Oh hey, a new Call of Duty is on the horizon. This time it’s Black Ops season (even though we just had one of those), and to help them fine-tune its competitive action and the overall ebb and flow of its speedy combat (as well as to test the game’s anti-cheat tech), developers Treyarch and Raven Software ran a beta for those with an active pre-order over the weekend.
BLOPS7 aims to be a very fast, bouncy shooter of a game, with players granted the ability to jump off walls much like they could in Titanfall. It looked super fun in motion during the multiplayer reveal last week, but now that folks have finally been able to pour into the lobbies and get some matches in, how did it all work out?
Read More: Call Of Duty: Black Ops 7 Shows Off Everything Coming To Multiplayer At Launch
TL;DR: The community is really upset over doors; TTK rates might be a touch too high; no one will ever be satisfied with SBMM; and Battlefield threatens to eat COD’s lunch for the first time in a long while.
Cheaters got the boot (most of ‘em, anyway)
This weekend’s beta was a perfect opportunity for Call of Duty’s anti-cheat initiative, Team Ricochet, to test out their defenses. And from the sounds of things, cheaters had a hard time getting into matches. TMP 2.0, along with whatever other magic Team Ricochet is using to block cheaters, appears to have caught 97 percent of cheaters “within 30 minutes of their first sign-in,” with “fewer than one-percent of cheating attempts reach[ing] a match, and those that did were removed within minutes.”
SBMM, the eternal debate
Discourse over skill-based matchmaking (SBMM) was at the heart of last weekend’s beta, with a mode that specifically sought to avoid this controversial form of matchmaking. SBMM aims to make sure you’re matched with other random players of similar skill level. Sounds good in theory, but in practice it tends to be a bit of a tricky situation, especially if you’re playing with a friend who’s of a different skill level than you, resulting in unfair pairings. It can also make games feel more competitive and sweaty when some folks are just looking for a chill set of rounds.
The debate over SBMM is sure to rage on, but Treyarch and Raven seem to be aware that not everyone’s a fan. During the beta, “Open Moshpit” was introduced to let folks jump into matches where “skill consideration is drastically reduced.”
Time-to-kill rates and those frakin’ doors!
Time-to-kill (TTK), the average amount of time it takes a player to die while being shot, would appear to be pretty speedy in BLOPS7. Perhaps too speedy. The devs are aware that folks are finding they die a bit too quickly right now, and so they’ll be “releasing a weapon balance patch in the coming days to adjust TTK and ensure all weapons available in the beta are competitive.”
Quick deaths weren’t the only issue some folks had. Doors, it would seem, really got under some players’ skin. Though doors in BLOPS7 maps are automatic (they can be shot to open them too), they don’t stay open, and the interruption of sightlines and the unwelcome surprise of running into someone you didn’t expect runs counter to the flow of gameplay many folks expect from COD. (Previous games saw doors stay open during a match.)
There aren’t too many doors, however. Treyarch reports that just five of its 16v16 maps currently have them. Still, the team is looking to possibly reduce that number, with an option to disable them in private matches.
The Battlefield-sized elephant in the room
As reported by GamesRadar, the upcoming Battlefield 6, which is shaping up to be somewhat of a return-to-form for the beleaguered military shooter franchise, seems to be spooking Treyarch and Activision a bit. That the devs even considered removing SBMM via Open Mosphit, according to some, is proof that COD’s gonna do whatever it takes to try and offer an alternative to the allure of Battlefield.
At the very least, it should be entertaining to see where this arms race between Battlefield and COD will go as we near the release of both games. Battlefield 6 arrives on October 10, 2025, with Black Ops 7 following it a month later on November 14.
