summarize the text:  Hey guys Drifter here, welcome to Modern Warfare In Depth. In today's episode we're going to be talking about skill based matchmaking. Yes, good old SBMM, the boogeyman, the scapegoat, the whatever you want to make it to be in Call of Duty. I have done a lot of work with Exclusive Ace to try to demystify what's going on with the skill ranking. And I was somewhat wrong in my initial assumptions and assertions that there is no skill based matchmaking in Call of Duty. And there is some evidence of skill matching, which we'll get to later today. We have four main conclusions. The two first ones are a little bit more in line of like myth debunking. And the last two are primarily going to talk about this skill matching, including a hidden ranking system. So it's going to be a fun episode. So let's go through what was done first so that we're all on the same page. Exclusive Ace has posted a video on this as well, because this was a joint project for the community. We pulled our efforts together to crunch more data and to kind of get two eyes on the same problem. The data that we analyze, everything that you see is going to be made public. There's a link down there in the description to the sheet and it's made public so that you can double check it to make sure that we didn't cheat. You can run your own analysis on it because I'm sure there's people out there smarter than I am, or you can try to replicate a similar test and see if it's replicable or if it's wrong or if you can do better. So anyway, what we did is we used our NetDUMA routers to test connections because they show the ping and the location of servers. In case you're curious, it looks something like this and it just kind of shows you the location of all the dedicated servers when you boot in because you're pinging all of them. Ace and I both tested three accounts and we tested connections on a low, medium, and high skill account. So six total accounts. And what we were trying to see is that if a low skill account would get better connections than a high skill account. Every single match was recorded so that the stats of every player that we matched with could be looked at as well. We took screenshots and matched them. The player data is taken from the Call of Duty Companion app. Unlike the online website, for whatever reason, the app doesn't allow people to have private stats, so we were able to find just about everybody unless their account was too new to match with. After all the screenshots and recordings were done, it was then time to do enough data entry to make me want to Epstein myself, and I do mean we did a lot of data entry. This is the raw stat sheet. You can kind of see it here, and it's also linked down there below in the description, but there's a lot going on here. This is not a small or insignificant amount of data. It took a very, very long time, but it was all done for the benefit of the community. Once you get all that data, you can make nice averages and do analysis and pull up stats kind of like this. But let's go ahead and jump to the conclusions because I know that that's what you all want to hear about. Conclusion number one today is that Call of Duty never prioritizes skill over connection, at least not in my testing. And I know that that is not going to be a popular thing in the comments section on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, wherever this video gets posted, because the number one myth about skill-based matchmaking is that as you get higher skill, your connection gets worse because your player pool that you can potentially match with gets smaller. We didn't find any evidence of that whatsoever. All of Ace's servers and pings were identical, no matter what skill level was being tested. When he got on his good account or his potato account, it was the same servers and the same ping. And I actually got slightly better connections on the 4kd account than on my 0.8kd account. You guys may not believe me, I know I'm gonna get Activision shill and lyre or whatever, but the data's right there. But even though the 4.0kd connections were a little bit better, the overall difference between the two was minimal, but Ace had absolutely no difference. I was a little bit surprised by this. I thought that skill-based matchmaking might be worsening connections or forcing out of region matches. That's what I was hoping to discover because that'd give me a lot more views, but that's not what we found. Unfortunately, the DumaOS doesn't let us see player locations anymore, so I can't tell you how many players connected from out of region. That's just sort of a limitation that we have. And oddly, it seems like Call of Duty has expanded their data servers, so there's more of them than there were before. And some of them reject pings. Some of these matches I was not allowed to ping the server and I'm not entirely sure why. Let's move on to conclusion number two. And this is another one the community is going to grill me for. High stat players do not match together. The other most common discussion that you hear with skill-based matchmaking is that a high KD player matches only with other high KD players. That high score per minute matches with high score per minute, high win-loss matches with high win-loss. And the higher your stats go, the higher the average stats of the people in your lobby will get comparatively. I've always said this is mathematically impossible because it'll just race everybody down to one KD and one win-loss. And the stats pretty much indicate that this doesn't happen whatsoever. This is a graph of the average KD of the lobby versus the KD of the account. The account's in blue, the lobby's in red. And you can see that as the blue bar grows significantly, the red bar doesn't change very much at all. There's no clear trend in that whatsoever, and it doesn't seem like as you get a higher KD that the lobbies get any harder, at least from a KD perspective. When you look at score per minute, it's pretty much the same. As the score per minute changes, the average score per minute of the lobby doesn't change very much. Of course, there's some variation in the data, but overall that's nothing impressive. Win-loss ratio tells a pretty similar story, but most players are close to a 1, so that's not surprising. No trend there. There is, however, a trend on the level of the account. Lower levels do seem to match generally with lower levels and higher with higher. We'll get to that in just a minute. But these are the correlation