Announced yesterday via a tweet from the official Call of Duty account: Call of Duty: pioneer and war zone have their Season 2 update delayed until February 14. The reason given is that the current state of the game takes priority and takes more time to process, especially in terms of polishing, game stability, bugs, and game optimization.
The news comes at a time when players are a little nervous about the state of the game. A quick look at the Warzone subreddit will reveal a slew of posts complaining about some aspect of the game, usually cheaters or features on specific platforms. Here’s a similar scene on the Vanguard subreddit. There seem to be shared concerns about certain parts of these games, and the developers seem to want to address some of them before moving on.
We’ve deployed many updates, but more work needs to be done.Thank you for your patience as we delayed the release of Season 2 #pioneer and #warzone Prioritize work in progress to balance and optimize your current gaming experience.
More Intel: https://t.co/dB2ruoguXq pic.twitter.com/iBWEVQFwpf
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) January 19, 2022
It’s worth noting some background on Raven Software’s QA department, which has been on strike following a series of layoffs in January. According to Launcher, the player base, which includes some of the game’s biggest content creators, is starting to get fed up with these issues. With about 60 QA contractors leaving the game, you can start to understand why the game is taking longer to meet quality expectations.
The game has recently undergone some tweaks to make the overall experience better. The mid-season update addresses certain balance issues, including the buggy Bren and Akimbo Combat Shotguns, which wreaked havoc on the game for a while.
The developers also recently made some stealth updates to Ricochet Anti-Cheat, preventing cheaters from using targeting bots to melt players through massively crippling damage. In response, more and more cheaters are flying around in cars, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
One thing is for sure, the game really needs to address these issues soon. Hope the QA contractor gets a fair deal. For more coverage on this topic, check out our coverage of Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard. If you’re wondering which guns are the best after the aforementioned mid-season update, we’ve got a guide to the best meta guns here!