News - How Sbmm Works Warzone 2
I believe I have solved skill-based matchmaking in War Zone 2, and today in this article I'm going to explain how it works, why exploits like vpning and loading in with a lower skilled player and dropping out do not work in this version of sbmm, and why it appears your favorite streamers or content creators are getting bottle lobbies more frequently than you or your friends.
And before we get into what I think is the most juicy thing, which is why these exploits don't work anymore. I need to explain how I believe sbmm is working so that it will make more sense why these exploits don't work. Let's imagine you have played 10 games of Warzone in your entire career of playing Warzone.
Now, most players are going to play hundreds, if not thousands, of games, but let's say this particular player has only played 10 games of Warzone in their entire life. Of those 10 games, let's say one of them is guaranteed to be a bot lobby, while the other nine are guaranteed to be skill-based lobbying.
Now, of course, there's no way to guarantee that your first game is going to be the bot lobby or your last game; it could be any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; it could be any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; any of the 10; it could be any of the 10; it could be your last game.
For every certain number of games you play, you are guaranteed to get skill-based lobbies, and you are guaranteed to get a fraction of those as bot lobbies. The idea is essentially a lottery system: the more you play, the more games you get through, and the more bot lobbies you're going to see because you are therefore guaranteed more lobbies.
This doesn't mean that you can stack bot lobbies up; it doesn't mean that you can reliably predict. When you are going to get a bot lobby, the more skilled a player you are, the earlier you will recognize a bot lobby and therefore be able to capitalize on it. The average war zone player in war zone one at least was right around a 1kd, if not a little bit lower or a little bit higher depending on the season, and so the average lobby, if it was perfectly skill-based, was going to average out to about a 1kd.
Lobby: Now, obviously, there were people who had lower lobbies and there were people who had higher lobbies, but anybody who had over about a 1.75 2kD could, at some point in the lobby, recognize when they were in a bot lobby. Now, if you yourself are a bot, and there's nothing wrong with that, we need all kinds of players in Warzone, but if you yourself are closer to that average player, closer to that 1K, it's going to be harder for you to recognize those easier lobsters because those easier lobsters are more closely aligned to your skill level.
I do think it's a little bit different depending on the game mode you're playing. At the end of the day, what's happening is that you're winning the lottery when you get a bot lobby, and you're guaranteed to win the lottery again, but you have to play through maybe a certain number of games, or maybe you'll get back-to-back bot lobbying because you've played through so many of your or other skill-based games that you are guaranteed to get more frequent bot lobbying.
I know what you're yelling: "How do you prove this?" and the real answer is we can't yet, but we will be able to prove this theory when we get access to the API in Warzone. When we get access to all of our stats, we'll be able to actually look at large content creators and streamers and average out hundreds, if not thousands, of their games to see if they're getting a set number of bot lobbies per a certain number of games being played.
At the very least, we'll be able to get a percentage of bot lobbies that they get when they're playing, and we'll be able to cross-reference that with other streamers and content creators. We often use the term "skill-based matchmaking." But the idea really is retention-based. Matchmaking and the game know how to keep you engaged.
It knows when the most optimal time to give you a bot lobby is, and that could be after five really bad games, or it could be you know give you two or three games in a row that are really good because, at the end of the day, it's a battle royale and anything can happen, but if it can give you a really easy lobby based on your skill level, it might be incentivized to do that to keep you playing longer.
Another way I can explain it is that it's a timeline. Your entire lifetime of playing Warzone is a timeline, so from the first game you play to uninstalling the game or your computer dying or you dying or whatever, every game that you play is just a continuation of all of your previous sessions, so it knows not to give you a bot lobby every time you log in for your first game.
It knows not to give you a bot lobby after you've already had five this past week or whatever the statistic comes out to, and if we think a little logically, we can start to answer the question of why do the streamers and content creators seem to get bot lobbies more frequently than other players, and it's simply a math game if the average player can play 5 to 10 games per session and they play for between two and four hours a session a couple nights a week.
Maybe they run into three or four bot lobbies that week, but a content creator or a full-time player of War Zone is going to get through. Three, four, five, or ten times the number of games over that same week, so of course they're going to see more frequent bot lobbying, and I know a lot of people don't like this answer, but if you've heard of Occam's razor then I think this makes a lot of sense.
Occam's Razor is the idea that the simplest solution is most likely the solution, and the further away from a simple solution you need to get into conspiracy theories and grand ideas and crazy processes to explain why things are happening, the less likely that explanation is. a little harder for me to believe, especially because I have witnessed people getting bots.
I know other people who have witnessed people getting into bot lobbies and playing in them, so it's not like those people are whitelisted. I'm not whitelisted, and I've never been contacted by Activision to say, "Good job; you sometimes play our game." Here are some bot lobbying examples. I think it is most likely that this is some form of a lottery system where X number of games are played.
