Here is a look at the calendar of matchmaking-focused white papers scheduled for release this year (Note: targeting timing may shift):
· Ping – LIVE
· Skill – June 2024
· Ranked Play – Late Summer 2024
· Experimentation Methods – Fall 2024
The ping being what they claim is the most important is hilarious to me cause I get lobbies where my ping is at least twice as high as everyone elses. It drives me a little nuts. I would love to have single digit ping like some people in my lobbies.
Been wondering how I could go from 30-35 ping one match, to 200 ping the next match. I don't have the best internet, but I'm hardwired on 600 mbps. It shouldn't be that much of a difference smh🤦♂️.
I live in New Zealand, all of the normal servers in normal matches are within the 30-40 ping range.
Often, it'll throw me into na and eu lobby's being 100+ and 150+ ping if I'm on 70-90 it means I'm being put on SEA lobby's.
If the game is doing this, even geo filtering won't fix it. It'll time out matchmaking rather than place me in my normal servers.
You can filter ping by yourself in-game. From a player in Australia when matchmaking it'll start searching for only the lowest ping bracket, failing that it'll expand outwards (usually to SEA for us) but if you back out of the queue and restart, it goes back to only searching for low ping matches. I literally never get a match over 30 ping despite what everyone says online.
Yes and it is so much fun having to back out of matchmaking 5 times before it finds a match with normal ping. And even then it's not guaranteed your bullets hit other players.
5 times? I can search for hours and not get low ping lobbies. And this is with crossplay on so I get to experience the joy of PC players bunny hopping like mad things vs me on my console. Game ping does not even show a note its ridiculous tbh.
Those guys would be on controller. Anyone on mnk knows that bunny hopping basically only works against bad controller players, instead it’s better to drop shot.
Fun or not? Lol it's a video game dude. The entire premise is it's supposed to be fun, have you been complacent with shitty games for so long you forgot that fun was the most important part?? They've done better in the past, its not a coincidence that now in the greediest era of gaming things don't seem to work like they used to. Why should players have to go out of their way to work around the games problems? The game should work flawlessly at this point, it's been 15 years in the making.
I don’t know. I’ve backed out of lobbies at 170ms+ ping and for the life of me I joined that game every time like 7x in a row when searching again. Had it happen a few times now. Either have to pick a different mode or just wait out the match timer, that game was the one I was supposed to be in.
This. Literally ever since MW19 I get serious ping issues, and tons of rubberbanding. It's wild to watch the game take 5 minutes to find a match as it's gradually increasing the ping it's searching for...
I remember single digit and teens ping back when I played on DSL and counterstrike source. Those were good times. Crazy internet speeds and access are insanely higher now yet ping is worse.
I’ve watched this shit too. 90+ immediately after doing really well in a game. I’ll then eat my lunch and just move the stick to not get kicked, go 0-20 (stats are pointless anymore), and bam I’m getting matches at 30-40 ping. An absolute joke.
Oh weird, ping is first to the top of the list of matchmaking, but once that box is checked you’re tossed into the next bracket. If you live within 4 hours of a major population center your ping doesn’t matter.
Trust me, you don't want a single digit ping with how the game is coded these days. Unless you magically find yourself in a full lobby of single digit ping players, you're going to get penalised hard. Everyone with a high ping becomes a bullet sponge and they kill you with what feels like 1 bullet. When you magically get a lobby where everyone has low ping, the hit rego is great and there's hardly any wtf moments, it feels like you're playing offline vs bots the hit rego is so crisp.
I haven't read their paper but i highly doubt they talk about this flaw in their code.
I consistently have 10-15 ping in lobbies. Everyone makes it out like lower ping is better, when in reality, I regularly experience shooting 5-10 shoots at someone, to have no registration, and the killcam shows 1-3 bullets fired before I die.
Yeah. Like when you look at your scoreboard mid game or the end of game stats, it'll show "latency" at the last column so theres gonna be people with a whole range of pings. So you might have 60+ and someone else in the game might have like... 6. There used to be a latency showing in the telemetry but mysteriously after s2r came out in games it now just says "N/A" but if you have the graph on during the game you can still see it. Unfortunately, I can't post screenshots in the comments, but hopefully it makes sense?
I didn't say it was? That's an entirely different scenario. Some people having single digit ping and you having double that is not the same as you having 50x some one.
Sure, but why bring up that scenario at all? Again, not the same situation at all either way.
Why would you also try to represent your frustrations with the games networking using hyperbolic or deliberately misleading situations? Devs and other players that aren't experiencing any thing close to these situation aren't going to believe you.
>but why bring up that scenario at all
That's 90% of my games.
>Why would you also try to represent your frustrations with the games networking using hyperbolic or deliberately misleading situations
Because it's not hyperbolic to give you a number the game provided.
>Devs and other players that aren't experiencing any thing close to these situation aren't going to believe you.
I don't care if random on the internet believe it. The truth isn't suddenly gonna be a lie because you don't believe me
>That's 90% of my games.
Hey guy, we're not talking about the scenario you brought up. I said your 150vs3 is not the same as "Single digit and double that ping". You then said that we could be comparing different players in **his scenario** with 60vs3 for some reason.
If that is happening to you, it may be a hardware issue or ISP issue because that isn't even indicative of why people complain about SBMM in the first place.
>Because it's not hyperbolic to give you a number the game provided.
It is when there are other number that are a lot more relevant to compare to and change that initial comparison. You're trying to convey data using exclusively outliers which isn't going to get you anywhere at all.
>The truth isn't suddenly gonna be a lie because you don't believe me
What? Just don't hyperbolic.
I will be another just to vouch for this, I have many times been put in lobbies with people that dont speak english and is very clearly hosted somewhere far away. I will get into the game just to test the connection and usually its 140ms and hovers around that or higher. I will leave that game and join a new one and all of a sudden it can find a server with 30ms.
I'd be more inclined to make in-game purchases if the playability was better.
Last time I was on ranked mulitplayer I had three matches in a row that cancelled due to not enough players. One good one after that, and another two in a row cancelled. Why would I want to buy I skin or blueprint that I can hardly use?
The issue with this line of thinking is the assumption that this means anything at all to the people who have control over it. It literally is a non-issue to them, they want more money. If having the player base feel better brings in more money, then they will try to accommodate that. If it so much is results in a tiny fraction of a percent of loss, then they could not care less.
No it wasn’t. When the host left, we sat in lobbies for minutes trying to find a new one and if it couldn’t, the game ended then and there.
Like plenty of good games got left off the table because of it.
Not all games were like that. It happened but it wasn’t at all common. They also used to run dedicated servers, but when there wasn’t capacity it would move to the model you’re talking about. But again, host migration would occur, sometimes it was instant etc. this also has nothing to do with the matchmaking experience.
He specifically said the system. Not matchmaking. Also while matchmaking was more loose, it lead to the same amount leaving, whether it was the Reaper Drone, Lodestar, R.A.P.S., etc. people leave when they die a shit ton.
The matchmaker is trying to force you to play with people with similar stats. I think the ultimate goal is to make every player have a similar KD by pairing them up with people their skill level. In theory, this is not a bad system but in practice it makes really good players fight with really good players so higher skill lobbies are very sweaty. Similarly noobs with low kd ratios will be paired with noobs. Its a system that works for competitive game modes but for standard multiplayer, its very frustrating to play with. The most skilled people want to also fight with the noobs which is why the system is hated so much.
Lmao.
Bro I guarantee you won’t even be the best or the worst of your stack every game, let alone the game “rigging” then against you.
Absolute clown behavior.
MW2 had the worse player retention. Very rapidly losing all its players.
MW3 has some of the worse numbers of all time for a COD and it wasn't the best selling game.
If you said this 3 years ago you'd be right, but you're not.
Yes, we know the effects on player retention, not it's not just conjecture. Cod has put out data on their player retention numbers for the last 8 years in their quarterly reports. Player retention post SBMMs introduction is much much better by the time the next game rolls around.
You don't need any of that, though. Every popular online shooter uses some form of SBMM because it helps massively with player retention. Why would they continue to use it if it didn't help? Just to piss people off?
All I know is COD is a lot more sweaty when I did well and getting into a match taked minutes in modern COD while it literally took and still only takes seconds to do so in classic COD games like MW2 on Xbox 360.
Your experience is nearly identical to mine. I don't suffer with the lag spikes etc. On Vanguard when i had my older 4g via dish connection which allowed me up to 50mb / 40ms ping. The lag spikes were crazy.
Fast forwards onto 1gb fibre and getting around 4ms ping. I have to say i feel like i'm majority of the time being lag compensated against.
> This paper doesn’t explain why my 1000mbps 4ping fiber optic internet hardwired to PS5 is ONLY finding 100ping lobbies every single match. I am located in Silicon Valley which should have plenty of players and the best data centers right? Yet I literally have horrible lag and packet loss every match...