values. It's just a measure of how closely these things relate. The closer to number one these are the better and the further apart they are the weaker. And they're all pretty weak except for that 9.0 on level. And yeah the last one, KD of average past five games, that one, we'll talk about that one in just a minute. That's gonna be the next thing we talk about. So overall, players are not matched based on their kill-death ratios, win-loss, or their score per minute. They are at least somewhat matched on level. And you can also see this in the data that we're missing, because on the high 4.0 KD, or it's like 3.95, whatever KD account, most of the lobbies are filled with people with high levels and they've all got data populated. On the lowest skill account we tested, there's more gaps in the data because more people have accounts that are so new that the app hasn't had time to populate with their information. So that's very interesting. And now we're going to move into the more juicy part of the video where I talk about the evidence for skill matching and hidden MMR systems and stuff like that. But first, I wanted to share something really cool with you from Astro Gaming. They sponsor me and InDepth, that's the first link in the description, and they budgeted a colossal amount of money for me to hold a huge fan meetup and give away 75 free headsets to fans. I did a whole video on it yesterday, but I wanted to show you the short version here because, I mean, they're my sponsor for the whole series and they just wanted to do something nice for the community. Hey guys, Drifter here. Today I'm at Madness Games and Comics in Plano, Texas, and behind me you can probably see this gigantic pile of Astro headsets. And I just wanted to give you guys an idea of the scale of what we're giving away here today, because when we do giveaways for In Depth, I want to make sure that it's awesome. I did it at my favorite store in the city. And I also wanted you guys to get an idea of the scale of the line. This goes all the way to the end of the store. We're gonna take a quick walk around Everybody Doing good doing good just walking around to show the line which is bananas. Hello nice to see glad you can make it which is bananas. Hello. Nice to see you, glad you could make it. What's going on man, how you doing? Good to see you. Alright, so I probably can't actually walk. You can see there's a big rock that way. Back around, over to this side too. So, oh my god, there's more people. This is kind of mental for me. I mean, I thought that people would show up and I was like, you know, maybe I'll have headsets left over or something, but the mob and the crowd is so big. I think I'm going to be here for a while today, and I'm going to try to meet and greet everybody and make sure that everybody has an awesome early Black Friday with Astro headsets. I wanted to once again shout out Astro Gaming. Thank you guys for making this possible. Astro is committed to our partnership, to the Call of Duty community, and to just generally being good people. So they shelled out for all of this, which is crazy. I felt like Santa at this fan meetup. I gave away 75 Astro A10 headsets. I gave away mod kits. I gave away, it was like an Xbox Live gift card, Modern Warfare 3 collectibles. I just gave away so much stuff. I felt like I was Oprah with, you get a headset and you get a headset and everybody gets a headset. And it was a very good feeling. I enjoy gifting things to people. I kind of thought with a group of gamers that all of them would have like their own elite headsetsets but almost none did. The vast majority of people were playing on Apple earbuds or just the TV speakers so for everybody in attendance getting a headset was like a massive upgrade which was awesome. So if you want to support me on this channel, the best way you can possibly do that is clicking that link down there in the description to go to Astro's website. There is value literally in just clicking the link so that my click-throughs are super high, but of course it's sales driven. Purchasing a headset will continue to keep In-Depth afloat this year. And let's move into the juicier conclusions now conclusion number three There is some kind of matching going on based on your recent performance And this is probably the best data that we got out of the entire night If you take a look at this graph of your past five games KD Versus the past five games KD of the lobby, you will see a much stronger trend. It should be immediately obviously visible to the naked eye. Exclusive Ace over here is sweating quite a bit, so he gets me an anomaly, but that's a pretty strong trend otherwise. When you take a look at a histogram, which is essentially just a graph of the most frequent numbers here of the high and low skill accounts, you'll see that the Big Fat Moose and Exclusive Ace, which are the highest skills accounts, have their skewed to the right and they more frequently match with players that are slightly above 1.0, whereas the weaker skill accounts more frequently match with players that are slightly below 1.0. And again, this is not global stats. This is just the past five games. And we did a correlation on the past five KDE averages, whatever, and the correlation is 0.83. By most of what I was trained to do in college, this would not be enough to say that there's a guaranteed effect or that there is a little more accurately that there's a strong relationship. This wouldn't really pass scientific muster. My professors wouldn't be super happy with it, but it's not nonsense. It's not just noise and it's not ignorable. It does indicate that there is a matching based on the performance of your past five games. And I do want to clarify to the community that the performance of the past five games is by no means the answer to everything. This variable only explains a small amount of what's going on and not the entire picture. We don't know the full range of games that it's testing. We don't know if it factors in your global stats. It doesn't seem to. We don't know if it factors in how long you've played COD, total hours, games played. We don't know anything about that and I will say that if it's doing what I think it's doing that means that reverse boosting won't last very long if you do it. So like if you reverse boost and then you play well for some period of time your average is just gonna rise and according to this data your average lobby should rise as well. What I don't want the community to do is to think