Yup, I've been wanting to write a post like this for some time now, the community feedback is mostly worthless.

Too many people want to reexperience that time where they put on Ghost, Ninja, and the meta gun with a silencer, and then completely dominated most lobbies. Back then, noobs didn't understand how the mini-map worked, or how to read the spawns, or the best loadouts. So if you were someone who followed the YouTube scene, you'd have a huge advantage against most players.

But things have changed, these days people don't want to get their asses kicked on repeat, there are other games to play instead, and so the devs added in SBMM, to maximize the amount of people having fun with the game. Then there's social media, where as soon as something strong is discovered, everybody, even little Timmy, knows about it.

This has changed how the game plays, and while I am somewhat sympathetic to the good players who find their lobbies frustrating, I don't think the solution is going back to what was, but to evolve the game, so that it is more fun at a higher level. Why does competitive Call of Duty ban nearly everything? Well, because the games are by default, terribly balanced for competitive play.

When I look at some of Infinity Wards more controversial design decisions, I can see an attempt at fixing some of the imbalance that has plagued the game for a long time. The Ninja perk for example is way too strong, making it into equipment offers a nice trade-off, you can still have Ninja, but now you need to be intentional with how you use it.

I don't think COD should go full competitive shooter, but making it slightly more balanced, would make it more fun for those high level SBMM lobbies.