People who stay blaming SBMM are just bad players expecting the game to hand them free kills by putting worse players on the other team.

A real player, a good player, someone with actual skill, isn't gonna blame anything except the game's lack of agency. Being limited in how they can move, their gun taking 30 years to ADS, delays on slides, visual recoil, all that shit that keeps them from just straight up letting their skill speak for itself.

That's why COD debates piss me off so much. People will be like "BO7 is a good game" or "MWII is a good game" and then hit you with "but the SBMM caters way too much to bad players" without even realizing THEY'RE the bad players. Meanwhile the actual good players are stuck on MW2019 / MWIII because those are basically the only two modern CODs that actually let you let your aim, movement and overall skill speak for itself.

I'm pretty sure very few people are gonna understand my point. A lot of people are just casual players who enjoy the game for what it is, which I completely understand. Not everyone has hours to dump into a video game when you got shit going on IRL. My point is simply this :

The lack of agency is the real problem. The delays on basically every movement, the delay on slide cancels, the visual recoil, all that shit is keeping good players from actually being good. And that's something only good players really seem to notice, while bad players, without even realizing they're bad players, spend their whole lives blaming SBMM.

TLDR: Just read the last paragraph.

“I'm pretty sure very few people are gonna understand my point.”

Bro threw that in there to sound smart.

Usually better to just keep bad takes to yourself

The SBMM has always had one major flaw with its argument: it doesn’t really exist.

It’s not SBMM. It’s EOMM. It’s not taking your overall experience into account. It’s taking a number of your recent games and matching you with others that have had similar experiences.

Skill can’t accurately be measured to begin with in public matches. You can’t have a variety of weapons, a variety of unlocks, different perks, and offer a different set of objectives for every player (kills, SPM, XP challenges, camo challenges, the actual objective, etc) and unilaterally apply one skill number to everyone. If it was an actual skill rating, you would have the opportunity to climb as you get better. Instead, everyone has the staircase meme.

But this is what the higher ups want. Create an experience where everyone should feel some level of success in hopes to retain them. The problem is that that system doesn’t work for everyone. It’s geared more towards extreme casuals. I would also assume that that subset of players spend less in microtransactions than the rest. So they have created a major conflict that they are feeling the cons of more and more each year.

Pretty sure it's been objectively shown that the system benefits bad players. The negative experience happens to those on the right side of the bell curve.

BO7 is the best modern game. No manipulation, just some good attachments, open matchmaking (for the most part), and limited aim assist. That’s how you let skill speak for its self. Not jamming in manipulated lobbies that disband every game.

It's not SBMM, SBMM doesn't exist as it's engagement based, not skill based.

My problem is gamers nowadays who listen to these "content creators" and have to optimise everything and therefore you basically get 99% of the fucking playerbase who keep going with "the meta" guns and loadouts because shitcunt69 on Twitch said to instead of playing the game their own way.

It's also become rampant in the BO2 port with everyone using fucking AN-94 or SCARs with Stock and Suppressor because they're too chickenshit to want to be seen on the minimap.

I wouldn’t mind SBMM as much if they toned down everything you mention in the last paragraph. I also really enjoy playing MP shooters on mnk so an input lock would be an amazing way to give mnk players an opportunity to be more consistent players as opposed to toning down aim assist and decreasing screen clutter from various animations. I’d rather get clapped by more skilled players on the same input as me rather than timmy no thumbs who can jump/slide his way out of a gunfight while retaining all shots to the upper torso/head.

It's definitely EOMM, but OP is also right in their own way: The problem with EOMM is it removes player agency.

Like for me, the game has arbitrarily decided I love being stuck at 0.6 kd (protip: I don't.)

Well that just means I'm bad right? Well I can't be that bad, cause it matches me exclusively with people that have ranked iri cards and top 250 cards. If it wanted me to play with worse players, it could easily find them! But it doesn't.

Even then the frustrating thing is I can keep up with them. But when I use a gun that can kill in 4-5 shots, it always takes me 7+. So I die, because I just don't have the DPS to win. 'Course if I die too many times and start to approach a 0.4 kd, then suddenly I can start killing in 2 shots, even if I watched them spawn (which only happens if I'm doing <0.6) and shot their legs...

It's less "skill based damage" and more "you'll just do whatever damage you need to do to get the outcome big brother wants."

My aim doesn't matter, my positioning doesn't matter, my communication doesn't matter. But somehow no matter what happens I will get the exact kd big brother decided I should get.

