After releasing a general overview of Call of Duty’s complicated matchmaking process earlier this year, Activision is now going into granular detail on the factor it prioritizes most: ping. The deep dive is the first of four promised white papers on the subject, with Activision committing to sharing its approach with industry peers.
As revealed in January’s outline, the most heavily weighted factor in Call of Duty’s matchmaking is ping–the time it takes for data to travel from a player’s game to the server running it. High ping can result in a bad gaming experience, with other players seeming to warp or teleport, or missing shots that appeared to be accurate.
Activision explains in the white paper that the most important statistic when it comes to ping is something it calls delta ping, which is the difference between a player’s best possible data center, and the data center they end up playing on. While it would be possible to have a player queue only for their optimal data center, Activision explains that this would lead to long wait times for players searching for a match early in the morning, for example, or queueing for modes that require a high player count.
About Author
