The whole “playing with your friends” and having fun aspect of COD is broken

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1

SBMM has ruined the “playing with friends” aspect of the game

Casual cod playing incoming but I remember there was a point in time when playing with your “good friend” was rewarding. They would open the map for you and dominate attracting all the attention allowing you to run around and get some easy kills and easy wins.

Nowadays playing with that skilled friend means you and your party are about to get molly whooped into the sun and back. I almost groan when I get a invite from certain friends who are amazing at cod because it just means I’m going to spend my evening battling against people who I can’t even get a shot off at becasue they laser beam me as soon at a blink of a eye.

This sucks because part of the reason I game is to socialize with friends and stay connected with them in our ever so busy and changing life’s. I hate playing solo and getting this false perception that I’m good at the game because I’m constantly at the top of the leaderboards after game only to find out that the game is creating a false image of how good the actually player base is.

Ever since MW2019 and especially Cold War the experience of playing with friends have never reached the enjoyement that games like MW2, BO1 & BO2 created and it sucks.

2

Showing my age but cod 4 was awesome for making friends. The lobbies didn’t disband and skill based matchmaking didn’t exist

Made so many friends on there and had a great time. Sad its turned into what it is today. Can’t even muck around because everything is go go go

Edit: apparently skill based was a thing after all. Not really noticed tho because the lobbies didn’t disband. They should bring that back for the casual play list!!

3

Skill based match making is just ranked without having a rank. Would be nice to know when your fighting the bottom 50 or top 5%

4

Yeah I hate that, I only played with my friends on launch day, on the second day they started hating my lobbies, now some of them uninstalled the game, some others just want to play with less skilled people to try and have a bit of fun and variety and I have to play alone…thanks Activision your system clearly works great, I will probably get bored pretty soon too as I did with latest chapters…at least the game was on GP and I havent payed for that rigged shit.

5

I just wish lobbies wouldn’t disband.

6

THen ItS YoUR FrienD’S FAult HuR Dur!

i really hate sbmm defenders so much.

7

Cod pretends to use SBMM but it’s really using a mix of that and EOMM. You do bad, they put you in a game where you can do good so you feel better. The algorithm is tailoring your matches so that most of the time you are with players that are worse than you so you keep having fun and then when you get spanked that is just the algorithm making sure the opponent is having fun. It’s like a 60/40 balance between good games and bad games if your solo queued. They want you on the game as long as possible. That’s my issue. Your entire experience is artificial. The reason the old system was better is because it was random. You never knew what you would get in a lobby and you had the choice to stay in that lobby after the game or leave and find another one if you weren’t having fun. It was fair. It was real. It created memories, friendships and allowed you to experience all different levels of opponents giving you a better sense of how good you actually were. The current matchmaking has us plugged into the matrix purposefully manipulating our emotions to keep us playing for longer which ultimately leads to in game purchases, higher player base numbers to show shareholders etc. it’s not about creating a fair landscape it’s about maximizing profit.

8

This is true for our group lol. Only 1 in the group is a huge mega COD fan and bought tons of double XP and is already prestige 3 and has all the skins etc etc.

We want to play with him and not exclude him, but there are sighs in the chat when he gets online and is about to join…we know there goes all the fun and here comes all the sweat.

I personally don’t mind as much because I enjoy the intensity of sweaty matches but it cuts our sessions short as my other friends inevitably get tired of it and leave.

9

My wife and I play together. She’s good, but I’m better (she’s actually better at WZ than I am because she plays more methodically).

She can keep up in our joint lobbies, but she definitely builds up a good underboob sweat.

We played last weekend with her friend’s husband and about five or six games in, he tapped out. He was getting utterly dunked on, dudes were earning rare medals and calling cards on this guy. LOL.

It was horrible to watch. He went 11-38 one game and he died 60 times once on Subsonic. He had auto tac sprint turned off because he finds it’s all too fast. He wants to play a more positional game (kind of like a Battlefield player). He was getting absolutely shit on.

Earlier this week, he texted us some screenshots of games he was playing by himself where he was going positive and top of the leaderboard. My wife and I were giving him :raised_hand:emojis and saying that was great.