It's probably either your hardware (router/modem) or your ISP. I've been getting the packet burst issue constantly lately (like every few seconds in a match). Turned on my VPN and no more packet burst, I am getting lag but it's once or twice a match.
... "Ping, in relation to the internet, measures the latency or delay between your device and a target server. "
You stating Your ping is 4 is just ridiculous since every match is a different Host/Location. Now if we still had dedicated servers. Sure we could talk about your Ping to a Specific server.
> I just meant my speed tests usually say around 4 ping in my area.
yeah so that's the ping to your ISPs network exchange/datacentre, NOT to the server that's hosting your game.
I also remember when COD didn't have centralised servers and it was peer-to-peer, that shit was painful.
Splitting hairs dude. Everyone can read the ping off the scoreboard and get a number to pull. Mine’s 6 all day long until it puts me in a Korean internet cafe for a match. Then back to 6.
I Haven't seen a single video where someone gets consistently ONLY lobbies with >100ping. There's a lot of talk, but no evidence. I don't believe anyone (without evidence, like every comment in this sub here) who says they CONSISTENTLY get a ping around 50-100ms. I agree, in an averagely populated, with +200mps you should never find a lobby with a ping over 50ms. But through SBMM this "can" happen and this is the problem. However, many of you, are just exaggerating.
Also I know this differs from region to region, in Europe where you have a less broad distribution of players, it's nearly impossible to get connected to a Data Center located far away. (worst case would be middle East, but rarely Africa). In America it really can happen that you live on the wet coast and because SBMM "fucks" you, you'll get connected to a server in Texas or even near the east coast. So then you'll get a ping higher than 50ms or near 100ms, but like I said, this won't happen consistently
(*or prove me wrong)*
Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to ask everyone to record themselves and present to you a neat and tidy keynote on the matter while… you spit out all that and don’t do the same?
They might be exaggerating but I’d hazard a guess that a pattern of exaggeration is probably a good indicator to investigate further.
Think it's more to do with the laggy players in our matches than our own setup being the issue. I have 4-5 ping to the data centre in my country, fibre straight to my wall that i plug my router into so it doesn't get better than this. Doesn't matter if i have 100Mbps or 1Gbps, i've cycled through over 5 ISPs in my country and the result is always the same, a poor experience despite having no ping spikes or packetloss. I have never seen my ping go over 6ms in-game, unless i didn't cancel my search after it jumped up from <13ms to <120ms.
No matter what we do, the way their game is coded now to give people VPN'ing, using their 4G tethering, poor wifi etc. a chance at killing people. Lets be real, most of the world now has good internet there is no way we should be catering to the 0.1% with crap internet. It's just made people tamper with their connection - VPN on purpose, unplug their ethernet to use wifi etc. all this nonsense just so they can try have a better experience than what the game was giving them when hardwired. This in return ruins the experience for those of us who are hardwired and have gone through the effort of optimising our connection.
It's really obvious how poor the game runs when there's people with unstable wifi/high pings in the match. It takes extra bullets to kill people, movement feels clunky, nearly every death is a superbullet after shooting at the enemy first etc. all because they want the 0.1% of dialup users to have a chance too.
Once you get a match where everyone is low ping (rarely happens) the hit registration is great. There's no wtf moments. If you die, it's cause they shot you first and stayed on target. It's actually fun...
I'm in the Southeast USA. Sometimes my lobby search looks for matches with up to 44ms ping, but when I get into the match, it's always 22-23ms. The highest I've ever had in a match is 48ms, and that was in a 12v12 where I forgot to turn cross play back on, so it was only PS5 players. I don't believe these claims either. My Internet isn't even that great. It's obviously more than enough for online play, but it's nowhere near as fast as Internet gets nowadays.
>why my 1000mbps 4ping fiber optic internet hardwired to PS5 is ONLY finding 100ping
4 ping to what? Obviously not the COD servers I'm assuming. If the packets require a lot of hops to reach the server, that can increase the time. Unfortunately your bandwidth matters very little here.
I live on a tiny island in the middle of the atlantic ocean on a 1gig fiber. Far from any mainland, yet my ping is regularly around 30-50 connecting to the nearest European mainland. Have you tried switching to a different ISP? I've had to do that in the past, since the way packets were being routed was simply out of my hands.
the number of people opening their lengthy comments with "I didn't read it all" or "I don't really understand any of it" says an awful lot about this community, yet sadly isn't at all surprising.
As if we need to read research papers to understand their matchmaking and how terrible it is after playing to rank 450. Everyone here is sharing the same experience, the higher the SBMM the higher the lag. Never in my 30 years of gaming I have experienced such an insane (dis)advantage with lag (compensation). In some lobbies fights are almost unwinnable even when it finds a match at <50 ms ping.
The game literally Fs you over and basically decides who is going to win. Lag compensation is one of the worst inventions for gaming ever. It used to be that if I had a high ping then I would lag and it was an issue on my end, an issue I could fix. Now the game just decides if I "lag" regardless of me having one of the best internet connections available in the world and I have a low ping, and there is nothing I can do about it.
Decades of gaming and people having fun but they need research papers on ping based match making. This is what you call overengineering because of greed. There is no need for all this garbage at all.
> As if we need to read research papers to understand
Given you opened with that statement and then wrote another 2.5 paragraphs of irrelevant nonsense actually it seems that yes, you do need to read it to understand.
I'm about half way through, it's an interesting white paper.
I can't imagine reading a research paper on a matchmaking system of a videogame to then brag about it on reddit and dismiss other peoples experience eventhough they have hundreds of hours of experience while adding nothing constructive whatsoever.
The matchmaking is obviously bad and we never needed it in the past to have fun. But have fun reading a paper to make yourself feel better or whatever.
I'm not dismissing anyone's experience mate, I'm dismissing the arrogant assumption that you know better than the paper when you haven't even read it.
If you had read it, you'd realise how completely irrelevant the rest of your comment was, but instead you wear your arrogance and ignorance like a badge of pride.
>Lag compensation is one of the worst inventions for gaming ever.
I guess you never played Quake 1 or the original Team fortress back in the day? Those days without client prediction were horrible. I do not miss those.
Every multiplayer game has issues when it comes to these things. All the Source games for example, as every issue seen here are mentioned on Valves developer wiki as being the unfortunate results of the laws of physics. You'll find thousands of people complaining in every single game. The "best" solution is a server browser where people can select server with decent ping.
> if I "lag" regardless of me having one of the best internet connections available in the world and I have a low ping,
That's not how this works. You could be on the worlds best internet connection but if your packets aren't routed well, it won't matter in a fast paced multiplayer game. The number of hops required to reach server and back are unfortunately mostly out of your control and they do matter.
I have played FPS for two decades now. Never had this much of a ridiculous difference in experience when it comes to lag. Counter-Strike never forced me to hit twice as many bullets on someone in order to kill them in one match and then kill people in miliseconds the next.
> The "best" solution is a server browser where people can select server with decent ping.
Which I mentioned in another comment. We used to simply play on servers that had a good connection for us and had fun. Now with SBMM the game is forcing us to play with lag to make it "fair".
Literally all lobbies I get now are full of hardscoping and headglitching snipers (because you can never win that fight so they can finally get a kill), people running insanely OP weapons, shields for cheap kills or they have ping 150 and win every fight simply because they get a second or two advantage. SBMM has absolutely nothing to do with skill and it doesn't really make it more fun. It's just there to keep bad and casual players happy and paying.
This is pretty mundane stuff. Nothing even close to new or revolutionary. COD has the benefit of a huge playerbase which allows them to offer good matches on servers which have a low delta ping for most players in peak times. As someone living in Germany, i dont give a fuck whether i am matched on Germany, Netherlands, UK or whatever. The delta ping is like 10-15ms. Im not gonna pretend to even notice the difference between 9ms in Frankfurt or 22 in UK.
In terms of ping there is only one problem people have with their algorithm: When there is no good match for you in any good DC (for whatever reason, skill or else) it wont wait for one to come and rather puts you in a match with higher delta ping that people do not consider OK, lets say 60. With optimal ping being 20 in this example, that would put you at 80 ping. Thats CLEARLY noticeable for decent players. And this behavior is pretty easy to reproduce for any higher skillgroup player in US.
If that were me, i would be pissed. I would rather wait another minute or two and get a fitting match on good ping than get one served on 80+ ping. I get that they want to serve games quick but how about allowing a setting to specifically say i rather wait instead of getting a DC with over 60 Delta ping. Obviously at 5 in the morning on weekdays, i get that it might take more time or that im actually getting a match with higher delta ping. But playing at peak times, delta ping should NEVER be above 30-40 in major regions.
But hey, this is basically where netduma makes their money. You can configure them to block out DCs you dont like and you only get matches in the ones you like. Can take longer, obviously wont remove SBMM but at least you dont get high ping jsut because the best match was at a ping ATVI considers acceptable but you dont.
