Hello all, I know there have been many, many posts and videos all over the internet about SBMM, and I really want to provide an in-depth breakdown of this issue I have encountered, coming from someone who has been there since the very beginning. For the record, I am 25 years old and have been playing COD ever since Big Red One and Finest Hour. I have many a nuclear in BO2, nukes in MW2, > 2 KD's, and have greatly enjoyed playing COD as a naturally quite competitive player. I am f***ing FED up with SBMM. Actually, this is an understatement. I was playing earlier today and I almost threw my controller through my TV, and this caused me to almost go into autopilot, drive to the nearest Circle K and pick up some American Spirits, and smoke a couple just to calm down, which is amazingly, because I exceedingly rarely smoke. Now that I can think clearly, I want to offer a very blunt take of the current state of COD, and I hope this will strike a cord with a lot of you, and I really hope the people who develop these games reads this post.
SBMM is absolutely destroying COD. I think we all have been being more and more aware of the absolute brainrot that our society is devolving into thanks to the attention-monetization algorithms of the giant social media platforms, along with the need to monetize everything we do being taken advantage of by these giant companies whose games we buy every single year. I love COD, but I hate what it has become. It is an absolute sweatfest every single game, and while I am good with some tough lobbies that challenge my skills, SBMM has taken that concept and turned it up to an 11. For all of those who don't know, COD back in the day, seemingly ending right around the BO2/Ghosts era put you in matches based primarily on internet connectivity. There was some light SBMM, but it moreso would balance teams with recurring matches to have a fair match as you stayed in a lobby. There was actualy incentives to staying in the same lobby, as the game did a pretty good job at balancing things. Now, it seems that COD has gone fully insane and decided to humble everyone every other game, by penalizing people heavily for playing well. I am sure you all know how SBMM works, and granted, I am not fully anti-SBMM, but within reason. However, things have gone insane. I would like to point to a series of games I played the past couple of days to paint a picture, and I would like to say that it has been like this, CONSISTENTLY, for almost every single series of matches I have played in the past 3-4 years.
Game 1: I go about 36-9 in BO4 TDM, our team wins. Pretty standard gaussian distribution of scores between between both teams.
Game 2: We go 66-100, with me going 40-8, and the rest of my team doing like a 2-18. We lose, with the other team representing a slightly skewed gaussian, with my team being a heavily negative skewed distribution, besides me.
Game 3: I go 56-10, we win 100-88, the bottom 4 players on my team are like 5-20. Same as game 2.
Game 4: we lose 30-100, ,with me going like 20-18, due to everyone else being like 2-25, and the other team completely wrecking my teammates by calling in 3 threshers, snipers nests, strike teams and gunships.
Game 5: we win 100-25, where I go 60-4.
Game 6: We lose domination 25-200, where the other team calls in 4-5 threshers, snipers nests, strike teams and gunships, are seemingly cheating, where I go 20-40 by the nature of not being able to leave the spawn, with the rest of my team being like 3-50.
As you can see, this isn't just SBMM. This is the type of SBMM where if you do good one game, the AI will then pair you with the seemingly worst players online at any given time to make sure that no matter how good you are, you get wrecked. I find this infuriating because it's not that I am now going against Optic gaming, but that my team is being nerfed heavily while I have to take the brunt of the responsibility. Now keep in mind, I am a very good player and tend to be top of the leaderboards by a wide margin in most games I play. I should not be penalized like this, and also be subjected to this degree of game/team manipulation to keep things "equal" and "fair" for others. This also is just cruel to the other players on my team who do not near as well as me, especially in the games where we get curbstomped. I do not buy for one second that the report put out by COD developers is actually in good faith in regards to SBMM, for a number of reasons:
1)You completely screw over all of the players who have put time into being good, and have been there since the beginning of the series
2)You completely cripple the ability of low-skilled players to truly develop into good players, as they are stuck in an apparent "protected class" where their games are the epitome of trash skills. This was recently shown in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANORsejXD3c by ExoGhost.
3)You turn the public lobbies from a casual, fun experience, into a sweatfest every single game, moreso than it would be if SBMM was not there(compared to say, xDefiant). This shouldn't be a world championship match for $100,000 every game. The game should be fun, in the spirit of COD.
