If you ever find yourself in the middle of an argument about Call of Duty and want to toss a tank of gasoline on the fire, recite these four letters in order: S-B-M-M. Skill-based matchmaking is the invisible system by which Call of Duty, as well as most modern multiplayer games, match you with similarly-skilled players so that every matchup is as fair as possible.
Sounds like a win-win for all involved, but there's a legitimate argument against a matchmaker that only cares about high competition. A faction of Call of Duty players argue that it's not fun to always have to "sweat" so hard in an FPS that most people play casually, and believe a random matching system could accommodate a wider range of experiences—matches where sometimes you're way better than your opponents, and sometimes you get totally destroyed. Notably, the free-to-play CoD alternative XDefiant has no SBMM.
