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Boosting and Reverse Boosting in Call of Duty Explained


Credit: Activision

Since Modern Warfare 2019 big changes have come to Call of Duty's matchmaking system. Skill-based matchmaking, or SBMM for short, is now a major force in the franchise. Because of these changes, boosting and reverse boosting have become incredibly popular techniques to use to get into easier lobbies or simply get into lobbies more like the lobbies of older Call of Duty games. In this article, we'll explain everything you need to know about boosting in Call of Duty.

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Credit: Activision

Boosting, as a practice, has been around forever across all first-person shooter video games. Boosting is when you load into a game with a friend and use your friend to farm free, easy, kills, artificially improving your stats and increasing your in-game score.

In most games, this is explicitly forbidden, and many games won't let you load into lobbies where you can directly kill or be killed by your friends to stop this. In Call of Duty, for example, you can't queue for Free For All with multiple people so it's harder to boost.

Related: How to Turn Off SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking, in Call Duty and Get Easy Lobbies Explained

In some cases, boosting can get your account banned, and even if it doesn't get banned, boosting is largely considered cheating by all gaming communities, so even if you could do it, you probably shouldn't. Plus, matchmaking systems like Call of Duty's make it hard to boost, so it's rare to see if you ever do.

Reverse boosting is a clever inversion of traditional boosting, which is where the name comes from. Instead of manipulating the game by getting kills you didn't earn you manipulate the game by dying more than you normally would.

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Credit: Activision

By killing yourself over and over, losing gunfights, and ultimately just playing the game like you've never played a video game before, you tank your account's stats. These stats collected by the game, from win/loss ratio to kill/death ratio to accuracy to everything in-between, play a big role in determining what kinds of players you get matched up against.

Related: SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking, in Call of Duty: Warzone, Vanguard, Black Ops Cold War, and Modern Warfare Explained

In modern Call of Duty games, there are two primary ways to reverse boost. On the account you normally use to play, you can kill yourself, die a lot, and otherwise play really badly for five to ten games, and then you'll be placed into much easier lobbies for a few games.

It works like this because recent performance is another major factor in Call of Duty's SBMM system. So, if you suddenly have a series of terrible performances, the game will try to give you an easier lobby where you'll do better so you keep playing.

This isn't an efficient system, though, because reverse boosting in this manner not only ruins the stats of your primary account but after reverse boosting you'll only get a few easy lobbies before SBMM recognizes your performance in-game as above average and puts you into tougher lobbies as a result.

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Credit: Activision

Related: The Controversy of Skill-Based Matchmaking, or SBMM, in Call of Duty Explained

What lots of content creators and streamers who play Call of Duty do is to reverse boost on an alternate account. This requires a second copy of whatever game you're playing as well as a secondary device, though it can be on whatever platform. With this second account, you play games and perform really badly. This will turn this fresh account into one with truly terrible stats. Then, you queue for games with the alternate account, and once the game loads you into the pre-match lobby where players are found, you join your alternate account with your main account. Then you can safely back out of the game on your alternative account.

This is somewhat inefficient as well, because your alternate account will constantly join games in progress or simply find games with a full pool of players, which you won't be able to join, but it's a lot more efficient than reverse boosting every time you want to find easier lobbies.

This method is the method of choice of many content creators. You can tell if someone is reverse boosting when watching gameplay if you never get to see them queuing for a match, or if it takes your favorite content creator a while to find matches. These are the tell-tale signs of reverse boosting.

Related: Why Is SBMM, or Skill-Based Matchmaking, in Call of Duty?

Reverse boosting isn't technically cheating and more so a profound exploitation of the core mechanics of Call of Duty's matchmaking system. So, many people don't really care if anybody reverse boosts, but many others find the practice fairly cheap.

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Credit: Activision

If you're trying to find lobbies filled with disabled folks or people who have truly never played video games before so you can drop 150 kill games with multiple nukes, you're just dominating players who truly have no ability to fight back. This seems unfair to many.

Though, the community is a lot more sympathetic to people who want to exploit the game's matchmaking system to simply have more laid-back lobbies, to have games like older Call of Duty games where most players in a lobby weren't very good.

Related: Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Season 6 Review: Is It Any Good?

Older games had lobbies with a lot more variety: The average Call of Duty player has never been very good, so lobbies used to be mostly filled with not very good players. The rest of a lobby's space would get filled by random mixes of very good and very bad players. This kept games interesting.

Today, SBMM is all about engagement, trying to get every player to keep playing the game for as long as possible, because when players are engaged, they're more likely to purchase weapon blueprints from the in-game store. Players don't want to buy stuff for a game that they get absolutely dominated in to the extent the game isn't fun to play.

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Credit: Activision

Ultimately, both boosting and reverse boosting are practices best avoided, but the matchmaking system in Call of Duty games today admittedly doesn't give players a ton of options. Beyond the moral and ethical considerations of boosting, though, the practice simply isn't reliable.

Related: Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War Year Two/2022 Content and Support Explained

Since we don't know the specifics of the SBMM system, manipulating it is always going to be slow and awkward. Even with reverse boosted lobbies, you might not find easy lobbies, or you might just find an easy lobby or two after a lot of work. And whenever you do find an easy lobby, you'll know that lobbies soon won't be easy anymore, as your recent performance is now recorded as very good.

Nonetheless, if you load into a match of Call of Duty and see people purposefully killing themselves or playing badly, you'll know what's going on. And if you're a below-average player and you're finding insanely cracked streamers in your lobbies, you'll know why, too.

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