I have a bad habit of reading online forum threads and deciding to conduct experiments based on them, and that’s why I spent a lot of my Thanksgiving weekend playing random matches of Call of Duty multiplayer.

This is very out of character for me.  Normally I don’t dip into the multiplayer aspects of any particular CoD. I buy it to play through the campaign and marvel at the amount of detail they put into the various levels.

Like this guy.  He has a crappy office where the walls are basically more mold than wood and he’s rocking a CRT monitor from the mid 90s, but he has his comfort cereal.  You need to have little things like this to get you through the day.

After I finish the campaign, I watch what seem like hours of credits to get to the post-credits scene teasing the next title, then call it good.  Probably not the best use of sixty seventy bucks, but I have a good time.

That said, when I got sucked into the drama of a thread complaining about how strict the matchmaking was, I got curious enough that I decided I really needed to test it out myself.

While it’s something of a simplified view, there seem to be two camps when it comes to matchmaking. One camp thinks that it should try to give as close to a balanced match as possible, while the other camp wants to get matched more randomly, with the idea that matches that may be wildly unbalanced are more fun for both participants and spectators.

Here I will withhold the majority of my editorial comments, as they are not constructive. I will simply say that I fall into the first camp, and that the developers appear to agree with me, and leave it at that.

However, even knowing that my opinion was that the only possible correct one, I was left with questions.  Well, one question:

Just how good IS the multiplayer matchmaking in Call of Duty, anyway?

I mean, sure, I figure it’s pretty good at matching up people who have played a couple hundred games and who fit the game’s typical demographics… you know, young and perpetually buzzed on energy drinks… but how could it handle a 50-something guy with failing reflexes and no real experience?

To that end, I booted up my most recent purchase: Last year’s “Modern Warfare II”.

Please note that there is a Modern Warfare III now, and presumably most fans of the game have moved on to playing that one. Anyone still playing MWII has been playing it for a solid year and is likely to be quite good at the game.

I figured that would give the matchmaking algorithm even more of a hard time.

Anyway, after downloading a tiny “update”…

…I got into the actual game and started queuing for matches. My plan was to play about five games, take a break, come back and play five more on a different day and then tally the results.

I actually wound up playing 20 matches over three days, because it turned out to be generally fun and the multiplayer experience is absolutely packed with bars you fill up and that go DING and then give you more bars to fill up.

Like, I had a player level that was steadily increasing and unlocking things, and every gun I used had their own levels that were increasing and unlocking things, and there was some sort of battle pass thing that was always setting off fireworks whenever I passed milestones and “daily challenges” that gave me shiny gold badges that made my other bars fill up even more.

To answer the original question that started this whole madness: It turned out that the matchmaking is very good. Like, over those 20 matches I wound up on the winning side 9 times, with only one match where I felt like my team was absolutely outgunned from the start and only one match where the superstar on our team single-handedly carried us to victory.

These sorts of matches are very fun!

These are not:

(OK, to be 100% honest I did enjoy being on the winning side of the 6-to-1 blowout.  But it could not have been fun for the other guys.)

To put it lightly, I was shocked. I figured that the game might be able to ensure balanced win rates by just ensuring that every side had 5 experienced players and one abject newbie, but instead it managed to find games where I felt like I was actually kind of contributing to the overall outcome. I’m pretty confident that if I played a hundred matches it would somehow manage to get me to a 50/50 win/loss ratio and I’d probably enjoy it the entire time.

At one point I even had to stop and do some quick googling to make absolutely sure that MWII doesn’t fill up games with bots to make you feel better about yourself.

My second shock was finding out just how much I enjoyed the games. They did wear me out pretty quickly, and I couldn’t queue into match after match for too long without needing to take a break, but it did a good job of finding other people for me to play with and mixing up the game types, even if I wasn’t sure what the objective of a given game type was at times.

Usually they boiled down to “shoot anyone who isn’t on your side”, of course.

I feel I should give special note to the every-man-for-himself style of match, because it was the first time I realized how important audio was. Above and beyond basics like being able to hear footsteps and how the footstep sound would change if someone was, for example, running across a metal floor above you versus running on dirt, knowing that every time you fired a gun meant that everyone nearby suddenly had a clue to your location added a whole new level of spice to the game.

I’ll admit that a few of my deaths may have come from one of my bad habits in Call of Duty, which is stopping to take a second look at the scenery and make up little stories for myself based on it.

Like, these “no photographs” and “no eating” signs. Look at them. They’re not only slightly off level compared to each other, but the guy who put up the “no photographs” sign didn’t care enough to make sure it was straight.  This sort of disdain for the rules is WHY you have madmen with guns running through your office shooting each other.

Or this, where presumably the reason that nobody is in the office to get in the way of “friendly fire” is that it’s before noon on Sunday and they get the morning off which is nice.

If you’re like me and prone to this sort of inanity, I’ll mention that I happened to discover that you can create private matches to play against bots, then set the bots to be really really dumb, which is handy if you just want to learn the levels or just to run around and look at stuff.

Sadly, these private matches do not make the bars go ding. You still get XP numbers popping up on the screen when you shoot a bot, but they’re not actually added to your player XP or weapon XP. I guess it’s a good thing to prevent people abusing private matches to level up, but it’s like my one complaint.

Well, OK, the crazy patch size was my first complaint. So I guess that makes two complaints.

Wait, three. When someone shoots you, you get shown a kill cam of them shooting you and it comes with a little animated banner of their choice, and some of them seem to be intentionally provocative. Like, yes, you shot me in the head but does that need to come with an animated banner shouting “HE’S OUTTA HERE!” ?

So mmm overall score 8 freedoms out of 10. Would play again.