For those who aren’t familiar, SBMM is an acronym for Skill Based Matchmaking. This is the main way that Activision pairs you with other people in COD games. A lot of people aren’t exactly fans with it, as it’s not very intuitive in how you get matches with people.
The same thing would go for Warzone, and you would get more or less put in different “tiers” based on how good or bad you were. There were a number of YouTube personalities such as Drif0r, Xclusive Ace, and JGod that look at numbers in huge excel spreadsheets that would kind of give you an idea of where you stood. However it took meticulous amounts of time as you had to keep track of what you and your team did during Warzone, and you pretty much also had no idea about people in the lobby either.
Enter the SBMM site. It would keep track of all of this for you, in addition you could potentially see what other players also did in the lobby as well. As long as their privacy was open (Activision at one point made it private as default). It was an easy way to see how you did at Warzone, what tier you were being placed in, did you play against any streamers, and you could potentially identify cheaters in the game as well.
Well it could only last forever, and according to the creators of the SBMM site, they were given what amounts to a cease and desist order forcing them to close down the site. The reason was for a TOS violation, bit specifically what is was is not mentioned. It is surmised that a privacy issue could have been at hand but who knows as Activision is been tight lipped.
What I and others thing personally is that SBMM was getting close to breaking the code behind what is in SBMM in COD. Activision thinks of their secret sauce behind it as being proprietary, so they don’t want it out in the wild if so. I really don’t think privacy was an issue, partly because there are many other games that use a similar type of system to see your recent stats that what the SBMM site was doing. Even some games that Activision even has as well.
I hope we see something similar in the future. I think Activision as of late has been becoming more of an EA type figure. More concerned with the money’s than being focused on the consumer. It’s progressed into an almost yearly release cycle for COD games, and even now you almost have mandatory purchases with the addition of the Seasons and new weapons.
I would prefer to see an more extended life cycle with their games between releases. More along an 18-24 month cycle, and release more seasons with the previous title. I’d like to see the same with Madden, a 2 year release cycle and perhaps a small fee for roster updates after the first year. But I think we all know that isn’t going to happen unless there is a huge change, and I doubt that’s going to happen anytime soon.
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