YouTuber Drift0r reveals an exploit that players have abused to avoid the SBMM system in Call of Duty Warzone.
Skill-Based Matchmaking (SBMM) is a system buried in the central experience of Call of Duty Warzone to ensure that players compete against opponents similar to them in skill.
For many players, this system hides in the background, unnoticed as they improve in the game. For the best players, this sometimes leads to frustrating gaming sessions against other highly qualified players.
Due to the competitive nature of Warzone and the need for some to be constantly the best, many have tried different methods to make the SBMM system less strict or totally absent. In doing so, some high profile players have chosen to purposefully play games against low skill opponents, making their gaming experiences much easier as well.
For many months, selected players have kept a dark secret about Warzone, possessing the ability to play in “bot lobbies”. In a YouTube video, content creator Drift0r gives the community a severe warning about this exploitation.
Competitive integrity issues
According to Drift0r, some selected members of the community shared with him a method on how to get into these “bot lobbies” quite consistently. Drift0r has verified this method and confirms that it results in significantly easier games most of the time.
Due to the nature of this exploit, the competitive integrity of kill races was questioned, as anyone could have used it when big payouts were at stake.
Although the vast majority of the competitive Call of Duty Warzone community advocates a good sense of sportsmanship in competitions, this does not rule out the possibility that some may have abused it.
Of course, this does not automatically mean that your favorite content creators and competitors have abused it all the time. Apparently, only a small number of players know how to make this failure and have kept it a secret all along.
Drift0r reported this bug to Activision and is expected to be fixed in the future. He refuses to share the information publicly, as this can harm the overall Warzone gaming experience. If all players start to abuse this bug, it will lead to significantly unbalanced Warzone games, pitting great players against below average players.
Before it is officially fixed, there is a possibility that more players will search for the exploit and finally find it. Fortunately, Activision takes action before this becomes a reality.