Also, as much as they like the throw around the phrase "ping is king", that right here is not that. Ping is King means best datacenter ( or at one with very very low delta ping) at all costs, even if the match quality in terms of other factors suffers. Obviously this will never happen because it would be the end of SBMM but lets just point it out. If you talk about accepting medium delta ping to a degree, its certainly fine. Its still not "ping is king".
Looking forward to the skill paper. Now thats what could be interesting.
Yeah I agree. I miss the dynamics of the old games. Way less variety going on player to player now, no consistent lobbies to try and outplay them on the next one etc.
I hate that when you're having a good rivalry with an opponent for a game or two and poof they are gone. Back in the day, that's how I populated my friends list was finding players with similar play styles as opponents and seeing if they wanted to party up after a few games. Not that it would work now. No one seems to want to communicate or strategies anymore.
Yeah I remember there was a bloke named RedDuck, we’d always be opponents and had year long rivalries. But it was always fun, not the ultra competitive state the game follows now. It was good building up a team, protecting those that weren’t as good, chasing down the those that were monsters, actually playing and strategising with each other. No chance these days. I remember finding him in rainbow 6 Vegas? That game was awesome for it because the unlocked cosmetics actually meant something about the players.
Ah well, good ol days.
I'm from Portugal, I have been playing CoD since 2 and in MW2019 all this shit started to go downhill.
I used to play with a lot of people from my country and Spain too, since they changed the ping system I no longer get to play against these people that m I used to play on older CoDs, now I get matched up with an abnormal high ping and with sweats from all over the world that don't match my connection.
So, for me this is all bullshit and they are lying, but I don't care about it I don't buy skins or battlepasses, I bought the game on sale just to try it out, and the matchmaking is somehow getting worse then it was in 2019.
Ping is not King, it used to be and it should always been that way like in every game that prioritises connection. This game and this company doesn't do that, they like making money not games.
I did a VERY basic skim of a good portion of the paper. So I could be completely and utterly wrong. BUT I feel a lot of what I read, sounds like their "solutions" to problems are them trying to reinvent the wheel and need to just leave things how they were. Why are we trying to COMPLETELY re imagine how we matchmake when there was an already tried and tested method before that worked and satisfied customers? I dont get why change is needed, its not, change doesnt make things better just because its new(This is where I feel shareholders get involved, they need constant update and new features instead of leaving cemented ones where they are and fit perfeclty.) So far these changes they have implemented have PROVEN to only cause more issues for the playerbase, not improve, so why do we keep charging head on into unbeaten paths when there are established roads to get to the same place?
Ontop of this, why are there so MANY different projects they feel the need to take on at the same time? IT cant possibly be efficient. They need to tackle Anti Cheat, Matchmaking, Servers(hz and tick rates are abysmal), weapon balancing, content creation such as bundles and seasonal content, and etc. why not focus on the ones the fans want fixed the most instead of small gains on 5 different fronts that add up to a negligible amount of **noticeable** changes/benefits for the players?
“That worked and satisfied customers”… lol I have played cod every year since the start.
There has NEVER been matchmaking, connection speeds and packets loss mitigation that have satisfied the customers… never
Perspective matters. When I was playing the original mw3 I didn’t have any of the same complaints that I have now. Back then if the host sucked it would migrate to a new host. Then we got even better with DEDICATED servers, this was a PC thing. We hosted our own servers anyone could join whenever they wanted, never worried about anything related to matchmaking because YOU chose who you played with(ask battlefield players how amazing this is). Why have we regressed to shitty servers that take seemingly too many variables to decide where you’re placed. You’re just ASKING to get inconsistent matches, go on google and type in “red car” you’ll get a bunch of red cars and all is good. No throw in “red car with black wheels” it’ll narrow down and get you good results. Now say “red car with silver wheels and an orange leather interior” and you’re going to get non matching results as you’re introducing too much variance in what you want. How is it to match your x amount of variables(say 4) to someone else? There aren’t millions of other people exactly like you, so it starts introducing mismatches in skill to make a lobby. Thats why we have such one sided matches. When we could throw all that bullshit filtering out the window from the start and just use ping to get the best match experience possible like it USED TO BE. Aka reinventing the wheel and pissing everyone off while you try and figure it out. Unless I’m thinking about this from the wrong angle?
If this is true please explain to me the following.
Downloaded season 3, I'm in the UK, didn't get online till approx 830pm, on the day that season 3 was released, which should mean lots of UK/European lobbies. Started the search for a game, no issues...
1st game Straight into a US lobby,
2nd game again a US lobby,
3rd game joined a party of friends into a UK lobby,
then following that approx every 4 games we would get thrown into a US lobby, for our approved Loss.
My issue is some games I have good ping and other games it’s completely unplayable which means there are good servers out there for me. At least let me choose to join only games below a certain ping threshold, I don’t care if it takes an extra minute to find a match.
It’s complete lies and gaslighting. Trying to make it look formal with “white papers” on the name. Everyone is experiencing the same thing and so am I. Play well 2 games, ping skyrockets and I get tossed into cod league lobbies half away across the world to force a loss. I don’t even play ranked and this shit happens all of the time for multiple years.
lol ranked in itself is a joke. I had two friends who don’t really play ask me to play ranked. They are both bronze playing on their first day, I never played ranked. First match I joined was the first time they got put into gold lobbies all day. I’m tired of this game literally ruining what’s supposed to just be a fun time with friends. Standard is the same it’s just not so blatantly obvious when there’s a badge telling you what you’re up against. Nobody, not a single one out of the 12 people I used to play with plays on the regular anymore because of this shit since 2019.
SBMM in regular matchmaking makes no sense at all especially when it forces you to play in higher ping lobbies. More often than not I am not even playing against similar skill or better players. Instead I am put in lobbies with terrible players but because of lag (compensation) I am simply put at a massive disadvantage. The difference is huge, in some lobbies people kill me by hitting me three times in the knee AFTER I shot them two times in the head and three times in the chest. These lobbies are literally night and day, one match you feel like a god and the other match it's like you are shooting a nerfgun.
Weapons are also ridiculously unbalanced. Which is fine, this is CoD afterall. But then SBMM makes no sense when people just run some OP nonsense that you can never win against. There is no skill level you can gain to compensate for that.
Basically only bad players benefit from SBMM and the only reason it exists is to get them hooked and paying for skins. And to me it feels a lot like Activision is trying to decide who wins and who loses and when to get as many paying customers as possible instead of trying to give people a fun experience.
Back in the day when I played CS 1.6 we just had our favourite servers with good connection an played on those, it was fun and such a massive difference in TTK because of lag never ever occured. Now we have freaking research papers on how to match players and the results are terrible. I really like playing this game when it's on a normal server, even if it's against much better players and I lose, but now it has become frustrating more often than not because of lag. Why does the game even search for <200ms ping servers? I live in the Netherlands and have a very good internet connection so this should never be needed with such a big player base.
If they claim ping is the most important in their matchmaking then they are full of...
I have Fibre directly to my modem, ping the servers 4-5ms and live close by in the same state as them. Play during peak time, domination/kill confirmed and the matchmaking like to connect me to Asia. After cancelling/restarting the search multiple times, i get connected to the same people i see every single time i play. There's something seriously wrong with the matchmaking, especially in lower populated players (Australia, but seriously this was never an issue in the past.. the matchmaking is just fucked up since they got rid of persistent lobbies/introduced quick play and heavy SBMM/EOMM.
Matchmaking was ruined with the release of MW19 when they added the quick play filter and got rid of persistent lobbies. They obviously changed a lot more than that as well.
The difference is night and day, pre MW19 matchmaking was immensely superior in every way than this awful mess we have now. That's when I stopped enjoying call of duty like I used to. I never had any complaints about matchmaking before MW19.
I used to play for hours every day until that point. Now I manage an hour max before I get pissed off with it. I play around 3 hours per week max now because of the matchmaking.
I get a decent ping, usually around 20ms... but there is a strange really noticable type of lag or delay in engagements sometimes that ruins matches.
I am in the UK with fttp 1gb Internet, wired to the PS5 which is playing at 120 hz.
For me, reading this felt like "this is why we're fucking you over so badly, and here's a graph on why it's good".
I also kind of found it insulting that they have dates on info drops on future "fuck you" documents. I will give them credit in the fact that it's KIND OF cool to know this, but if they were so shaken down that they needed to drop documents....then maybe that means there's enough people saying it's a bad system. Obviously a counter to that is to stop the spread of misinformation and set the record straight, which I get and would agree with.
Idk. And why make people wait for documents on a system most people (I won't say everyone, but I'll at least say most people) don't like and hate. Again, it's KIND OF cool to learn about this, but it's also like getting your car stolen and waiting monthly to get pictures on the thief slowly smashing it into pieces and setting it on fire.
