Apex Legends isn’t perfect, but Call of Duty fans are desperate for Respawn-style communication on SBMM

Call of Duty and Apex Legends are two of the top FPS franchises in the world right now, and because of this, they are constantly being compared with each other by fans and streamers.

The comparisons continued recently as Apex’s developer, Respawn Entertainment, posted a deep-dive blog post detailing how matchmaking works in the battle royale title, including how the company is working to “create fairer matches as you play with friends of different skill and retiring our current system.”

The update was subsequently posted to the Modern Warfare 2 Reddit page, and some CoD players came together to express their jealousy of Respawn’s openness and communication with its community in comparison to CoD’s devs.

Interestingly enough, however, many in the thread who have played both Apex and CoD made the argument that Respawn’s communication has “dwindled” over the years, yet CoD’s communication between developer and community is still somehow worse.

For example, the latest update on the Call of Duty blog was on Dec. 15, which was a post about the patch notes for MW2’s season one midseason update. It’s now been over a month since the last official communication from the devs, which also included the holiday break.

The issue of skill-based matchmaking was the main point of discussion for players, though. The notion of players being matched against those with similar skill, even in unranked playlists, to help better the experience for casual players has been a hot-button topic for years in CoD and several other games.

“I don’t think Activision and their studios will ever disclose how their matchmaking works because it will make the public angry if we find out,” said one comment, pointing out how players generally know and believe that skill-based matchmaking exists despite it never being confirmed by CoD’s developers.

Whatever the case may be, if SBMM is real, then it seems to be working because both games are quite successful financially and also succeed at keeping players coming back for more.

“The only reason they will ever change the matchmaking system is if people stop playing,” said one comment. “People often mistakenly call it skill-based matchmaking when in reality it is engagement-optimized matchmaking, designed to keep you in the game for as long as possible, much the same as the algorithms social media uses.”