Call Of Duty Explains Their Matchmaking Process To Help Ease Player Concerns

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has quite an intricate matchmaking system, and yesterday they took to their blog in order to explain the system and how it works to help ease recent concerns brought up by Call of Duty players.

The factors that go into making a lobby in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 include connection, time to match, playlist diversity, recent maps/modes, skill/performance, input device, platform, and whether or not voice chat is enabled. Together these factors combine to quickly analyze and place players together in a lobby.

They go into further detail about some of these factors, including how connection is king. They always try to place players in a data center that is closest to them for the best ping, and the client server match hosting also has an impact on data times. They also go on to reiterate that restarting a match queue when it's taking a long time does not speed up the process, and is in fact detrimental to matchmaking.

Measuring a player's skill is also very important to the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 matchmaking process. Lower-skilled players who are always on the losing end tend to leave matches or quit the game, so the devs want matchmaking to have the least amount of disparity possible. 

"We use player performance to ensure that the disparity between the most skilled player in the lobby and the least skilled player in the lobby isn’t so vast that players feel their match is a waste of time," the blog states. "Our data on player outcomes clearly indicates that the inclusion of skill in Call of Duty’s Multiplayer matchmaking process (as it currently stands) increases the variety of outcomes experienced by players of all skill levels. In other words, all players (regardless of skill level) are more likely to experience wins and losses more proportionately."

One thing they do not consider is time played, as other factors such as connection and skill take precedence. You can check out the full blog and the Q&A on the Call of Duty site.