He then says, “If you guys are on after the kids go to bed, let me know.”

I say to my missus, “We need to tell him our lobbies are a bit different.”

She says that’s mean and will make him feel stupid and like a loser… I point out getting pissed on again will probably have the same impact.

Nope, she’s a nice person, so we hop on after the kidlets go to sleep, she invites him to join, he hops in our Discord, and starts off telling us that he thinks he’s figured it out. Talks about changes he’s made and starts talking a bit of shit, just friendly banter.

We queue up… he gets choke slammed for three or four games. He asks why so we explain to him that our lobbies are harder.

He hasn’t asked to play since.

It’s rough. We’re in our 40s and so you’re not going to appreciably “get better”, so we’ll never be able to play COD with our few friends who do game unless they’ve been sweaty nerds like us for twenty years.

10

i´m on the opposite side, my friends are worst then me so for me i get relative easy loobies, but some of my friends complaine how hard the loobies are and start rage quitting. Activision absolutly desrtoyed the joy and fun while playing with your friend just to protect a minority of a playerbase, it sucks!!!

11

It’s been ruined my guy. I’ve been complaining about this since SBMM was implemented.

Used to run with a group of 4 friends + my now wife, who was always a below average player. We always tried to have fun regardless. Sometimes we won sometimes we didn’t, but we still could generally play in most lobbies.

We tried playing MWIII together. My wife, who was a .4 K/D player was going like 1-24 playing with us. SBMM put her against players she couldn’t fucking touch for the cardinal sin of partying up with people above her skill level.

Hell most competitive games online we can’t play together anymore because I am good and she’s not, but SBMM basically makes partying up hell on earth for the less skilled players. It’s fucking depressing.

12

Yap 100%. When i play with a mate it’s horrendous what kind of lobbys we get compared to me searching alone. It doesn’t make a big difference if he (slightly better player then me) hosts a game or when i do it. The moment we play together it’s World Champiuonships Finals time.

You get all the indicators. 100% meta guns, slide cancel every meter they go, Bunny hopping, prefiring, usual sweatskins. It’s like the game decided that you are meat now and need to get farmed. Over and over again.

I legit think because we still kept playing these lobbys the game algorithm decided that we are good slaughtering sheep that don’t quit and therefor can be put in these lobbys 24/7 now.

Then i go on Youtube or here on Reddit and see people that play the same game that i play but it’s a completely different experience. It’s insane. It’s like these people play a completely different game.

It’s rigged to an insane level. And now in BO6 we talk about skill based damage???

13

The game is just too fast now. It’s not a “skill issue” thing. I do fine. It’s just not fun to be constantly running and shooting. There’s no variation to the gameplay. It doesn’t make for fun storytelling or organic gameplay variety that multiplayer shooters usually do so well because you’re constantly doing the same sprints and dives and corners over and over again.

14

I play with 1 friend and unfortunately the lobbies are so sweaty I usually just leave and play solo. It suck’s because the main reason I bought the game was to play with him. But even after several games it just never throws us a bone.

15

I can’t play with my friends cus I get absolutely annihilated. I play by myself I’m in top 3 every game lol

16

Had two different friends today drop out of the party to play alone because they don’t have fun playing with me in “my lobbies” anymore.

I’ve essentially had to play the last several cods alone because of this system and it always ends up with me dropping the game to play something else even though I’d prefer to play cod with my friends the whole year like the good ol days

17

A solution could be to matchmake all the groups together randomly and have the single players matchmake together and enjoy SBMM.

18

It’s a small problem for sure. I play with my older brother who has a .6 K/D and is very casual. I on the other hand have a 1.47 K/D so he unfortunately gets the sweat lobbies with me. He doesn’t really care about stats or winning so he is content. Still, it would be nice if he had some people at his skill level to fight

19

I’m working on marksmen rifles so my KD is trash. Haven’t prestige yet but playing with a party of 5/6. The lobbies are sweaty af, everybody using assault or smgs,so many first and second prestige. Queued up by myself and people was around my level 40.

20

I must have a different build of BO6 on my Xbox than you because I am having tons of fun playing with my friends & solo

:person_shrugging: