After warring with fans for years, Black Ops 7 will finally ditch aggressive skill-based matchmaking: 'Our team feels strongly about providing players with a more varied experience'

Black Ops 7 weapon prestige attachments and weekly challenges: A group of soldiers sneaking through a dark corridor with weapons at the ready. — (Image credit: Activision)

It's a landmark day in the greatest ideological conflict of our time: In a blog detailing its Black Ops 7 beta takeaways, Treyarch has announced that BO7 will launch with "minimal skill consideration" as the multiplayer default, reversing a series trajectory of skill-based matchmaking implementation that dates all the way back to Call of Duty 4.

"Simply put, imagine the matchmaking experience of Open Moshpit from the Beta, but as the standard in Black Ops 7 on day one," Treyarch said. "Our team feels strongly about providing players with a more varied experience, and the Beta proved to be a great opportunity to test this approach."

It's worth noting that SBMM's loudest critics tend to be those who'd most benefit from ditching it: high skill players and streamers who'd get to enjoy more public games where they can reap clip-worthy killstreaks from the hapless, outmatched masses. Whether or not that risk sounds appealing is probably down to personal preference—but it seems like a preference that plenty of BO7 beta players shared.

"We’ve heard the community discussion and dialogue around lobby disbanding, and as we mentioned earlier during the Beta, we’re focused on keeping players together from match to match more often," Treyarch said. "Today, we’re excited to announce we’ll have persistent lobbies at launch for Black Ops 7. We’re committed to improving this experience for players, and will be sharing more details soon."

Treyarch said that aim assist will get additional tuning before launch, too. These are some dramatic changes to what's been the standard CoD multiplayer formula for years now—and it's probably not coincidental that they're being announced just a day before the Battlefield 6 launch.

Lincoln has been writing about games for 12 years—unless you include the essays about procedural storytelling in Dwarf Fortress he convinced his college professors to accept. Leveraging the brainworms from a youth spent in World of Warcraft to write for sites like Waypoint, Polygon, and Fanbyte, Lincoln spent three years freelancing for PC Gamer before joining on as a full-time News Writer in 2024, bringing an expertise in Caves of Qud bird diplomacy, getting sons killed in Crusader Kings, and hitting dinosaurs with hammers in Monster Hunter.

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