Call of Duty: Modern Warfare apparently has a serious problem with “Reverse Boosting” at the moment. Players are continuously killing themselves in matches to lower their statistics (K/D or KDA). Why do players resort to reverse boosting?
What is “Reverse Boosting”? In “Reverse Boosting”, players try to get as many deaths as possible to have a kill-to-death ratio well below 1 for their profile.
The term is derived from “Boosting”, where players have others help them reach a level far beyond their skill: they want to have a particularly high rating.
“Reverse Boosting” is the reverse of this practice: they want to have the worst rating possible.
Reverse Boosting in Call of Duty
Why are players doing this? The reason for this voluntary mass death seems to be the assumption that Modern Warfare uses skill-based matchmaking.
Players expect that with “Reverse Boosting”, they can face weaker players who play well below their own level.
The topic of matchmaking has long been a debate in the community. For weeks, there has been a dispute about how matchmaking works in Modern Warfare, but the developers remain silent.
Even the head of Black Ops 4 made a joke about it. However, the topic is so sensitive, that he had to publicly apologize.
Why is this a problem? It would not be problematic if only a few players occasionally lowered their K/D. However, CoDTracker statistics show that hundreds of players repeatedly kill themselves:
The player with the most suicides has accumulated over 280,000. Some players kill themselves on average 50 times per round.
This is a problem because they disturb the gameplay experience of other players. When they constantly kill themselves, their own team loses a player, and in the worst case, the opponent even directly receives points. Similar to those who intentionally shoot poorly, they are trying to manipulate matchmaking.
With a “Reverse Booster” on the team, winning is nearly impossible. However, it is not even clear whether matchmaking takes such behavior into account at all:
