Sledgehammer Games has revealed the results of their weapon evaluation on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
They made a Twitter thread explaining how it panned out, but to keep things simple, we’ll summarize it for you below.
Sledgehammer revealed that this weapon evaluation was actually a team effort, which also involved Treyarch, and their esports division, Call of Duty League.
The first thing Sledgehammer notices was that the MCW was the overwhelmingly most popular choice of weapon, being 40 % of the most common weapon choice. This was followed by the WSP Swarm at 17 % and Rival-9 at 15 %. All the other weapon types were very uncommon choices.
After they made changes, they got a bigger spread of weapons. The MCW dropped to a still dominant 25 % of usage. Meanwhile, the Holger 556, BP50, and MTZ-556 overtook the WSP Swarm and Rival-9 to take over 10 % of usage each. The point of these changes, of course, was to make the metagame more interesting, by forcing competitive players to deal with a wider variety of weapon types more often.
Sledgehammer also found a good K/D ratios across all the weapons, which means that the broader use of different weapons also reflects their effectivity in actual play. They also noted that the top four most popular weapons are new ones, which means that players aren’t just reliant on old weapons that they had gotten used to for years.
We’ll quote this last part, for the sake of Call of Duty players who are genuinely competitive:
“Looking at the bigger picture, we recognize that SMGs are underperforming compared to ARs. One of the first changes from this observation is reducing hipfire accuracy for ARs in the Season 3 Reloaded update, weakening their close-range viability where we intend for SMGs to excel.
During our evaluation of individual weapons, the MCW stood out uniquely, with a significantly increased K/D ratio for high-skill players versus low-skill players. This observation is one of the reasons for the recent headshot damage multiplier reduction. The MCW is highly dependent on the player’s skill. By bringing it down a notch and introducing more options to the meta, we create a smoother experience for players of all skill levels.”
As we had noted before, Call of Duty has become such an ubiquitous part of the industry that it is MetaCritic proof. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 was lambasted by reviewers, who themselves understood their recommendation would fall on deaf ears from the people who play this game exclusively, year after year.
And so Sledgehammer and other Activision studios have kept on working on the game, and made those players happy, with the breadth and depth of their multiplayer offerings. This game will continue to service the fans until Activision announces the next game, which might not take that long.