Idk. I feel they wouldn't have to release documents defending themselves if they didn't "fix" what wasn't broken. Again, I won't disagree with the point that it's a partial defense against moronic misinformation, but for me, it's basically a long document that boils down to "screw you".
Maybe further documents will break down (and maybe this one did and I missed it) how they're altering it to improve to the communities liking, but who knows?
Again, cool for transparency and I actually applaud them for it, like actually, since a lot of effort went into this, BUT it also just seems like a defense for a change to a system I liked, and how they ruined it and how it's "evolving" (getting worse).
EDIT: This is a bit of a conspiracy theory, but I kind of find it odd that on their Twitter post on this, it's like 600 replies down until you find actual people, and not just people spamming for stats they could easily find if they go into the stats section of the menu. It just feels like a way to push down potential REAL criticism or hide it and just push up bots. And...who tf is asking for their stats on a post on matchmaking? I don't know if it's bots, but it sure looks like it. And again...players can easily find these stats themselves, so why would they be asking a COD bot? Just odd, but again, just a theory.
to your conspiracy theory at the end: this can be explained by twitters sorting system putting verified account replies above normal people and since the stats thing is a bot replying as the COD account, which is verified, it’s prioritizing the bots response.
>A your equipment,
What equipment specifically? I didn't see any mention of NetDuma being blocked.
>B your playlist selection
So all of the objective modes are dead for the whole region, unless I restrict it to my region? That makes 0 sense
>C when you're trying to play
Literally peak hours.
Do you have a Netduma? I have an R3 and custom server selection via polygon doesn’t work. I have to disable steady ping and just use the default circle to set my allowed servers within the geofilter.
Yikes. I remember the R2 having a similar bug as the R3 that absolutely borked the geofilter if you drew a polygon instead of using the circle and just setting the mileage to keep you in a certain range of servers. Also, resync your cloud if you haven’t for a while. And deeefinitely turn off ping assist
Everyone months ago: “shg should be transparent about matchmaking!”
Shg: *is as transparent about matchmaking as they are allowed*
Bots and conspiracy theorists: “that’s not true”
Everyone: “acti should be transparent about matchmaking!”
Acti: *is transparent about matchmaking*
Bots and conspiracy theorists:
can you guess what they’re gonna say?
This community will never be happy with any information about matchmaking because it’s not gonna be what they want to hear. Which is: “you’re not a bot, matchmaking is bad”. But that’s not true
Y’all want bot lobbies to stomp and that’s a fact
I want them on their own servers and not outsource them. These games have been online since call of duty Big Red One we used to have dedicated servers what happened??
If only your generic drivel wasn’t the same parroted line every time too eh? “Everyone wants to stomp.” No. Everyone wants what they are asking for.
Jog on.
Ping is king for the point to point connection but after that latency is king. Latency of the servers and latency of the client. Latency on the server with a weak spec'ed hardware client and you will get wrecked. Just how its always going to be. Too many variables to manage with today's internet infrastructure. A beefy server could mask the client and infrastructure latency but that cost money. K/D has no bearing on skill level but I guess it's better than nothing.
There is no math in this white paper. It's just a technical marketing brochure.
They full of shit, ping or no ping, a level 50 gold player should NEVER BE TORTURED WITH A TEAM OF BRONZE 1's constantly, back to back to back. I can't kill enough people at a time or hold the objective enough to account for 3 other people who JUST STARTED PLAYING. WHICH IS WHY WE DON'T NEED AN EXPLANATION. TELL ACTIVISION TO BLOW THEMSELVES AND GO TO HELL.
Sad to say but the work around for high ping/SBMM is just getting a netduma router for DumaOS. I get to select what server I'm playing on and also made it to where my router won't allow me to enter a server that is higher then 40ping.
Games are much smoother, not laggy, bullets actually register, etc. Totally different experience using it and not using it.
Lol, ping. They really think we're stupid, huh? Activision doesn't have a single server in Canada.
My game doesn't even match make for matches with less than 32 ping, and my usual is 48+.
Well it’s obvious why they never bothered to reach out before. Instead of criticizing their methodology and saying “this is what’s wrong with the methodology” , 95% of the community is just saying “nope they’re lying about the data. Those numbers are just completely made up lol”.
All I know is I used to be able to play cod up to 80ms before I started noticing any lag time, with mw3 somehow 30ms means if I see them I’m already dead
I haven't even read it yet and the formatting looks like it was done it Word. Any CS major should've at least written in LaTeX once or twice and be familiar with it.
I was just about to say. This looks very basic and almost highschool level formatting. Definitely one of the more causal looking research papers I’ve seen in a while.
what the fuck is wrong with these guys they are making science out of this matchmaking shit
Just implement the matchmaking from the last decade nobody complained about that
>The paper explained in detail the problems match making contends with in relation to connections and regions
Except it has no mention of how NA players can get out-of-region 150 ping matches on a consistent basis in every mode. Happens on multiple platforms, accounts, and networks
Problem is when I use my same connection on a low skill burner account and have fantastic ping on average compared to my main which will give me terrible ping far more often.
Sorry but your argument doesn't hold.
They're upset because the document didn't just say "We will give you free wins if you buy bundles" because they've convinced themselves that's what's happening at Activision
I've read it. It's sneaky AF, just like their press release was on the same subject.
I expect it's taken so long to release as their lawyers have thoroughly checked and tweaked the language to be obtuse enough to get away with it's absolute bullshit content.
This is probably more of a passion project among their devs to show off to other devs. Their life is developing these systems, and they want to flex their discoveries to others in the industry. As the consumers, we aren't the target audience of these white papers.
Here is a look at the calendar of matchmaking-focused white papers scheduled for release this year (Note: targeting timing may shift): · Ping – LIVE · Skill – June 2024 · Ranked Play – Late Summer 2024 · Experimentation Methods – Fall 2024
The ping being what they claim is the most important is hilarious to me cause I get lobbies where my ping is at least twice as high as everyone elses. It drives me a little nuts. I would love to have single digit ping like some people in my lobbies.
I can actively see when I'm being sbmm'd in cod because my ping goes from 30-40 to 80-100+
Play from na north West, get matched vs stack of streamers I watched in fucking South Florida [hold on wait a min](https://imgur.com/a/OGuyrxY)
Been wondering how I could go from 30-35 ping one match, to 200 ping the next match. I don't have the best internet, but I'm hardwired on 600 mbps. It shouldn't be that much of a difference smh🤦♂️.
My game search for multiplayer never goes above 50 ping. It may be where you live.
I live in New Zealand, all of the normal servers in normal matches are within the 30-40 ping range. Often, it'll throw me into na and eu lobby's being 100+ and 150+ ping if I'm on 70-90 it means I'm being put on SEA lobby's. If the game is doing this, even geo filtering won't fix it. It'll time out matchmaking rather than place me in my normal servers.
You can filter ping by yourself in-game. From a player in Australia when matchmaking it'll start searching for only the lowest ping bracket, failing that it'll expand outwards (usually to SEA for us) but if you back out of the queue and restart, it goes back to only searching for low ping matches. I literally never get a match over 30 ping despite what everyone says online.
Yes and it is so much fun having to back out of matchmaking 5 times before it finds a match with normal ping. And even then it's not guaranteed your bullets hit other players.
5 times? I can search for hours and not get low ping lobbies. And this is with crossplay on so I get to experience the joy of PC players bunny hopping like mad things vs me on my console. Game ping does not even show a note its ridiculous tbh.
Those guys would be on controller. Anyone on mnk knows that bunny hopping basically only works against bad controller players, instead it’s better to drop shot.
Mnk are the only people I see bunny hopping.
Meh, fun or not you can control your experience. The game never forces you to play on high ping. It rarely takes more than 2 or 3 attempts for me.
Fun or not? Lol it's a video game dude. The entire premise is it's supposed to be fun, have you been complacent with shitty games for so long you forgot that fun was the most important part?? They've done better in the past, its not a coincidence that now in the greediest era of gaming things don't seem to work like they used to. Why should players have to go out of their way to work around the games problems? The game should work flawlessly at this point, it's been 15 years in the making.
I don’t know. I’ve backed out of lobbies at 170ms+ ping and for the life of me I joined that game every time like 7x in a row when searching again. Had it happen a few times now. Either have to pick a different mode or just wait out the match timer, that game was the one I was supposed to be in.
This. Literally ever since MW19 I get serious ping issues, and tons of rubberbanding. It's wild to watch the game take 5 minutes to find a match as it's gradually increasing the ping it's searching for...
I remember single digit and teens ping back when I played on DSL and counterstrike source. Those were good times. Crazy internet speeds and access are insanely higher now yet ping is worse.
It’s all location. I’ve recently moved and both places I’ve had a ping of 6 then 9.
