With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6’s own era of Warzone and all that juicy battle royale goodness, we’ve gotten a vast list of patch notes and intriguing information to go alongside it. However, one point is controversial to a subsection of the community: an adjustment to the ping threshold in order to curb VPN usage.
There’s a whole argument raging about why players use VPNs in Call of Duty. Primarily it’s used in an attmept to outmanoeuvre the game’s skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) for easier matches, though international friend-groups also use it to play together. It is, however, that first case that has drawn the ire of Activision and resulted in this adjustment.
The idea is that by changing the ping threshold, players with higher pings will be removed from matches in a certain region they’re trying to VPN over to. While a VPN can mask which region you’re actually playing from, it doesn’t actually shorten the distance that data your game sends to Call of Duty servers travels, resulting in a higher ping.
This way, Activision can essentially catch players using VPNs, without having the Ricochet Anti-Cheat packaged alongside Call of Duty using its kernel level access to scan for such software. That would be a whole other can of worms: malicious cheats are one thing, but totally legal VPNs with real-world uses aside from clicking heads in a video game aren’t something a video game company should really have any influence over. Yet, if you’re using them to work around in-game skill-based matchmaking, that’s obviously not what the company wants.
The counter arguement to this is essentially, ‘whatever dude, SBMM sucks! I want to play easy and fun games without having to try too hard. I just wanna turn my brain off and chill!’ If you’re a good player, you’re currently matched with players at a similar skill level. That means you’ll not be bodying many scrubby players. The problem is, Activision published its own study into how removing SBMM impacted the game earlier this year, which showed a drop in player retention for less-skilled players while great players had increased retention.
In layman’s terms, worse players didn’t like it, while very, very good players liked it better. The problem is, most players suck! Most players are totally ass, dude. So Call of Duty, aiming to make a game that appeals (and sells content to) as many people as possible obviously aren’t gonna flick the SBMM switch off and call it a day. If you want that, go play XDefiant! That game turned SBMM off as a big marketting move and it’s doing great.
So yeah, that’s the situation. Unless you’re an incredibly great player looking to avoid the skill-based matchmaking this won’t impact you at all. It might even make your games better.