Treyarch has either partly or entirely rolled back some of the changes it made in the most recent Call of Duty Black Ops 6 patch, admitting that they unintentionally “nerfed fun” for Zombies players.
In last week’s update to Black Ops 6, which kicked off the FPS game’s Squid Game-themed event, dozens of balancing tweaks and bug fixes were rolled out for Zombies. This included some important changes, including a series of buffs to the new elemental sword Wonder Weapons in Citadelle des Morts to make them much more enjoyable to use. However, some of the other changes had the opposite effect.
The main change that has irked Zombies players is to the Directed Mode, which is a guided, story mode-style difficulty for those that want to experience questlines and complete BO6 Zombies easter eggs without the stress of super powerful enemies. It’s a brilliant feature for novice players, but camo grinders also found that it could be used as an easy way to farm kills to complete mastery camo challenges. Treyarch moved to close up this loophole in last week’s update by increasing the timer between rounds and the delay to spawning new zombies in Directed Mode in later rounds, essentially making it a more drawn out process for those trying to grind for camos.
It also patched up a bug involving the Big Game augment for the Shadow Rift ammo mod. This bug allowed you to deal huge amounts of damage to Elite enemies, making it a popular choice.
Both the Directed Mode issue and the Big Game bug have been around a while, so players were quite surprised and aggrieved when Treyarch tackled both of them out of the blue in last week’s update. The studio has now explained that both were deemed low priority exploits that were identified ages ago, but only now has it had the time to change them. Recognizing the frustration felt by Zombies fans about these changes, it has now totally reversed the Directed Mode changes and given Big Game some generous buffs to still keep it a viable loadout option.
“The team is always focused on making Zombies fun and rewarding (it’s why we make video games!), but we don’t always nail it the first time,” Treyarch says in the patch notes for a small update that was pushed out today, January 9. It also acknowledges that “it’s not fun to see a ‘fix’ multiple weeks later for something that wasn’t bothering you in the first place.” In a social media post, it also says sorry for having unintentionally “nerfed fun” for Zombies players.
It’s great to see Treyarch act so swiftly and try to retain as much good will with Zombies players as possible. With Black Ops 6 generally getting hammered at the moment for not fixing some long-running technical issues and its poorly-performing anti-cheat, it’s nice to see the devs being so quick and positive in this particular Zombies situation.
If you’ve been enjoying Black Ops 6 but you’re looking for a bit of a breather before Season 2 arrives in a few weeks, here are some other excellent multiplayer games and co-op games to take a look at instead.
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