Through a series of settings new to Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, streamers now have tools that allow them to mask themselves from their audience. Stream sniping is a very real problem for streamers. The bigger the audience, the more problems you are likely to run into. The practice sees viewers trying to enter a matchmaking queue at the exact same time as the streamer they are watching. If they are successful and get into the same game, they can watch the streamers’ feed and know where they are at all times. That’s a problem for any competitive Call of Duty player. The most effective of the new options is a matchmaking delay. This allows you to set an artificial time buffer on your account. It will look like you are matchmaking for a period of time before matchmaking actually starts. Stream sniping already takes a decent amount of luck. Guessing the right amount of time on top of that makes the chances much slimmer. You can also hide both your name from other players and hide other player names through the use of codenames. This likewise makes it a challenge to identify the correct streamer lobby. None of this is a guarantee of anonymity in-game, of course. That said, all together, it means the odds are heavily stacked against any prospective viewer trying to ruin a big personality’s game. As audiences grow and streamers reach more and more people, tools like these will become increasingly important. Viewers will always try to get noticed by their favourite streamers, but hopefully, this locks down one of the more obnoxious ways they do that. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War is available now on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4 and PS5.
