Activision Just Released An SBMM Bible That Reveals All

Activision has just published a document online titled ‘Matchmaking Series: The Role of Skill in Matchmaking’, which blows the lid off SBMM, the much-debated mechanic that’s designed to keep players engaged in Call of Duty for as long as possible. This expansive, revealing document spends 25 pages breaking down the concept of ‘skill’ in the overarching SBMM model, with Activision’s teams confirming what skills are examined by the mechanic.

Oh, and they also revealed a secret experiment that took place to see how players performed with massively lowered levels of SBMM.

Everything is Revealed

In the sizeable document published by Activision, one of the biggest contributors to ‘Skill-Based Matchmaking’ is discussed: Skill.

The opening pages of the document revealed that ‘skill’ is calculated using three criteria:

• Match Total Kills
• Kill / Death Ratio
• Kills / Deaths by Enemy

That last one is clever, as it enables Activision to give you an accurate skill reading regardless of ‘self-killing’ deaths. That means that players can’t ‘break’ SBMM by repeatedly killing themselves to drop their K/D artificially. The team went in-depth about the various tests they’ve performed over the years to continually refine SBMM.

In 2024, Activision performed a secret experiment on Modern Warfare 3, dropping the skill metrics from SBMM for thousands of players to see how it panned out. The test was run for an entire month, during which players would have been matched more ‘randomly’ against competitors. In a report discussing the findings of this experiment, Activision noted that with reduced skill considerations in the SBMM mechanics, 90% of players suffered from a reduced ‘returning player rate’.

Put simply, when lobbies were more randomised and skill wasn’t taken into consideration, players quickly abandoned the game and took long to return. Further, the team tracked an increase in ‘quit rate’ in 80% of all players taking part in the secret test, which is a huge figure. It proves that players get increasingly frustrated when SBMM isn’t as strong as it should be.

Again, Activision pointed out that the first thing the matchmaking process looks for is geolocation, matching players with other gamers that are close to them geographically. Then, the system considers skill, using a player’s percentile rating to match them with closely aligned users. Then, the players’ desired control schemes are considered.

There was an interesting scenario outlined by the team that shows how matchmaking works when you queue with a talented player:

‘Take for instance a party of two players, Alice and Bob, Bob is an average player with 50% skill percentile and Alice is an elite player with 99% skill percentile. If we matchmake them with Bob’s skill, Alice is practically guaranteed to be the best player in every lobby they join, more so than if she played solo. If we matchmake on Alice’s skill, then Bob will likely be the worst player in every lobby they join. Thus, we must match them in the middle such that the worst player gets some opponents of equal footing while minimizing the inherent advantage of the better player.’

Ultimately, this is the deepest dive we’ve ever had into how SBMM works. While it’s understandably being tweaked all the time, the fundamentals have remained the same for years. It’s nothing short of interesting for Call of Duty fans and pro players.

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