If you’ve been playing the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War alpha and found snipers to be a tad too powerful, you’re not the only one, and apparently, it was intentonal. It seems Black Ops Cold War sniping has been buffed so Treyarch can collect data!

This was confirmed by Game Designer Tony Flame:

Ok let's talk Sniping in Cold War.

Crossplay is coming, but we knew it wouldn't be in Alpha. We buffed Snipers to evaluate their performance in this Alpha specifically. Sniper Rifles WILL have balance changes for the upcoming Beta based on our analytics data this weekend.

— Tony Flame (@Tony_Flame) September 18, 2020

Ok let’s talk Sniping in Cold War.

Crossplay is coming, but we knew it wouldn’t be in Alpha. We buffed Snipers to evaluate their performance in this Alpha specifically. Sniper Rifles WILL have balance changes for the upcoming Beta based on our analytics data this weekend.

We shouldn’t have to wait until release in order to get an idea on how sniping has been nerfed given the beta is due next month.

In another Twitter convo, Treyarch Head of Technology Martin Donlon clarified to a fan that SBMM (Skill-Based Matchmaking) was already in the game as far back as Black Ops 2, and even corrected a fan by stating he implemented it in BO2!

I wrote the BO2 implementation.

— Martin Donlon (@wickerwaka) September 19, 2020

I honestly think SBMM is fine, as long as it’s not supre strict to the point that it throws away connection priority just to put you in lobbies of similar skill.

Black Ops Cold War will be out this November 13, but before that, we’ll get a beta roll out on all platforms which you can read about here.