Skill-based matchmaking has long been the bogeyman in the eyes of many Call of Duty fans, but a recent paper released by Activision revealed that they secretly ran an experiment on a portion of the player base and found that its absence made the experience worse for almost everyone involved.

Players of all stripes have long been unwitting guinea pigs of many changes when it comes to live-service games, but this is one of those rare cases when an actual experiment has been conducted by the publishers and a proper summation was released for everyone to check out, and the outcomes of Activision’s science session have been quite interesting indeed.