Activision, part of Microsoft, can give you a shocking recap of every single game we’ve played over the last 4 years, if you want to claim it…
IGN has reported that a Call of Duty YouTuber, TheXclusiveAce, has outlined the process of receiving a data package that will provide information going back to Call of Duty: Vanguard, which will be released in 2021. The data set also includes a score that will be used for Call of Duty’s skill-based matchmaking system. It’s called SBMM, and it’s a behind-the-scenes system that measures players’ skills and matches them against each other.
The data can be requested through Activision’s support portal, which is probably set up to comply with the European Union’s stricter privacy laws. There’s a bit of dark humor in using a privacy measure as a loophole to mathematically solve Elo hell, but there’s no denying that TheXclusiveAce was pretty sneaky. He got the data in one day, but Activision’s customer support team will probably see a lot more of these requests as the news spreads. Let’s be careful who we share this data with! In addition to the performance numbers, we may see other identifiers (such as the IP address from which we connected to each game).
The dataset is thorough. In addition to the kill/death ratio (K/D), Activision tracks every shot we take, our accuracy, the number of kills and executions, how much we’ve moved around the map, and more. Important to the SBMM debate is the skill number, which seems to be the ranking you enter a match with. TheXclusiveAce made a graph of how the skill number has changed since the release of Call of Duty Black Ops 6, but it’s hard to draw too many conclusions without more context. For him, it’s around 400, but what’s the maximum and where would he rank?
In any case, the dataset is frighteningly detailed, so at least we get some (a lot?) transparency.
Source: PCGamer