I wouldn't mind facing iris/top 250s and getting a GENUINE 0.6 kd. That's not too bad. That still means I'm doing better than most. But it's 0.6 because EOMM wants it to be 0.6 and the rules of the game will change to ensure I stay locked to 0.6 kd. That's what pisses me off.

I’d like to see a single clip of a gun that kill in 4-5 bullets killing in 7+ or only 2 shots.

Bro's acting like I'm holding on to 4-7 year old videos of games I don't like from back when recording things was a bigger pain to deal with. What am I, a youtuber?

If you want, I can get you a clip of the mw4 beta. 3 kill streak with the worst aim and worst positioning you've ever seen in your life. Enemies still dropped extremely fast and it was definitely way faster than "Treyarch TTK" like people are complaining about. Cause none of it matters.

Even got a hitmarker by shooting literally nothing. Textbook example of the perfect miss. Can't be explained by desync. Landed anyway.

As long as you can show the stats of the gun and how many bullets it’s normally kills in. Beta is not optimal for this, especially not since they did weapon balancing patches almost every day. Hit marker clip would be interesting too.

Alright let's go through this frame by frame
https://streamable.com/pfsxho

First dude: There's too many variables. He was in a 1v3, I don't know what my 2 teammates saw. But he's conveniently there to build up data. On my 18ms wired connection, he was shooting me for \~112ms and landed 3 shots. I fired 11 rounds before he died and landed 2 shots. On my screen you can see I should've landed 3 or 4. Not a big deal because of the other player potentially causing a desync. Far as I can tell? Super normal game behavior. I'd expect every >2 player fight in any shooter to be like this.

Second dude: Clear 1v1. He stared at me for 176ms and didn't shoot. I fired 10 rounds before he died and landed 4 shots. But it looks like I should've landed 7. It's not like someone else's shots caused a minor desync. Where'd those other 3 shots go?

Third dude: Clear 1v1. He was shooting for 256ms. I counted 4 of his bullets that seemingly went through me. I took no damage. I guess there's the possibility he was aiming at a teammate that wasn't looking at him, but I've played enough CoD to know that's where the tracers can go when someone's damaging you. I fired 8 shots before he died and landed 4, but it looks like 5 should've landed. Best hit reg I had so far... worst hitreg he had.

Watching a teammate die intermission: Teammate was walking at ADS speed for about 224-288ms, so he may very well have been shooting the fourth guy, though there's no way to confirm anything either which way. What I know for sure is I saw 5 shots hit him (although only 2 produced blood.)

Fourth dude: He may have started injured. Who knows. What we do know is he was looking at me for 352ms, 6 tracers went through me, I received 3 hit indicators from a bullet and 1 hit indicator from his nothing grenade (and none of the tracers were any closer than the tracers from third dude.) Killcam says he secretly shot me 4 times, and it forgot I was hit by the nothing grenade.

Now what's very interesting is on my end, I open up by completely whiffing entirely. I hit nothing by any definition. Still got a hitmarker anyway. I fired 17 shots. From what I can see, I only landed 2 - but I got 3 hit markers!!!

Now I remember in black ops (6?) there was some drama because the devs addressed "erroneous blood splatters". Basically what happened was, there was overwhelming evidence you could just run up on an afk dude, mag dump them, get 20+ hitmarkers, and they wouldn't die. So their "fix" was to hide hitmarkers, but it still rendered blood. So their "fix" was to hide the blood, too. And everybody was mad because you could still mag dump afk players and not get a kill.

The only difference is the game was pretending you were missing. It knew you shot, it knew the shot landed, it just ignores it (and the bug fix was making it ignore the hitmarkers/blood as well.)

So I play mw4 and almost every gunfight there's something off about it. Half my shots magically don't count. All of their shots that I see go through me magically don't count. Sometimes all my shots do land. Nobody in this clip even moved except for the last guy, so it's really hard to believe it's desync.

Every gunfight actually feels like the mw2019 and mw2022 days.

I suspect the only difference is, back then the hitmarker matches what you could actually see (ie. I would've gotten 2 hits on the fourth guy, and 7 hits on the second guy, but the server secretly pretends I got 3 hits on the fourth guy and 4 hits on the second guy.)

But even if all these patterns across every cod match I've played (outside of cod mobile, mobile doesn't feel like this) since 2019 are all a complete and total, crazy coincidence?

Still doesn't change the fact you have no agency. Sometimes half the shots you obviously landed will miss anyway. Sometimes all your shots will miss. Sometimes you don't even need to actually land a shot for it to deal damage anyway. Your aim doesn't matter and CoD provides no