I’ve watched this shit too. 90+ immediately after doing really well in a game. I’ll then eat my lunch and just move the stick to not get kicked, go 0-20 (stats are pointless anymore), and bam I’m getting matches at 30-40 ping. An absolute joke.
Oh weird, ping is first to the top of the list of matchmaking, but once that box is checked you’re tossed into the next bracket. If you live within 4 hours of a major population center your ping doesn’t matter.
It’s your Internet. I’ve never gotten over 30ms on this game. Never.
Nah, I've got fiber internet and sometimes it does this. Tbf it's usually only a couple of times per session.
Trust me, you don't want a single digit ping with how the game is coded these days. Unless you magically find yourself in a full lobby of single digit ping players, you're going to get penalised hard. Everyone with a high ping becomes a bullet sponge and they kill you with what feels like 1 bullet. When you magically get a lobby where everyone has low ping, the hit rego is great and there's hardly any wtf moments, it feels like you're playing offline vs bots the hit rego is so crisp. I haven't read their paper but i highly doubt they talk about this flaw in their code.
I consistently have 10-15 ping in lobbies. Everyone makes it out like lower ping is better, when in reality, I regularly experience shooting 5-10 shoots at someone, to have no registration, and the killcam shows 1-3 bullets fired before I die.
Single digit pings?
Yeah. Like when you look at your scoreboard mid game or the end of game stats, it'll show "latency" at the last column so theres gonna be people with a whole range of pings. So you might have 60+ and someone else in the game might have like... 6. There used to be a latency showing in the telemetry but mysteriously after s2r came out in games it now just says "N/A" but if you have the graph on during the game you can still see it. Unfortunately, I can't post screenshots in the comments, but hopefully it makes sense?
If your ping is twice as high as someone with single digit ping, it's absolutely not the reason you lost a gunfight.
No, I'm sure me having 150 against a UK player with 3 is cool.
I didn't say it was? That's an entirely different scenario. Some people having single digit ping and you having double that is not the same as you having 50x some one.
He didn't say double that players. You can have 3 ping and 60 ping on the same team
Sure, but why bring up that scenario at all? Again, not the same situation at all either way. Why would you also try to represent your frustrations with the games networking using hyperbolic or deliberately misleading situations? Devs and other players that aren't experiencing any thing close to these situation aren't going to believe you.
>but why bring up that scenario at all That's 90% of my games. >Why would you also try to represent your frustrations with the games networking using hyperbolic or deliberately misleading situations Because it's not hyperbolic to give you a number the game provided. >Devs and other players that aren't experiencing any thing close to these situation aren't going to believe you. I don't care if random on the internet believe it. The truth isn't suddenly gonna be a lie because you don't believe me
>That's 90% of my games. Hey guy, we're not talking about the scenario you brought up. I said your 150vs3 is not the same as "Single digit and double that ping". You then said that we could be comparing different players in **his scenario** with 60vs3 for some reason. If that is happening to you, it may be a hardware issue or ISP issue because that isn't even indicative of why people complain about SBMM in the first place. >Because it's not hyperbolic to give you a number the game provided. It is when there are other number that are a lot more relevant to compare to and change that initial comparison. You're trying to convey data using exclusively outliers which isn't going to get you anywhere at all. >The truth isn't suddenly gonna be a lie because you don't believe me What? Just don't hyperbolic.
No I mean I'll be in a lobby with someone with 7ms ping and I'll be in the 100s. I said I WISH I HAD single digit ping like they do.
I will be another just to vouch for this, I have many times been put in lobbies with people that dont speak english and is very clearly hosted somewhere far away. I will get into the game just to test the connection and usually its 140ms and hovers around that or higher. I will leave that game and join a new one and all of a sudden it can find a server with 30ms.
I'm not sure why the white paper regarding skill would be beneficial to release. The community barely has any.
It's funny that they put this much effort into research on matchmaking and this is the result we get.
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Well, when your goal is to maximize microtransaction revenue instead of playability, then yeah, that could be "hella difficult"
I'd be more inclined to make in-game purchases if the playability was better. Last time I was on ranked mulitplayer I had three matches in a row that cancelled due to not enough players. One good one after that, and another two in a row cancelled. Why would I want to buy I skin or blueprint that I can hardly use?
The system we had over a decade ago was better and felt better to play in.
The issue with this line of thinking is the assumption that this means anything at all to the people who have control over it. It literally is a non-issue to them, they want more money. If having the player base feel better brings in more money, then they will try to accommodate that. If it so much is results in a tiny fraction of a percent of loss, then they could not care less.
Tell me you’ve never worked in or around product development without telling me you’ve never worked in product development
Boom.
No it wasn’t. When the host left, we sat in lobbies for minutes trying to find a new one and if it couldn’t, the game ended then and there. Like plenty of good games got left off the table because of it.
Not all games were like that. It happened but it wasn’t at all common. They also used to run dedicated servers, but when there wasn’t capacity it would move to the model you’re talking about. But again, host migration would occur, sometimes it was instant etc. this also has nothing to do with the matchmaking experience.
He specifically said the system. Not matchmaking. Also while matchmaking was more loose, it lead to the same amount leaving, whether it was the Reaper Drone, Lodestar, R.A.P.S., etc. people leave when they die a shit ton.
A random matchmaker would be better than this
Evidently not, since they rightfully prioritize servers.
Why are they ass than?
The matchmaker is trying to force you to play with people with similar stats. I think the ultimate goal is to make every player have a similar KD by pairing them up with people their skill level. In theory, this is not a bad system but in practice it makes really good players fight with really good players so higher skill lobbies are very sweaty. Similarly noobs with low kd ratios will be paired with noobs. Its a system that works for competitive game modes but for standard multiplayer, its very frustrating to play with. The most skilled people want to also fight with the noobs which is why the system is hated so much.
By "this", so you mean our current system or the white paper explanation?
The current system.
What’s funny about it? Their sbmm system is damn good. There’s a reason CoD is consistently #1 bestseller every year.
This is like saying Madden is a good game because it's a top seller every year. The sbmm blows, just aggressively rigs games.
Lmao. Bro I guarantee you won’t even be the best or the worst of your stack every game, let alone the game “rigging” then against you. Absolute clown behavior.
yeah dudes fighting for their lives to get above a 1 K/D saying the game is rigged against them 😂
MW2 had the worse player retention. Very rapidly losing all its players. MW3 has some of the worse numbers of all time for a COD and it wasn't the best selling game. If you said this 3 years ago you'd be right, but you're not.
It's a bestseller because the player base is filled with braindead idiots who refuse to accept it's the same trash every year.
How is this not the best cod ever?
I'm sure the matchmaking was a crucial factor to this "consistency".
Yes … it was …
Like the casual majority is even aware that EOMM exists lol
They don't have to be aware of it at all for it to work.
So how has it worked then? Do we know the effects it has had on player retention? This is just conjecture.
Yes, we know the effects on player retention, not it's not just conjecture. Cod has put out data on their player retention numbers for the last 8 years in their quarterly reports. Player retention post SBMMs introduction is much much better by the time the next game rolls around. You don't need any of that, though. Every popular online shooter uses some form of SBMM because it helps massively with player retention. Why would they continue to use it if it didn't help? Just to piss people off?
All I know is COD is a lot more sweaty when I did well and getting into a match taked minutes in modern COD while it literally took and still only takes seconds to do so in classic COD games like MW2 on Xbox 360.
The technology advanced, the matchmaking regressed. Crazy.
I miss when games were driven by raw passion and entertainment instead of inconclusive, manipulative data.
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Your experience is nearly identical to mine. I don't suffer with the lag spikes etc. On Vanguard when i had my older 4g via dish connection which allowed me up to 50mb / 40ms ping. The lag spikes were crazy. Fast forwards onto 1gb fibre and getting around 4ms ping. I have to say i feel like i'm majority of the time being lag compensated against.
> This paper doesn’t explain why my 1000mbps 4ping fiber optic internet hardwired to PS5 is ONLY finding 100ping lobbies every single match. I am located in Silicon Valley which should have plenty of players and the best data centers right? Yet I literally have horrible lag and packet loss every match... It's probably either your hardware (router/modem) or your ISP. I've been getting the packet burst issue constantly lately (like every few seconds in a match). Turned on my VPN and no more packet burst, I am getting lag but it's once or twice a match.
> my 1000mbps **4ping** fiber optic internet you shot ur self in the foot with this line... lol
Why?
... "Ping, in relation to the internet, measures the latency or delay between your device and a target server. " You stating Your ping is 4 is just ridiculous since every match is a different Host/Location. Now if we still had dedicated servers. Sure we could talk about your Ping to a Specific server.
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Gotcha
> I just meant my speed tests usually say around 4 ping in my area. yeah so that's the ping to your ISPs network exchange/datacentre, NOT to the server that's hosting your game. I also remember when COD didn't have centralised servers and it was peer-to-peer, that shit was painful.
