Call of Duty: Black Ops developer Treyarch blames the existence of multiplayer perks in the Call of Duty series for the game’s lack of “native competitiveness.”
The game is inherently disadvantaged in offering competitive gameplay as players are forced to grind to unlock various perks to even the playing field in online battles.
David Vonderhaar, design director of Treyarch said on Twitter that the perk rewards system serves only to imbalance the experience for players seeking fair competition.
“Perks are a reason why the game isn’t natively competetive. If we can fix this, perks will be for “pub type” fun and no perks for “competition type” fun. They are different things. Perks are effectively game cheats. Cheating is fun… except when trying to make the game genuinely competitive.”
It remains to be seen whether his views—logical as they are—will be embraced by the other Call of Duty development studios, and Activision at large, which seems mainly interested in catering to kids who like seeing pointless achievements pop up on their screen ever so often.
Until this happens, Call of Duty will remain at the bottom of every competitive gamer’s list of shooters.