Just what is Treyarch doing with Black Ops 4? A number of controversial changes that saw adjustments to play list structure and leaderboard tracking threatens to divide the active Black Ops 4 community, with third-party stat tracking sites no longer able to connect to the game’s servers.
Last week, Treyarch bizarrely removed Team Deathmatch as a sole playlist on PC, bundling it in a Moshpit playlist against Kill Confirmed.
This prompted a string of angry PC players to lash out at the studio, although some did come out to defend Treyarch, arguing the studio was merely acting to keep a small community alive by bundling lobbies together.
Regardless of its intent, the studio appears to be making a number of key changes to the way people interact with the game, and the response has been mixed thus far.
The latest change to enter the news is that of changes to the game’s API, which third-party websites use to track in-game performance on a global level.
Strangely, Black Ops 4 doesn’t have global stat-tracking, only allowing you to compare performance against friends and recent players. This is where the likes of the Tracer Network have come into play, although they’re now struggling to stay afloat with this latest change to Black Ops 4.
“Our temporary fix no longer works. COD Stats are not updating again,” the network said.
“Without @Activision or @TreyarchPC help, it looks like we will no longer be able to do stats for Call of Duty.”
The community has understandably raged in response.
“You promise leaderboards and combat records, we don’t get them,” said one angry player. “You’ve slowly phased out tracking statistics for the past few years in your games. You killed the companion apps detailed stat tracking. I know players as myself biggest reasoning for getting into CoD in the first place was the competition to do better then friends and see how your stats compare.
“[You’re] killing off what’s made this CoD fun for a lot of people just to hide your current player count. In which you’re going to end up with a double negative and lose even more people.
“Your game is rated 18+ so stop using the excuse about online bullying with statistics, face the fact that you’re no longer the big cheese at the table and we’re no longer the number one community and destroying off the rest of your loyal fan base that has decided to stay through the years of absolute mediocrity.”
That’s a fairly brutal assessment, but it sums up the general consensus coming out of the Call of Duty and Black Ops 4 community.
That global leaderboards aren’t in Black Ops 4, despite long being a Call of Duty staple, adds some merits to the above player’s suggestion that Treyarch — and Activision — are trying to hide player numbers.
What has perhaps fed into the frustration is that Treyarch said in October that leaderboards were coming soon.
“For those inquiring about leaderboards: we are aiming to take them live next week. Stay tuned for details . . . thank you for your patience!”
So not only have they backflipped on that promise, they’ve now also removed any capacity for third-party websites to track in-game performance.
Just what are Treyarch and Activision trying to do?
