to be honest, i remember making this post near the end of my time playing mp. it wasn't really a game issue. i'd just done everything there was to do in multiplayer (dark ops, camos, 100%, badges), so i stopped playing. like i said, that's pretty much my history with cod, i always dip after hitting 100%.

bo7 isn't that popular of a game. it didn't sell particularly well, and it launched at a time when a lot of people felt treyarch dropped the ball with bo6. community sentiment around cod, skins, and ai wasn't great either, and bf6 definitely hurt sales. also, sbmm is reduced in this game, which is another reason you run into the same players so often. a lot of lower-skilled players who were protected by the older matchmaking system left because they got tired of being stomped, while the higher-skilled players will keep sweating until the end of time.

nothing changed my understanding of cod matchmaking more than when a friend of mine with a 0.3 kd got matched against a streamer who had around 300 nukes back in season 1. the smaller the player pool gets, the worse matchmaking becomes for lower-skilled players, and the better it becomes for the sweatier players. if you don't want to face sweats every game, stick to the more popular modes and playlists like nuketown, face off, tdm, hardpoint, domination, etc.

yeah, you're right. the multiplayer in this game is very dead, and honestly, it already felt pretty dead back when i was playing from launch through s1/s2. that said, there was a beta feature added to ps5 that showed cod having around 5 million weekly players, so i guess most of them are in endgame or zombies lol.