In a recent post on the Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare website, Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey has addressed a new practice in the game called “reverse boosting.”
Since skill is factored in to Advanced Warfare matchmaking, you eventually get matched up with better players as you get better at the game yourself. But certain players don’t like this, and prefer to dominate other players of lower skill levels. Thus, they take advantage of “reverse boosting”, a practice by which you throw any match you don’t think you can win by repeatedly finding ways to kill yourself. This drastically lowers your stats and allows you to be matched up with players of lower skill, which you can then easily dominate.
As a result, bans have been instituted for players caught partaking in reverse boosting. “No one wants to lose an objective based match by effectively being outnumbered while their teammate shoots grenades into their own forehead 100 times in the corner,” Condrey said. “It’s not dissimilar from the bans that cheaters and boosters receive, and we have increased our focus on reverse boost banning to combat the growing issue. No one is trying to restrict the fun factor of playing Advanced Warfare with this policy, nor are we actively banning against particular styles of play, like trick shots. However, we have a low tolerance approach to people who ruin the experience for others through cheating, boosting, reverse boosting or being caught with toxic emblems in game.”
Source: Sledgehammer