Activision will send you scarily detailed data on every Call of Duty match you’ve played in the last 4 years if you ask, and players use it to figure out their mysterious SBMM ratings.
As reported by IGN, Call of Duty YouTuber TheXclusiveAce has outlined the process for accessing all the match-by-match data that Activision has collected on you, starting with 2021’s Call of Duty Vanguard. This data includes the score used to match CoD players based on skill, or SBMM, a behind-the-scenes system by which players are paired with other players of similar skill levels.
You can request data through Activision’s Privacy and Data Protection Support Portal, a system likely designed to comply with the European Union’s stricter data privacy laws, so kudos for that, EU. To me, there’s something darkly humorous about using a privacy/data protection measure as a backdoor to mathematically solve Elo hell, but I can’t deny TheXclusiveAce’s cleverness in figuring it out. It took TheXclusiveAce a day to get the data, but Activision support will probably notice the glut of these requests once word gets out. Also, be careful about who you share the data with: it contains identifying information such as the IP address from which you connected to each match, in addition to your performance metrics.
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And oh my god, this thing thorough. In addition to kills/deaths, Activision tracks every bullet you fire, your accuracy, skins and executions equipped, how much you move around the map, and more. Relevant to the SBMM discussion is the skill number, which presumably corresponds to the rating you enter a given match with. TheXclusiveAce charted how his skill rating has changed since the launch of Black Ops 6, but without more context it’s hard to draw too many conclusions: TheXclusiveAce’s score is hovering around 400, but what’s the top score? What percentage of CoD players would that place him in?
TheXclusiveAce asked viewers to find out their own skill ratings and share them for comparison so we can see this aspect of Call of Duty demystified in the coming days. However, this can create its own problems. “Cod scavengers are about to become data scientists,” jokes user jake-p2l in the top comment on TheXclusiveAce’s video. “Now it won’t be, ‘What’s your CD? Mine is higher! – it will be “What is your skill coefficient? What is your standard deviation over the last 30 days?”