In addition, there is one other GLARING problem that is permeating all of this, and it is corporate greed. The main reason these developers are pushing SBMM so heavily is definitely not due to promoting "fairness". We know that the second giant companies making billions of dollars and simultaneously preaching "love, peace, fairness, equality, equity" you know it is just to hide their own evil tactics(and this is coming from someone that has been a lifelong economic conservative). It is to pad their bottom line and they do so as follows: by turning on SBMM, you can keep the total player count from falling off, by pushing this league-play type spirit in all the lobbies, regardless of skill level. Now granted, this makes sense from a purely financial POV as less people will leave the game, but this is perhaps the worst thing COD has ever done. While a financial plus, they are simultaneously beating the community down with a hammer, and crushing the spirit of what made COD what it was in the first place.
The reason games like COD4, MW2, BO1, BO2 were the true golden days of COD is because we didn't have all of this AI manipulation, attention grabbing with tons of extras like loot boxes, every visible location on our screens being taken up with options to buy COD points or skin bundles, little to no pay-to-play, and no amount of optimization to keep your attention for as long as possible, using sleazy business practices the likes of which can be seen used by tiktok, IG and facebook. COD has turned from a community favorite of people who love to play casual shooters, to a carefully crafted attention-holding psy-op to maintain as many players as possible, at the expense of any ethics or care for the actual community they had initially built. I would have way more "respect" for Activision, Sledgehammer and Treyarch if they just came out and said, "we are designing COD in this way in order to trap as many players as possible in a never-ending sweatlodge dopamine, addiction-like state, where out algorithm via insane SBMM will give the the highest highs and lowest lows for dopamine, carefully playing on the self-worth and image of the players, to maximize our profits, with no regard for how COD was initially loved and perceived. We would rather f*** over the old player base in order to become a sleazy business on par with the algorithms of the biggest social media companies than to keep our integrity and spirit, because we wouldn't make as much money if so." These companies really do not need to squeeze every last dollar out of the gaming community, and I think it's time something is done about this. YOU MAKE ENOUGH PROFITS ALREADY. THE PEOPLE WILL COME AND PLAY REGARDLESS. I will conclude with saying one last thing, as a plea to the gaming companies:
Make COD what it was again, at the expense of maximizing your profits. In an attempt to become maximally profitable, you have lost your morals and soul.
6 Comments
They used to fuck us with supply drops and in-game microtransactions. Now they fuck us with Sbmm or Eobm or whatvever the fck they called, to earn few dollars more, over their billions.
What saddens me is their game developers did a actual amazing job, wonderful game. Its always the marketting department fuck things up. God they deserve best spots in hell
I don’t remember BO4 having strict SBMM at all, all I remember is absolutely dominating that game every match.
Definitely nowhere near the SBMM currently employed, where I can barely go 2 K/D most matches.
I’ll tell you what, though, if SBMM wasn’t a thing none of my friends would still be playing COD. Their lobbies are basically bot lobbies, but to them, they’re just right and they’re having fun.
The biggest problem with all of this is that we can’t play together. Like at all. Either we get my lobbies and they go 2-50 or we get their lobbies and I go triple digit and everyone leaves.
So we just don’t play together outside of LAN parties, where I have to run stupid setups like next week at LAN I’ll be doing Torque + Spear.
This is a masterpiece. Thanks for the read.
*cough cough* 2 box bro *cough cough*
You don’t really have to write all that shit. Just stop playing, delete the game, and never buy another cod. But you won’t, will you
5 hour book on why cod is hard
Call of duty is maybe the *most* casual online shooter on the market, so they make the effort to make it accessible for the incredibly large casual market. As a casual player, I’ve never had issue with sbmm, I consistently go slightly positive and 9 out of 10 games seem evenly matched and fair. The problem with super competitive players is that they don’t want to be evenly matched with players of their skill level and go *slightly* positive, they want to stomp randos and go 60-5 every match, so when you get put in an even match, you call it a sweat fest even though you are literally playing on the same level. Sbmm works as intended (the majority of the time) by pairing casual/bad players together, and pairing sweats/good players together.