Sometimes, you hop into a game and the balance just isn't right–there are people who are way too good, and people who are terrible. Ideally, though, you jump into a match where the skill level is somewhat even and there's no heavy skill imbalance.
Treyarch knows this. To that end, they've developed something that they call "League Play," which they talked about in a video interview with Joystiq. The way League Play works is, you participate in placement matches that let Treyarch understand how good you are relative to the rest of the population. Then, they put you in a division that is similar to your skill–design director David Vonderhaar put forth 'silver' as an example, so we might expect something like 'gold, silver, bronze' etc.
Once the game knows what league you're in, you can play with a smaller community of players who are around your skill level. The point is to try to make the game more fun for everyone involved–nobody wins too much, or loses too much. The most fun is had, after all, when you're close to going either way on a match.
League Play will not be replacing the normal matchmaking that Call of Duty has had before.That will still be there, but League Play will be an available option.
It's a separate thing for practical purposes, too: Treyarch aims to learn from the mode. Eventually they hope to integrate it into the main game–which is what happened with wager matches and combat training before this. Those used to be separate modes but are now party games.
This also acts as a confirmation that wager matches are back–which we could have assumed, but wasn't official or talked about up until recently. Thankfully! Wager matches were definitely my favorite part of Black Ops.
Call of Duty Black Ops 2 drops in November 13th.
