Former Call of Duty multiplayer creative director Greg Reisdorf has admitted that CoD could scrap skill-based matchmaking, but it wouldn’t be good for players.
Skill-based matchmaking has been a hot topic in the Call of Duty community for a few years. Some fans aren’t pleased with it, especially when mixed with cross-platform play, because they’d rather play a bit more casually. Others, though, are big fans and can’t wait for Ranked updates.
Those critics have urged the developers to rethink the formula or take the nuclear option of scrapping it altogether. Skill-based matchmaking isn’t new, though. Plenty of CoD devs have confirmed that it’s been around forever, and was a key part of the games that players point to as examples for what should be copied.
Former Call of Duty multiplayer creative director at Sledgehammer Games, Greg Reisdorf, noted that SBMM was a key part of Advanced Warfare, too.
Ex-CoD dev explains why you can’t just get rid of SBMM
Reisdorf joined the Going Dark podcast at the start of July to talk about his CoD life and was quizzed about SBMM.
“We’ve always had some form of skill-based matchmaking thats existed,” he told TDawgSmitty and Chopper. “It’s a very complex thing to have. In those days, it really wasn’t a big deal from our side because there wasn’t crossplay, it was all Xbox or PlayStation, it was more about team balance.”
The former CoD dev noted that players just “leave” after getting slammed in-game, adding that games like Fortnite and CoD use bots to “feed” bottom players better experiences.
“You could totally get rid of skill-based matchmaking but in a very short amount of time you will be playing people of higher skill than you and you will be the one on the receiving end of that and you’ll be like ‘oh this sucks.’”
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Reisdorf added that Call of Duty devs have been trying to raise the skill ceiling for years, and that CoD players are better now than ever before as they’re “more used” to first-person shooters.
“In the past, if you had less players playing, your matches were less skill-based. So, when you have more and more playing, you’re going to have a more skilled match,” he said, joking about using a VPN to get a poorer quality match.
“You can also point at that for the skill-based matchmaking conversation too,” Residorf added about the introduction of PC players. “When you think about your population size, you triple it because you now have PlayStation and PC in there as well with what just used to be Xbox.”
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