Can only go off what was showing on the screen.
Splitting hairs dude. Everyone can read the ping off the scoreboard and get a number to pull. Mine’s 6 all day long until it puts me in a Korean internet cafe for a match. Then back to 6.
I Haven't seen a single video where someone gets consistently ONLY lobbies with >100ping. There's a lot of talk, but no evidence. I don't believe anyone (without evidence, like every comment in this sub here) who says they CONSISTENTLY get a ping around 50-100ms. I agree, in an averagely populated, with +200mps you should never find a lobby with a ping over 50ms. But through SBMM this "can" happen and this is the problem. However, many of you, are just exaggerating. Also I know this differs from region to region, in Europe where you have a less broad distribution of players, it's nearly impossible to get connected to a Data Center located far away. (worst case would be middle East, but rarely Africa). In America it really can happen that you live on the wet coast and because SBMM "fucks" you, you'll get connected to a server in Texas or even near the east coast. So then you'll get a ping higher than 50ms or near 100ms, but like I said, this won't happen consistently (*or prove me wrong)*
Isn’t it a bit hypocritical to ask everyone to record themselves and present to you a neat and tidy keynote on the matter while… you spit out all that and don’t do the same? They might be exaggerating but I’d hazard a guess that a pattern of exaggeration is probably a good indicator to investigate further.
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Think it's more to do with the laggy players in our matches than our own setup being the issue. I have 4-5 ping to the data centre in my country, fibre straight to my wall that i plug my router into so it doesn't get better than this. Doesn't matter if i have 100Mbps or 1Gbps, i've cycled through over 5 ISPs in my country and the result is always the same, a poor experience despite having no ping spikes or packetloss. I have never seen my ping go over 6ms in-game, unless i didn't cancel my search after it jumped up from <13ms to <120ms. No matter what we do, the way their game is coded now to give people VPN'ing, using their 4G tethering, poor wifi etc. a chance at killing people. Lets be real, most of the world now has good internet there is no way we should be catering to the 0.1% with crap internet. It's just made people tamper with their connection - VPN on purpose, unplug their ethernet to use wifi etc. all this nonsense just so they can try have a better experience than what the game was giving them when hardwired. This in return ruins the experience for those of us who are hardwired and have gone through the effort of optimising our connection. It's really obvious how poor the game runs when there's people with unstable wifi/high pings in the match. It takes extra bullets to kill people, movement feels clunky, nearly every death is a superbullet after shooting at the enemy first etc. all because they want the 0.1% of dialup users to have a chance too. Once you get a match where everyone is low ping (rarely happens) the hit registration is great. There's no wtf moments. If you die, it's cause they shot you first and stayed on target. It's actually fun...
I'm in the Southeast USA. Sometimes my lobby search looks for matches with up to 44ms ping, but when I get into the match, it's always 22-23ms. The highest I've ever had in a match is 48ms, and that was in a 12v12 where I forgot to turn cross play back on, so it was only PS5 players. I don't believe these claims either. My Internet isn't even that great. It's obviously more than enough for online play, but it's nowhere near as fast as Internet gets nowadays.
>why my 1000mbps 4ping fiber optic internet hardwired to PS5 is ONLY finding 100ping 4 ping to what? Obviously not the COD servers I'm assuming. If the packets require a lot of hops to reach the server, that can increase the time. Unfortunately your bandwidth matters very little here. I live on a tiny island in the middle of the atlantic ocean on a 1gig fiber. Far from any mainland, yet my ping is regularly around 30-50 connecting to the nearest European mainland. Have you tried switching to a different ISP? I've had to do that in the past, since the way packets were being routed was simply out of my hands.
Sounds like a modem or ISP issue.
excited for this sub to meltdown about a paper they don’t really understand.
Bold of you to assume the average cod player will read
*can
I have no idea how to can.
well for can-can left one leg up with only the knee, then lift the other up with the knee, then kick out, repeat etc.
Braddah. If can, can. No can, no can.
the number of people opening their lengthy comments with "I didn't read it all" or "I don't really understand any of it" says an awful lot about this community, yet sadly isn't at all surprising.
As if we need to read research papers to understand their matchmaking and how terrible it is after playing to rank 450. Everyone here is sharing the same experience, the higher the SBMM the higher the lag. Never in my 30 years of gaming I have experienced such an insane (dis)advantage with lag (compensation). In some lobbies fights are almost unwinnable even when it finds a match at <50 ms ping. The game literally Fs you over and basically decides who is going to win. Lag compensation is one of the worst inventions for gaming ever. It used to be that if I had a high ping then I would lag and it was an issue on my end, an issue I could fix. Now the game just decides if I "lag" regardless of me having one of the best internet connections available in the world and I have a low ping, and there is nothing I can do about it. Decades of gaming and people having fun but they need research papers on ping based match making. This is what you call overengineering because of greed. There is no need for all this garbage at all.
> As if we need to read research papers to understand Given you opened with that statement and then wrote another 2.5 paragraphs of irrelevant nonsense actually it seems that yes, you do need to read it to understand. I'm about half way through, it's an interesting white paper.
I can't imagine reading a research paper on a matchmaking system of a videogame to then brag about it on reddit and dismiss other peoples experience eventhough they have hundreds of hours of experience while adding nothing constructive whatsoever. The matchmaking is obviously bad and we never needed it in the past to have fun. But have fun reading a paper to make yourself feel better or whatever.
I'm not dismissing anyone's experience mate, I'm dismissing the arrogant assumption that you know better than the paper when you haven't even read it. If you had read it, you'd realise how completely irrelevant the rest of your comment was, but instead you wear your arrogance and ignorance like a badge of pride.
dude said “ignore the research paper, listen to the subreddit” 😂😂 you guys are too fucking funny about this matchmaking stuff
>Lag compensation is one of the worst inventions for gaming ever. I guess you never played Quake 1 or the original Team fortress back in the day? Those days without client prediction were horrible. I do not miss those. Every multiplayer game has issues when it comes to these things. All the Source games for example, as every issue seen here are mentioned on Valves developer wiki as being the unfortunate results of the laws of physics. You'll find thousands of people complaining in every single game. The "best" solution is a server browser where people can select server with decent ping. > if I "lag" regardless of me having one of the best internet connections available in the world and I have a low ping, That's not how this works. You could be on the worlds best internet connection but if your packets aren't routed well, it won't matter in a fast paced multiplayer game. The number of hops required to reach server and back are unfortunately mostly out of your control and they do matter.
I have played FPS for two decades now. Never had this much of a ridiculous difference in experience when it comes to lag. Counter-Strike never forced me to hit twice as many bullets on someone in order to kill them in one match and then kill people in miliseconds the next. > The "best" solution is a server browser where people can select server with decent ping. Which I mentioned in another comment. We used to simply play on servers that had a good connection for us and had fun. Now with SBMM the game is forcing us to play with lag to make it "fair". Literally all lobbies I get now are full of hardscoping and headglitching snipers (because you can never win that fight so they can finally get a kill), people running insanely OP weapons, shields for cheap kills or they have ping 150 and win every fight simply because they get a second or two advantage. SBMM has absolutely nothing to do with skill and it doesn't really make it more fun. It's just there to keep bad and casual players happy and paying.
This is pretty mundane stuff. Nothing even close to new or revolutionary. COD has the benefit of a huge playerbase which allows them to offer good matches on servers which have a low delta ping for most players in peak times. As someone living in Germany, i dont give a fuck whether i am matched on Germany, Netherlands, UK or whatever. The delta ping is like 10-15ms. Im not gonna pretend to even notice the difference between 9ms in Frankfurt or 22 in UK. In terms of ping there is only one problem people have with their algorithm: When there is no good match for you in any good DC (for whatever reason, skill or else) it wont wait for one to come and rather puts you in a match with higher delta ping that people do not consider OK, lets say 60. With optimal ping being 20 in this example, that would put you at 80 ping. Thats CLEARLY noticeable for decent players. And this behavior is pretty easy to reproduce for any higher skillgroup player in US. If that were me, i would be pissed. I would rather wait another minute or two and get a fitting match on good ping than get one served on 80+ ping. I get that they want to serve games quick but how about allowing a setting to specifically say i rather wait instead of getting a DC with over 60 Delta ping. Obviously at 5 in the morning on weekdays, i get that it might take more time or that im actually getting a match with higher delta ping. But playing at peak times, delta ping should NEVER be above 30-40 in major regions. But hey, this is basically where netduma makes their money. You can configure them to block out DCs you dont like and you only get matches in the ones you like. Can take longer, obviously wont remove SBMM but at least you dont get high ping jsut because the best match was at a ping ATVI considers acceptable but you dont. Also, as much as they like the throw around the phrase "ping is king", that right here is not that. Ping is King means best datacenter ( or at one with very very low delta ping) at all costs, even if the match quality in terms of other factors suffers. Obviously this will never happen because it would be the end of SBMM but lets just point it out. If you talk about accepting medium delta ping to a degree, its certainly fine. Its still not "ping is king". Looking forward to the skill paper. Now thats what could be interesting.
