How to Get Around Disbanding Lobbies in Call of Duty

In Call of Duty games in the past, when you loaded into a lobby during matchmaking, that lobby would stay together for as many games as you like, but that's not how the system works anymore. Now, each time you finish a game you're thrown back into the matchmaking system to find a new game. This has some major drawbacks, but you can get around it, somewhat, so in this article, we'll explain how to get around disbanding lobbies in Call of Duty.

The Problem With Disbanding Lobbies in Call of Duty

Credit: Activision

In the past, when you searched for a match in a CoD game, you'd get paired with players you had the best connection to, thus people closest to you geographically, because CoD games didn't have dedicated servers and relied on peer-to-peer connections. Accordingly, once you found a lobby, it only made sense the game would let you stay together with those players you have a good connection to until you otherwise choose to leave.

This worked well for CoD because of the variety inherent in matchmaking. With light SBMM, the matchmaking experience was truly varied. Some lobbies you'd dominate in, some you'd get crushed in, and some you'd just find people messing around trying to no scope. It was usually a dynamic, fresh experience every time, so being able to pick your lobby gave you some much-needed control over the experience.

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This way once you had a great game you could just hang out in that particular lobby and have a series of great games, or if you had a bad time you could queue again for a totally different experience. In modern CoD, you get the lobbies you get, and every game you play, you play with a fresh set of players, or at least that's the idea. That's not how it always actually works all the time, and you can use that to your advantage.

How to Get Around Disbanding Lobbies in Call of Duty

First off, the thing you have to know is you can get matched up with the same players in your last game during normal matchmaking, which is why there's a matchmaking delay setting you can enable to make sure you don't match with the same people again. Getting around disbanding lobbies involves exploiting this possibility.

Second, it's important to understand you can't actually force the entire matchmaking system to work how you want it to work. So, while you can get a string of five or even ten games filled with people you recognize, it won't always be like that and you won't always be able to make this happen when you want it to happen. In short, your mileage will vary.

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So, how do you do it? First off, start by playing not one of the most popular modes, like quickplay Domination or Team Deathmatch. Then, it's best if you play at some sort of off-peak time, either during the day or late at night. It's best if it's on a weekday, too. Lastly, you'll want to turn off crossplay. You can do any combination of these, but it works best if you do all of them.

What this will do is massively reduce the player pool of people searching for games alongside you at any given time. Chances are, if you play a game and then you just continue queueing, with these tweaks you'll have a good chance at getting paired together with the same players, or at least some of them, from your last game and so on and so forth.

Disbanding Lobbies in Modern Warfare II

Credit: Activision

Disbanding lobbies are returning in Modern Warfare II. Just like the previous games, the system will be the same in that regard. So, one can assume that the above tweaks will apply to Modern Warfare II just as well as they do with other games. However, there is some reason to think they might be less effective, too.

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See, SBMM is supposed to be changing in Modern Warfare II. It's supposed to be less punishing and restrictive, which is anticipated by many to mean less (or no) pairing of players together to form lobbies based on 'skill level' and rather, using 'skill level' to divide up teams once you find a lobby. This will make matchmaking more random, so if this is true, getting paired with the same players might be less common an occurrence.

How getting around disbanding lobbies in CoD works today is by leveraging the SBMM of the game to pair you with the same players the game deems fit for you to play with, so, naturally, if the game lets you play with a lot more people, it'll be even rarer to play with the same people more than once.