Activision will send you alarmingly detailed data for every single Call of Duty match you’ve played in the last 4 years if you ask, and players are using it to figure out their mysterious SBMM rankings

As reported by IGN, Call of Duty YouTuber TheXclusiveAce has outlined a process to access all the match-by-match data Activision has collected on you dating back to 2021’s Call of Duty Vanguard. This data includes a score used for CoD’s skill-based matchmaking or SBMM, the behind-the-scenes system by which players are paired with others of a similar skill level.

You can request the data via Activision support’s privacy and data protection portal, a system likely put in place to maintain compliance with the European Union’s more robust data privacy laws, so thanks for that one EU. There’s something darkly humorous to me about using a data privacy/protection measure as a back door to mathematically solving Elo hell, but I can’t deny TheXclusiveAce’s craftiness in figuring it out. It took a day for TheXclusiveAce to get the data, but Activision support may be seeing a glut of these requests as the word gets out. Also, be careful who you share the data with⁠—it contains identifying information like the IP address you connected to each match from in addition to your performance numbers.

And boy, this stuff is thorough. In addition to kills/deaths, Activision keeps track of each bullet you fire, your accuracy, equipped skins and executions, how much you’re moving around the map, and more. Relevant to the SBMM discussion is the skill number, which appears to be the ranking you enter a given match with. TheXclusiveAce made a graph out of how his skill rating changed since Black Ops 6’s launch, but it’s difficult to draw too many conclusions without more context⁠—TheXclusiveAce’s score hovers around 400, but what’s the maximum? What percentile of CoD players would that put him in?

TheXclusiveAce requested that viewers seek out their own skill rankings and share them for comparison, so we might see this aspect of Call of Duty demystified in the coming days. That may present its own problems though. “Trash talkers in cod are about to become data scientists,” user jake-p2l quips in the top comment on TheXclusiveAce’s video. “Now it won’t be ‘What’s your KD? Mine’s higher!’—it’ll be ‘What’s your skill coefficient? What’s your standard deviation over the last 30 days?'”

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