Call of Duty matchmaking and the education system

I am finally getting back into playing Call of Duty competitively as I get to the end of senior fall in high school. Now that college apps are over, I wanted to pick back up a very amusing passion of mine. While I used to play competitive Call of Duty on their mobile version during the pandemic, this time I chose to hop on the console version. The current CoD is Black Ops 6.

(while I use call of duty as an example here because that is the game I play, the concepts discussed in this writing can pretty much apply to any competitive FPS game)

Having just finished with high school (the part that matters: I still have another semester left), I find myself on the game more, but I am also starting to notice the close parallels between the design of public schools and the algorithmic logic used to match players in a Call of Duty game.

The Model of Call of Duty

Call of Duty multiplayer has two different modes: Multiplayer and Ranked. Multiplayer is 6 players on a team, each side taking part in close-quartered combat. Ranked is just the same thing as Multiplayer but between 4-a-side, except you are assigned a rank based on your skill level.

The need for matchmaking

Call of Duty, or any other FPS game’s skill ceiling is so sparse that there need to be algorithms to systematically match players against each other. You must have experience trying out new games from the app store, where you keep playing the ones you win and progress forth, and delete the ones that seem very hard and hold you back. This is why levels in a game get progressively harder. That’s just basic human engagement.

For example, if you downloaded Where’s My Water 2 back in its prime in 2013-14, all starting levels are very easy just like any other game as the game is designed to be addictive as such. But if you download a game like Hill Climb Racing, a much more mechanically difficult game than Where’s My Water 2, you had to have a bigger barrier of will to get through the game as you just trip over and die often times.

Coming to CoD, if beginners are always put into pro-level lobbies, they lose consistently, feel held back, and delete the game. The game as a business is failing at its purpose: to get and keep as many players concurrently playing the game. This is the reason Call of Duty devises two different matchmaking algorithms to balance retaining players, but also offering a full-fledged ranked experience: SBMM and EOMM.

SBMM and the top college grind

Skill-based matchmaking SBMM is designed to provide both a balanced and competitive experience to ranked players. In Call of Duty, you progress from 8 tiers of rank (each with 3 sub-tiers): Bronze all the way to Iridescent, with the 8th tier being Top 250, which as the name suggests, is a constantly updating leaderboard of the top 250 Iridescent players. To progress these ranked tiers, there is a set amount of SR points (Skill Rating) needed to progress the sub-tiers (eg. Bronze I, Gold II). If you win, you gain SR, and if you lose, you get your SR deducted. As you can figure, most ranked matches happen between players of the same rank tier. But this is not the only metric that goes into matchmaking. Your past history of wins/losses, your kill/death ratio, and objective points (CoD’s ranked match mostly rely on different ways to earn points from objectives so that killing more and dying less is not the only metric to determine how you win the game), which indicates your individual skill level that in turn affects how you get matched.

The ranked mode that uses SBMM is a actually a valid measure to truly determine a player’s individual skill, which is reflected in the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate curriculums in education. As the exams in these programs are designed to weed out students into 5 or 7 different tiers of their skill/knowledge in that subject through the number and difficulty of questions, and to even first enrol and sustain these classes through the semester, you are a student that usually stays on top of your stuff (determined by grades in prerequisite classes). Students, usually in these programs, are incentivized to score in the high 5s and 7s (climb up the ranks) so that they get into better colleges (like getting into the Top 250 leaderboard) and not drop their performance (lose SR points). Conversely, students not enrolled in these programs rather only have their GPA as a metric, and the way grades are assigned in non-AP and IB classes is much more lenient, inflated, and designed to keep the overall student body GPA up. This is where EOMM enters.

EOMM and incentivizing high school

Engagement-Optimized Matchmaking EOMM is used in the Multiplayer mode of Call of Duty, which is unranked. This mode cares much less about determining a player’s rank and offering them a competitive experience, and rather keeps them playing the game and gives them a feel of winning. As the name suggests, this matchmaking system adjusts the method it picks players for you in your matches so that, let’s say if you are on a losing streak, it gives you an easier lobby of players with a lesser skill level than you so that you win. However, if you are on a winning streak, a game or two on the defeating side is much less likely to make you quit, hence, the game assigns you a game with a harder lobby of players for you to lose. This is also done so that you don’t get “bored” or “tired” of winning. This, as I mention above, is the cause of grade inflation and incentivising high schoolers much less motivated about getting into a top school to take their education seriously by giving them “occasional wins”.

As you can see, the problem with this system is that it does not truly determine the student’s skill relative to their surrounding student body, rather it only works to make them “enjoy” school. Partly, a reason I am writing this essay is the recent incident involving a student in Connecticut that graduated high school without even knowing how to read or write, revealing how lenient regular high school education has become that works to retain students rather than to nurture them.

CBMM and standardised testing

However, another matchmaking system also has close parallels in the current education system: CBMM (Connection-Based Matchmaking). This is a more hands-off, laissez-faire approach to matchmaking in CoD and is heavily called upon by the community to adopt over EOMM, where there is no skill factor or your willingness to quit the game factored in to matchmake you with players. It is as random as a matchmaking algorithm can get, so your lobby can either be extremely easy for 10 games straight or extremely difficult as well. All that matters is if you are a top 1% player, most, if not all, matches should be easy to you and if you are just starting out, it takes a while to build that skill and compete. While it risks losing concurrent players, it is a more realistic approach towards giving players a truthful gaming experience without mathematical operations manipulating it. This parallel is seen in tests like the SAT and ACT, where all students in the nation take the exams, and the scoring system is a no-filter, true test of student aptitude. Hence, it’s usually students doing well in their AP and IB classes scoring high on these exams and vice versa.

Christmas Noobs

Note: It is a funny parallel to the concept of “Christmas noobs” observed every December 25 in Call of Duty. Every annual title of CoD releases late October/early November, and most people buy the game during Christmas when both the game is relatively new, and they also get some Christmas money to drop 60 bucks on a video game. Hence, a large influx of “noobs” (newbies), play the game, making lobbies you get into much easier sequentially as the matchmaker has more beginners to match you against.

Final Thoughts

If there is one implemented system from CoD we can take to make the education experience more truthful and holistic, it's placement matches. CoD has 3 placement matches where players are unranked, and the only purpose of these matches is to determine how many standard deviations above or below the mean the players are and then assign them to their actual rank. If you apply this to every time a middle schooler transitions to freshman year of high school, the average GPA of the school in subsequent years will better represent their students’ aptitude while truthfully keeping it up.