One selling point for Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 was the departure from strict skill-based matchmaking. However, community tests now suggest that the algorithm works much more aggressively than announced.
It was supposed to be a major turnaround for Call of Duty multiplayer. After years of criticism of the opaque and often frustrating skill-based matchmaking system, the developers promised improvements for Black Ops 7.
“Open matchmaking” with only minimal consideration of player skill was supposed to be the new standard at launch. But just a few weeks after release, the mood has shifted. A well-known YouTuber has now backed up this feeling with numbers – and the results don’t paint Activision and Treyarch’s promises in a good light.
The dream of relaxed matchmaking
To understand the community’s frustration, let’s take a quick look back: During the Black Ops 7 beta, Treyarch introduced a special playlist with open matchmaking. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and based on this success, Activision confirmed shortly before release that open matchmaking with “minimal skill consideration” would be the standard at launch.
But it’s precisely this little word, “minimal,” that is now causing doubt. Does the game feel increasingly difficult to you since its release? You’re not alone.
Well-known CoD expert and YouTuber TheXclusiveAce wanted to know for sure. He didn’t rely on his gut feeling, but conducted a controlled test to see if connection really takes precedence over skill.
He used two completely different accounts for the experiment:
- An account with high stats and a lot of playing time, belonging to an above-average player.
- A new account with extremely poor stats, normally only used for weapon testing against walls.
To keep the variables as low as possible, he searched for games with both accounts at exactly the same time of day in the same mode to find out how the game puts together the lobbies.
The results are sobering
The data collected from ten matches each shows a clear trend. Although the weak account found a match slightly faster on average (28 seconds) than the pro account (34 seconds), the real scandal lies in the latency.
While the weak account ended up in lobbies with a ping of around 25 ms in eight out of ten cases – which, according to TheXclusiveAce, is the best possible value for its location – the reality was different for the good account. The main account only achieved this optimal value once. The average ping here was 42 ms, with outliers in the 50s.
His conclusion: The system apparently does not prioritize the best connection. If matchmaking were truly “open,” both accounts should have ended up on the best possible servers with similar frequency. Instead, the game deliberately accepted poorer connections for the good account in order to find opponents of a similar level. And that contradicts the definition that skill should only play a “minimal” role.
What the community says
The well-known Twitter account ModernWarzone commented on the analysis with the words: “This doesn’t look good.”
The fact that skill is apparently weighted more heavily than connection quality is particularly met with incomprehension. DougDagnabbit, the owner of ModernWarzone, sums up the mood of many veterans:
Genuinely such sad results.
Half of the COD community was already accusing the studios of rug pulling minimal SBMM, and now it’s at least been proven that skill is considered above ping in some instances which should NEVER be the case.
Just gotta laugh at this point. https://t.co/tWQpXKQ3ka
— DougDagnabbit (@dougdagnabbit) November 26, 2025
Link to Twitter content
“At the very least, it’s been proven that skill is prioritized over ping in some cases, which should NEVER be the case… At this point, all you can do is laugh.”
TheXclusiveAce himself admits in his video that the current system still feels better than in its direct predecessors. Nevertheless, it is a noticeable step backwards compared to the beta phase and contradicts the official communication prior to the launch.
Among all the voices of long-time series veterans, however, there is also someone who takes a more down-to-earth perspective on the whole thing. The user bt norris
dryly comments, whether professionals in any other competitive sport would complain so much about having to compete against opponents of a similar level?
And with that, he probably speaks for everyone who can no longer take the drama surrounding the tryhards
, who just want to pubstomp
worse players, seriously.
