Call of Duty Finally Breaks Silence on Controversial SBMM With Official Statement

Activision and its studios are finally talking about skill-based matchmaking, aka SBMM, in Call of Duty. SBMM has not only been a contentious topic in Call of Duty for many years, but a contentious topic in various online game communities, such as the Fortnite community. And up until today, Activision and the development teams responsible for the first-person shooter series haven't had a word to say about the matter. 

Unfortunately, the new statement is a nothing burger, however, it promises more information, insight, and discussion about the topic "in the coming weeks." As for whether there will be major tweaks to the system alongside this, the statement doesn't say. 

"We know there is a lot of interest in the matchmaking experience, especially around how skill contributes to how lobbies and matches are put together," reads the statement. "Nothing is more important to us than the experience players have with the game, and matchmaking is a big part of that. We've been working on our matchmaking system for well over ten years, and we continue to spend a ton of time and energy on improving the matchmaking process."

The statement continues: "This involves people working at our Call of Duty studios, our backend services teams at Demonware, and other groups like our Player Insights team. It's a large effort that we've worked on for many years, and our approach combines latency, search time, and skill, along with many other factors, to try to find the best match experience for you. Talking about this topic in detail can be hard, and we haven't spent the time to pull together all of our work to share with you our insights and improvements over the many years. We're looking forward to doing that in the coming weeks after Season 1 launches, and we'll also make it a part of our ongoing discussions with the community."

For those out of the loop: SBMM places players with and against other players of roughly the same skill, or at least this is how it works in Call of Duty. And over the years this system has been refined to the point it is very effective. And many players hate this as it creates a very competitive environment, and is different than the experiences that made them fans of the series in the first place. All of that said, and as always, feel free to leave a comment or two letting us know what you think. Does Call of Duty need to make major changes to SBMM?