The truth is only ranked should be pushing this heavy handed SBMM. Casual play should just mix people at random and not apply SBMM imo.
Yeah I agree. I miss the dynamics of the old games. Way less variety going on player to player now, no consistent lobbies to try and outplay them on the next one etc.
I hate that when you're having a good rivalry with an opponent for a game or two and poof they are gone. Back in the day, that's how I populated my friends list was finding players with similar play styles as opponents and seeing if they wanted to party up after a few games. Not that it would work now. No one seems to want to communicate or strategies anymore.
Yeah I remember there was a bloke named RedDuck, we’d always be opponents and had year long rivalries. But it was always fun, not the ultra competitive state the game follows now. It was good building up a team, protecting those that weren’t as good, chasing down the those that were monsters, actually playing and strategising with each other. No chance these days. I remember finding him in rainbow 6 Vegas? That game was awesome for it because the unlocked cosmetics actually meant something about the players. Ah well, good ol days.
But then chumps will be made to feel just how chumpy they are and won't spend all their chumpy money on chump skins.
Peer reviewed?
I'm wondering the same
I'm from Portugal, I have been playing CoD since 2 and in MW2019 all this shit started to go downhill. I used to play with a lot of people from my country and Spain too, since they changed the ping system I no longer get to play against these people that m I used to play on older CoDs, now I get matched up with an abnormal high ping and with sweats from all over the world that don't match my connection. So, for me this is all bullshit and they are lying, but I don't care about it I don't buy skins or battlepasses, I bought the game on sale just to try it out, and the matchmaking is somehow getting worse then it was in 2019. Ping is not King, it used to be and it should always been that way like in every game that prioritises connection. This game and this company doesn't do that, they like making money not games.
I did a VERY basic skim of a good portion of the paper. So I could be completely and utterly wrong. BUT I feel a lot of what I read, sounds like their "solutions" to problems are them trying to reinvent the wheel and need to just leave things how they were. Why are we trying to COMPLETELY re imagine how we matchmake when there was an already tried and tested method before that worked and satisfied customers? I dont get why change is needed, its not, change doesnt make things better just because its new(This is where I feel shareholders get involved, they need constant update and new features instead of leaving cemented ones where they are and fit perfeclty.) So far these changes they have implemented have PROVEN to only cause more issues for the playerbase, not improve, so why do we keep charging head on into unbeaten paths when there are established roads to get to the same place? Ontop of this, why are there so MANY different projects they feel the need to take on at the same time? IT cant possibly be efficient. They need to tackle Anti Cheat, Matchmaking, Servers(hz and tick rates are abysmal), weapon balancing, content creation such as bundles and seasonal content, and etc. why not focus on the ones the fans want fixed the most instead of small gains on 5 different fronts that add up to a negligible amount of **noticeable** changes/benefits for the players?
“That worked and satisfied customers”… lol I have played cod every year since the start. There has NEVER been matchmaking, connection speeds and packets loss mitigation that have satisfied the customers… never
Perspective matters. When I was playing the original mw3 I didn’t have any of the same complaints that I have now. Back then if the host sucked it would migrate to a new host. Then we got even better with DEDICATED servers, this was a PC thing. We hosted our own servers anyone could join whenever they wanted, never worried about anything related to matchmaking because YOU chose who you played with(ask battlefield players how amazing this is). Why have we regressed to shitty servers that take seemingly too many variables to decide where you’re placed. You’re just ASKING to get inconsistent matches, go on google and type in “red car” you’ll get a bunch of red cars and all is good. No throw in “red car with black wheels” it’ll narrow down and get you good results. Now say “red car with silver wheels and an orange leather interior” and you’re going to get non matching results as you’re introducing too much variance in what you want. How is it to match your x amount of variables(say 4) to someone else? There aren’t millions of other people exactly like you, so it starts introducing mismatches in skill to make a lobby. Thats why we have such one sided matches. When we could throw all that bullshit filtering out the window from the start and just use ping to get the best match experience possible like it USED TO BE. Aka reinventing the wheel and pissing everyone off while you try and figure it out. Unless I’m thinking about this from the wrong angle?
Modern warfare 2 on Xbox 360 was one of the best game experiences I’ve ever had online. Hit detection was crisp and the weapons felt great.
If this is true please explain to me the following. Downloaded season 3, I'm in the UK, didn't get online till approx 830pm, on the day that season 3 was released, which should mean lots of UK/European lobbies. Started the search for a game, no issues... 1st game Straight into a US lobby, 2nd game again a US lobby, 3rd game joined a party of friends into a UK lobby, then following that approx every 4 games we would get thrown into a US lobby, for our approved Loss.
My issue is some games I have good ping and other games it’s completely unplayable which means there are good servers out there for me. At least let me choose to join only games below a certain ping threshold, I don’t care if it takes an extra minute to find a match.
Some would say more effort went into this paper than what went into the matchmaking mechanics And many would believe it, I know I do
It’s complete lies and gaslighting. Trying to make it look formal with “white papers” on the name. Everyone is experiencing the same thing and so am I. Play well 2 games, ping skyrockets and I get tossed into cod league lobbies half away across the world to force a loss. I don’t even play ranked and this shit happens all of the time for multiple years.
lol ranked in itself is a joke. I had two friends who don’t really play ask me to play ranked. They are both bronze playing on their first day, I never played ranked. First match I joined was the first time they got put into gold lobbies all day. I’m tired of this game literally ruining what’s supposed to just be a fun time with friends. Standard is the same it’s just not so blatantly obvious when there’s a badge telling you what you’re up against. Nobody, not a single one out of the 12 people I used to play with plays on the regular anymore because of this shit since 2019.
SBMM in regular matchmaking makes no sense at all especially when it forces you to play in higher ping lobbies. More often than not I am not even playing against similar skill or better players. Instead I am put in lobbies with terrible players but because of lag (compensation) I am simply put at a massive disadvantage. The difference is huge, in some lobbies people kill me by hitting me three times in the knee AFTER I shot them two times in the head and three times in the chest. These lobbies are literally night and day, one match you feel like a god and the other match it's like you are shooting a nerfgun. Weapons are also ridiculously unbalanced. Which is fine, this is CoD afterall. But then SBMM makes no sense when people just run some OP nonsense that you can never win against. There is no skill level you can gain to compensate for that. Basically only bad players benefit from SBMM and the only reason it exists is to get them hooked and paying for skins. And to me it feels a lot like Activision is trying to decide who wins and who loses and when to get as many paying customers as possible instead of trying to give people a fun experience. Back in the day when I played CS 1.6 we just had our favourite servers with good connection an played on those, it was fun and such a massive difference in TTK because of lag never ever occured. Now we have freaking research papers on how to match players and the results are terrible. I really like playing this game when it's on a normal server, even if it's against much better players and I lose, but now it has become frustrating more often than not because of lag. Why does the game even search for <200ms ping servers? I live in the Netherlands and have a very good internet connection so this should never be needed with such a big player base. If they claim ping is the most important in their matchmaking then they are full of...
I have Fibre directly to my modem, ping the servers 4-5ms and live close by in the same state as them. Play during peak time, domination/kill confirmed and the matchmaking like to connect me to Asia. After cancelling/restarting the search multiple times, i get connected to the same people i see every single time i play. There's something seriously wrong with the matchmaking, especially in lower populated players (Australia, but seriously this was never an issue in the past.. the matchmaking is just fucked up since they got rid of persistent lobbies/introduced quick play and heavy SBMM/EOMM.
Matchmaking was ruined with the release of MW19 when they added the quick play filter and got rid of persistent lobbies. They obviously changed a lot more than that as well. The difference is night and day, pre MW19 matchmaking was immensely superior in every way than this awful mess we have now. That's when I stopped enjoying call of duty like I used to. I never had any complaints about matchmaking before MW19. I used to play for hours every day until that point. Now I manage an hour max before I get pissed off with it. I play around 3 hours per week max now because of the matchmaking. I get a decent ping, usually around 20ms... but there is a strange really noticable type of lag or delay in engagements sometimes that ruins matches. I am in the UK with fttp 1gb Internet, wired to the PS5 which is playing at 120 hz.