like well I did really good in this game the next's going to put me in a lobby versus Team Optic. And that's absolutely untrue. That's some sort of matching based on rolling averages. And players will mathematically always play to their averages. So there's not a way to beat that unless you're just boosting accounts and stuff. Now for the juiciest and most surprising conclusion of the entire episode. Now for the juiciest and most surprising conclusion of the entire episode. There appears to be a hidden MMR system in Call of Duty, or matchmaking rank system, ELO system, some sort of hidden ranking system in Call of Duty that we can't see. And the reason for that isn't because of the past five games, but this year past years I relied on other people to collect the data and I would analyze it because I didn't want to violate anybody's privacy. This year I personally requested other accounts to play on so that I could feel the difference between them. And my experience, aka feelings, which are not facts, were that every account that I played on had increasingly skilled players. I started on the low KD account, then I played on my account, which is pretty normal by most measures, and then I played on the god account at 4 KD, and I felt that every single time I changed accounts, there was a significant change in the skill in the lobbies. I mean, just take a look at this. This is gameplay from the 0.8 KD account, and you know, not everybody in the lobby was like this but there were a lot of times the enemies just about couldn't kill me. It was not hard to pop off and just slaughter people on this account versus this is one of the more typical games from the 4 KD account. I mean it's it is night and day difference here. You can see the sophistication of the players, how they're moving, how well their aim is, the kits and loadouts that they're using. That's not to say that I couldn't pop off on the 4KD account because I definitely did in a few places and it wasn't unplayable, but the feelings, the notice, the experience difference was very, very noticeable. So with this clear difference, that means there's skill matching, right? But the average lobby stats were about the same, if not lower on the 4KD account. When I was playing on the high KD account, you can look at the stats yourself, they don't really change, if not in some cases, go down very slightly from the 0.8 account. So that doesn't make sense. If players are playing this good and sweating that hard, how are their stats the same as the players that are in the lower bracket? I get that the past 5 game stats were more related, but they still weren't that extreme. I made sure on each account that I played on to match my performance to whatever the account normally performed on, from favorite weapons to loadouts to score per minute and kills and whatever. The difficulty changed massively from an experiential point of view, but not from a mathematical point of view, which really doesn't make any sense to me. And the only way that this makes sense is if there is a hidden ranking system that we can't see from public stats. Because the public stats we just have is like kill death ratio and score per minute and stuff like that. But if there is a hidden MMR, ELO, or some kind of ranking system, those stats won't really matter because paradoxically this will mean that there's no way to tell a lower high school player apart just by their stats unless it's like a really extreme anomaly. You know, you have to be good to do X thing. And I mean that by if you take a whole group of 4.0 KD players and you make them play each other all the time, their kill death ratios will eventually just go down and average out to one because that's how math works. That's how many ages ago I remember somebody watched a Call of Duty competitive match for the first time and said, these guys are terrible. These are supposed to be the best players in the world and they're barely pulling 1.2 KDs. I didn't see anybody drop a nuke. And the answer is like, well, no, because they're playing the other best people in the world. You can't get stats like that against a group because your stats will of course be worse as they go down toward the average. And I think that's kind of what's happening here. I think that higher skill players are matching against each other more frequently so that their in-game stats don't really reflect their hidden rank MMR, whatever you want to call it. So some kind of skill matching is happening, in my opinion. However, it's currently untestable. There's nothing that Exclusive Ace and I were able to find from the publicly available stats that had a strong enough correlation for me to be able to tell you exactly what's going on. The best we have is that your recent performance matters, and I don't even know how much it matters. That's really about it, which is unfortunate. I would like to reiterate again that even on the highest skills account we played with, the ping and connection was never altered. The dev line, the Activision line, the thing that you've heard for years and years and years that ping is king is true, And that makes sense because no sane engineer would design it otherwise. And I think that Jeffrey Epstein tried to leak the details of skill-based matchmaking, which is why he's no longer with it. I mean, I'm just kidding. But seriously, it's mysterious. It's covered up. It's hidden. We may never know. And I don't think that anybody in the community is going to be able to test this at a level of detail such that we can know unless Activision or Infinity Ward or Treyarch or whoever wants to make this information public. So I'll reiterate at the end of the video, ping is king. Your skill level does not affect your connection. Sorry guys, get salty about it. Just hate me for it, whatever. Your global stats, high KD, high score per minute, the things you've been grinding for to make your account look good in combat records, that doesn't matter. There is definitely some relationship between your matches and your past couple of games performance. We don't know how many games or how exactly strong of a relationship that is, but there is one. And we have reason to suspect that there is some sort of back-end ELO or MMR system that we can't see. So guys, that is all for this episode of Modern Warfare in Depth on skill-based matchmaking. I hope that you enjoyed it. I hope that you learned something useful. If you did, don't forget to like, favorite, and subscribe, or buy an Astro headset. Drifter out.