At the end of March, SBMM Warzone was shut down by Activision. SBMM Warzone was a popular Warzone stat tracker used by the community to gauge the difficulties of their lobbies. However, Activision took issue with the site and ordered it to shut down or face legal action. Just over a month later, SBMM Warzone has returned under a new name, now known as WZ Stats.
According to WZ Stats, attempts were made to negotiate with Activision “multiple times.” Unfortunately, the AAA publisher did not respond either directly or even through SBMM Warzone’s lawyers. At this point, the site owners feel they’ve done as much as possible to show a willingness to cooperate and have thus reopened SBMM Warzone under the new title.
Why the rebrand?
The name signifies more than just a switch-up of identity. Previously, SBMM Warzone allowed players to track the general level of the lobbies they were playing in. Although the system was not official, many players began to use terminology from SBMM Warzone to refer to the skill level of each lobby.
These ranks were divided up between various tiers of Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Diamond. This helped players to figure out how skill-based matchmaking operated and what kind of impact it had on each player. This is the feature that Activision primarily took issue with.
SBMM Warzone’s landing page now displays this message when accessed.
The newly branded WZ Stats will not offer this feature. Instead, it will operate as a simple stat tracker, providing important information like the average K/D of a lobby and the total damage each player achieved.
Much like SBMM Warzone, the new site features a premium subscription service that provides various extra features. According to a post on its official Twitter, this was not mentioned by Activision as one of the reasons that SBMM Warzone got taken down. However, if the publisher does flag this then it is “pretty much open” to adapt its business model.
