Warzone lobby data suggests SBMM strength not impacted by time of day
ActivisionA Call of Duty: Warzone’s fan analyzed a variety of streamer and casual lobbies and drew some interesting results. Among them, his research suggested that time of day doesn’t actually influence how hard your lobbies are.
SBMM (skill-based matchmaking) is a widely discussed, controversial subject in the CoD community. With Activision typically quiet about the game’s matchmaking, many have speculated about the system.
Among the theories, some believe that people get easier lobbies after buying cosmetics or at different times of the day. Notably, Quaisy also investigated months of streamer and casual lobbies to conclude that some big names are blessed with ‘whitelisted bot lobbies.’
Looking back at Quaisy’s work, another interesting point comes to light. Contrary to popular sentiment, he claims that time of day actually doesn’t influence the strength of your lobby.
Time of day irrelevant to Warzone SBMM
While Quaisy’s original post on the Warzone subreddit was deleted, you can still access his video, comments, and data spreadsheet. The purpose of all was to prove that streamers do in fact get easier lobbies, but there are other intriguing findings.
As he explained, “time of day played really didn’t seem to affect the skill level of the lobby.” For proof, he noted that streamers didn’t get harder lobbies when playing at peak time (7-10 p.m.).
ActivisionThis conclusion goes against one set forth by JGOD back in March 2021, where he claimed that you could get into easier lobbies by playing from 3-8 a.m. (in your local time).
There’s a possibility that Quaisy’s data is skewed since so much of it focused on streamers, but it’s nonetheless interesting to monitor.
While it’s at least useful to know that there’s no perfect trick for getting easy lobbies, the only lesson learned here is that we still have no idea how SBMM works in Warzone.
Maybe that’s why a transparent ranked playlist would be helpful, though.