But what happens when some mean spirited players make use of bugs and system exploits to get ahead? Many players accept that some player will snipe them into the afterlife from across the map, but what happens you’re being beaten by less than sportsmanslike means rather than outright skill?

The latest occurrence of this is ‘reverse boosting’ where some players of Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, in an attempt to fool the game’s multiplayer matchmaking system into thinking that they’re bad players and get paired with newer players as a result, will commit virtual suicide over and over again. It’s obviously quite dreadful to have people like that on your team and after witnessing it himself, Michael Condrey, Studio Head & Co-Founder of Sledgehammer Games, has vowed to stamp reverse boosting out.

The Sledgehammer boss began his post on the company blog by explaining exactly how Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s matchmaking system works. Condrey revealed that in somewhat ironic circumstances, the game’s servers actually prioritize connection speed and location over skill or matchmaking. In other words, reverse boosting would have very little bearing on who you’re matched with and yet some players are doing it anyway. That doesn’t mean that it’s not harmful to play though and Condrey said this in regards of how Sledgehammer will begin to deal with it:

Those who do things like trick shots don’t need to worry about Sledgehammer’s methods, as their “low tolerance approach” is specifically against “people who ruin the experience for others through cheating, boosting, reverse boosting or being caught with toxic emblems in game”.

And while it is good that Sledgehammer is looking at tackling reverse boosting, exactly how they’ll decide who has been reverse boosting or not isn’t clear. For example, would a player have to commit suicide a significant amount of times in one game or would Sledgehammer look at the numbers from various games? And how would they distinguish between players who are actively trying to kill off their own characters and those who are just really bad at aiming their grenades?

These are questions that Sledgehammer will have to answer as they aim to tackle this issue if they don’t want Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’s multiplayer experience to be soured any further.

Source: Sledgehammer Games