Last week's alpha version of "Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War" was marred by a particular problem: skill-based matchmaking. The game itself was relatively well received, with many players praising the new maps and the way Treyarch seems to have captured the essence of the old Black Ops titles. However, some players have complained on social media about the way Treyarch, the developer, has chosen to match them with opponents.

Skill-based matchmaking, as the name suggests, is a system that selects opponents based on their abilities. It is a staple of competitive multiplayer games and helps keep individual games as fair as possible. Shortly after the alpha launched last week, players began to notice that their games were surprisingly fiercely contested, suggesting that the matchmaking system was working as intended. Ultimately, however, that is not what every Call of Duty player wants.

On Saturday afternoon, former Call of Duty world champion Seth 'Scump' Abner tweeted that "[skill-based matchmaking] doesn't belong in Call of Duty," and that a dedicated ranked He stated that there should be a playlist. Abner's comments were echoed by a significant portion of the community, many of whom suggested that both ranked and casual matchmaking modes should exist, allowing players to choose whether to play for fun or to climb the ranked ladder.

However, while many such players condemned the addition of SBMM, others pointed out that it has existed in Call of Duty games for years, with Twitter user Unionstreaming pointing out that it has been present in Call of Duty 4, " Modern Warfare 2," and "Black Ops 2" benefited from a casual approach to matchmaking, Martin Donlon, director of technology at Treyarch, responded that all of these games include SBMM in some form. He responded that they all contain some form of SBMM. [However, the matchmaking in the current "Black Ops - Cold War" is more rigorous than in the previous "Call of Duty" series, so more players may be aware of its impact. According to Donlon, that is a "perfectly reasonable observation," and "SBMM is one of many parameters that can be adjusted in the matchmaking system," suggesting that further testing and tweaking the approach in time for the November 13 release of "Black Ops Cold War" in the main game suggesting the possibility that the approach could be tweaked for further testing and the November 13 release of the full-length Black Ops Cold War.