Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a game about shadowy organizations causing geopolitical turmoil and well-timed headshots. It’s also an RPG about making the progress meters fill up. When it comes to the latter, Black Ops 6‘s first patch is already increasing XP rewards for certain modes to keep the level-ups flowing.
An October 26 update for the game listed a handful of changes and bug fixes, including a series of map exploits, a problem with matches quickly replacing players that leave, and various glitches in Black Ops 6‘s well-received Zombies mode. The changes that are most noteworthy were to XP, though. Four modes will now get boosted rewards.
Increased XP and Weapon XP rates for modes that were awarding less XP than expected
- Team Deathmatch
- Control
- Search & Destroy
- Gunfight
“Our team is closely monitoring XP rates for all modes to ensure players are progressing as expected wherever they play,” the development team wrote. XP earned and other rewards often start out a little stingier at launch since it’s always easier to increase them later once the data from millions of people playing comes back, rather than the reverse.
There are already lots of different strategies for optimizing XP gain in multiplayer. Obviously, playing better—landing headshots, chasing objectives, and unloading killstreaks—all accrue rank-ups faster. Some players also recommend playing Hardpoint instead of Domination because players in that mode are more likely to actually play objectives. Others suggest grinding out all of those camo challenges. And, of course, no new Call of Duty launch is complete without sickos crushing cases of Monster Energy for double XP.
Black Ops 6 players had latched onto one easy trick for getting bonus XP by exploiting the decoy grenades for guaranteed kill assists. Treyarch nerfed that one in the above patch as well, though.