It has been widely accepted in online video games for a long time that you have to compete against people of the same level. It doesn’t make much sense to be beaten by a master or feel that victory has been too easy: it’s called SBMM (Skill-based matchmaking), where each match will always be a challenge, but one that players feel they can overcome without much trouble.
Call of frustration
Now, Activision has revealed all its tricks to match players by skill and, above all, what happened when they secretly decided to deactivate the option and have everyone face each other: “Everyone hated it, more people left the games, there was less play and more anger and negative reactions.“ You didn’t need an investigation for that, really.
The truth is, it is always fun to face a challenge to push players to be more efficient, but if they are overcome time and time again, they simply decide that multiplayer is not their thing, and they don’t try to participate again. Considering that the vast majority of Call of Duty is based on multiplayer, it was a noteworthy finding.
That doesn’t mean they don’t play with the idea of creating confrontations that don’t use personal skill as a factor to unite rivals, knowing full well that the worst players would never get into that mode, leaving it only for those who have skills far superior to the normal ones. Who knows. The future is unwritten.
Perhaps some find it fun to feel crushed (or crush) another team and have them withdraw out of sheer exhaustion. Activision has promised to study it. Because, hey, you never know where the future of video games may be.
