When Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 1 went live on Thursday, players were thrilled to find all their XP Tokens from previous Call Of Duty games back in their inventory. Suddenly, the grind didn’t feel so daunting. We could Prestige and pop a 2XP Token and go back through those levels a lot faster. Gun-leveling suddenly wasn’t so laborious.
Then, on Saturday, all the XP Tokens had vanished. I wrote about this yesterday, noting that Treyarch and Activision had squandered a lot of good will with their community in the process, even though you could still activate the tokens from Warzone (unless, of course, you don’t have it installed).
Today, Treyarch tweeted that the XP Tokens would be returning, citing “game stability” as the reason for removing them in the first place. Whether that’s entirely the case—or whether this is a smart response to online backlash—is something the community will surely be debating. Either way, it’s the right move and a smart one. While the tokens are not yet back in players’ inventory, the studio promises more news next week.
The tweet reads:
With the start of Season 01, a UI bug allowed players to activate legacy XP tokens in Black Ops 6. Unfortunately, it also introduced some potential risk to game stability, which is why it was patched yesterday.
We realize how much players appreciate being able to redeem legacy XP tokens in both BO6 and Warzone, so we are currently testing a way to implement this change correctly in a future update. This allows us time to ensure stability is maintained before we reintroduce this feature.
In the interim, players can activate any legacy XP tokens in Warzone. Any tokens applied in Warzone will also apply to Black Ops 6 should you switch titles or modes.
We look forward to sharing more about this change next week. Thank you for your patience.
As you can see, we’re sparse on details here. What “potential risk to game stability” the return of tokens actually threatened remains a mystery. I certainly don’t understand the backend stuff nearly well enough to speculate, but if there really was a threat to game stability it’s best they were removed.
I know that merging this many games into one overarching Call Of Duty experience must be a massive headache, with all kinds of little issues popping up, and given that these were introduced by mistake, caution might be the best approach. It’s too bad this wasn’t communicated in the first place, but here we are. I suppose it’s ultimately beside the point. In the end, this was a good call and I’m happy that tokens will be coming back. Hopefully we find out when that will be soon.
P.S. I had my first hard crash playing the game yesterday. Blue screen of death. Otherwise, it’s been performing remarkably well since launch. I’m not sure if this was something to do with the update or the graphics card driver or what, but I had literally just activated all three 1 hour XP tokens and lost about ten minutes getting everything back up and running. I really wish Activision would make the most sensible change of all: Have XP Tokens run during matches only, not during load times, lobbies or when the game is closed.