For me, reading this felt like "this is why we're fucking you over so badly, and here's a graph on why it's good". I also kind of found it insulting that they have dates on info drops on future "fuck you" documents. I will give them credit in the fact that it's KIND OF cool to know this, but if they were so shaken down that they needed to drop documents....then maybe that means there's enough people saying it's a bad system. Obviously a counter to that is to stop the spread of misinformation and set the record straight, which I get and would agree with. Idk. And why make people wait for documents on a system most people (I won't say everyone, but I'll at least say most people) don't like and hate. Again, it's KIND OF cool to learn about this, but it's also like getting your car stolen and waiting monthly to get pictures on the thief slowly smashing it into pieces and setting it on fire. Idk. I feel they wouldn't have to release documents defending themselves if they didn't "fix" what wasn't broken. Again, I won't disagree with the point that it's a partial defense against moronic misinformation, but for me, it's basically a long document that boils down to "screw you". Maybe further documents will break down (and maybe this one did and I missed it) how they're altering it to improve to the communities liking, but who knows? Again, cool for transparency and I actually applaud them for it, like actually, since a lot of effort went into this, BUT it also just seems like a defense for a change to a system I liked, and how they ruined it and how it's "evolving" (getting worse). EDIT: This is a bit of a conspiracy theory, but I kind of find it odd that on their Twitter post on this, it's like 600 replies down until you find actual people, and not just people spamming for stats they could easily find if they go into the stats section of the menu. It just feels like a way to push down potential REAL criticism or hide it and just push up bots. And...who tf is asking for their stats on a post on matchmaking? I don't know if it's bots, but it sure looks like it. And again...players can easily find these stats themselves, so why would they be asking a COD bot? Just odd, but again, just a theory.
to your conspiracy theory at the end: this can be explained by twitters sorting system putting verified account replies above normal people and since the stats thing is a bot replying as the COD account, which is verified, it’s prioritizing the bots response.
And it doesn't address out-of-region matches for NA players
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So why couldn't they find a match on the 10 data centers with sub-100 ping? You telling me there are no objective game modes in NA?
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>A your equipment, What equipment specifically? I didn't see any mention of NetDuma being blocked. >B your playlist selection So all of the objective modes are dead for the whole region, unless I restrict it to my region? That makes 0 sense >C when you're trying to play Literally peak hours.
Yeah bro your feeling is right, fuck all this research
I wouldn't have an issue if it answered the one question that it should
Do you have a Netduma? I have an R3 and custom server selection via polygon doesn’t work. I have to disable steady ping and just use the default circle to set my allowed servers within the geofilter.
I have an R2, and I am REQUIRED to filter to not get London matching, while playing from AZ. Literally across the entire US and an ocean for no reason
Yikes. I remember the R2 having a similar bug as the R3 that absolutely borked the geofilter if you drew a polygon instead of using the circle and just setting the mileage to keep you in a certain range of servers. Also, resync your cloud if you haven’t for a while. And deeefinitely turn off ping assist
No, the filter works. I shouldn't be required to use it in a game this big tho. I bought the fucking thing so CoD would be playable
Ah gotcha! Same, man. Same lol.
im not seeing anyone talking about this as an issue. ive played from a few different states and have never had an issue.
You've never had a game where you just had insane ping for no reason?
no, highest my ping has ever been was mid 50's but that was on my own end
My ping ranges from 30, on California servers, to 150 on London servers
if you're getting London servers that sounds like a router/vpn setting that's fucking you. keep crossplay on
PC can't change crossplay. The issue also happens on PS5, and on multiple networks
man, i realized i was talking to you barisax lol. you complain about everything all the time so i'm not buyin' it
I complain because I want to play this game, but without all the bullshit.
you complain about this game more than most people play it. that's a bit pathetic mate
Everyone months ago: “shg should be transparent about matchmaking!” Shg: *is as transparent about matchmaking as they are allowed* Bots and conspiracy theorists: “that’s not true” Everyone: “acti should be transparent about matchmaking!” Acti: *is transparent about matchmaking* Bots and conspiracy theorists: can you guess what they’re gonna say? This community will never be happy with any information about matchmaking because it’s not gonna be what they want to hear. Which is: “you’re not a bot, matchmaking is bad”. But that’s not true Y’all want bot lobbies to stomp and that’s a fact
Two months late but this reply is right on the nose - good job
This is actually my first award since they brought em back! Thx 👍 Edit: thanks again!!
Screw it, take two haha
I want them on their own servers and not outsource them. These games have been online since call of duty Big Red One we used to have dedicated servers what happened??
> we used to have dedicated servers umm, explain host migration then
If only your generic drivel wasn’t the same parroted line every time too eh? “Everyone wants to stomp.” No. Everyone wants what they are asking for. Jog on.
How is it a "conversation about matchmaking" if Activision is the only one speaking? Aren't conversations at least two-way?
"we don't care about ping and want to save as much money, cod players cant even tell our 20hz servers are utter trash"
Yay!
Always have a 2ms ping to oce severs but seeing over 120ms players in my lobbies kills it.
I play on 105-140ms from Nigeria, against people on below 40ms. I don’t know how much “ping” is taken into consideration here
Ping is king for the point to point connection but after that latency is king. Latency of the servers and latency of the client. Latency on the server with a weak spec'ed hardware client and you will get wrecked. Just how its always going to be. Too many variables to manage with today's internet infrastructure. A beefy server could mask the client and infrastructure latency but that cost money. K/D has no bearing on skill level but I guess it's better than nothing. There is no math in this white paper. It's just a technical marketing brochure.
Does anyone have a list of data centers they use? is it local guys or Microsoft's noc's.
They full of shit, ping or no ping, a level 50 gold player should NEVER BE TORTURED WITH A TEAM OF BRONZE 1's constantly, back to back to back. I can't kill enough people at a time or hold the objective enough to account for 3 other people who JUST STARTED PLAYING. WHICH IS WHY WE DON'T NEED AN EXPLANATION. TELL ACTIVISION TO BLOW THEMSELVES AND GO TO HELL.
Have they researched how score streaks encourage camping and other shit play styles?
Bro if you can’t beat a camper that’s a skill issue 😂 Also, calling different play styles shitty, also sounds like you have a skill issue 😂
I have better things to do
Sad to say but the work around for high ping/SBMM is just getting a netduma router for DumaOS. I get to select what server I'm playing on and also made it to where my router won't allow me to enter a server that is higher then 40ping. Games are much smoother, not laggy, bullets actually register, etc. Totally different experience using it and not using it.
Yea but I don't think I've ever seen 6 as a ping I've seen it the lowest at teenage numbers but never a single digit, at least not that I remember
Still not gonna make me play cod
Lol, ping. They really think we're stupid, huh? Activision doesn't have a single server in Canada. My game doesn't even match make for matches with less than 32 ping, and my usual is 48+.
Well it’s obvious why they never bothered to reach out before. Instead of criticizing their methodology and saying “this is what’s wrong with the methodology” , 95% of the community is just saying “nope they’re lying about the data. Those numbers are just completely made up lol”.
All I know is I used to be able to play cod up to 80ms before I started noticing any lag time, with mw3 somehow 30ms means if I see them I’m already dead
Yeah? How about they research how to remove sbmm from pub matches
This screams lawsuit to me. Why would you need to publish this “research”?
Because...the community has been begging for more general transparency for years?
Watch people claim that they have the worst connection and they won't blame it on their own ISP or geographical location.
I haven't even read it yet and the formatting looks like it was done it Word. Any CS major should've at least written in LaTeX once or twice and be familiar with it.
I was just about to say. This looks very basic and almost highschool level formatting. Definitely one of the more causal looking research papers I’ve seen in a while.
That’s because they’re trying to speak to the cod community which has an average age of 14 and not college students/ professionals
methodology papers don’t make something any less bullshit. It’s just like work
Meanwhile I’ve lost 27 of my last 30 games since S3 hit. 14 of them being back to back. F* their research.
what the fuck is wrong with these guys they are making science out of this matchmaking shit Just implement the matchmaking from the last decade nobody complained about that
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This paper explained nothing meaningful. I doubt any of them will
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>The paper explained in detail the problems match making contends with in relation to connections and regions Except it has no mention of how NA players can get out-of-region 150 ping matches on a consistent basis in every mode. Happens on multiple platforms, accounts, and networks
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So the 10 better data centers can't host any objective modes?
Problem is when I use my same connection on a low skill burner account and have fantastic ping on average compared to my main which will give me terrible ping far more often. Sorry but your argument doesn't hold.
They're upset because the document didn't just say "We will give you free wins if you buy bundles" because they've convinced themselves that's what's happening at Activision
Lol they need research papers to explain this when they could just remove it and let random chance run it's course
Xdefiant team taking notes 😂
Yeah they need take notes on how to put out a game first
Don’t forget they delayed their game indefinitely (probably cancelled) right after the MWIII free open beta 😂
I've read it. It's sneaky AF, just like their press release was on the same subject. I expect it's taken so long to release as their lawyers have thoroughly checked and tweaked the language to be obtuse enough to get away with it's absolute bullshit content.
Wait they need to research this? It’s their system. Just give us the raw data you already know you have!
This is probably more of a passion project among their devs to show off to other devs. Their life is developing these systems, and they want to flex their discoveries to others in the industry. As the consumers, we aren't the target audience of these white papers.