Activision has launched a promo where they offer Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 & Warzone rewards to players who verify their email at the official COD website. Besides double XP tokens, the rewards consist of a weapon camo but the entire promo caused a lot of confusion among players and the ensuing tech issues were just one more problem.
If you like free stuff in new Call of Duty games, you are on the right track, right? Who doesn’t want to? Activision, or better yet, its social media managers, made it crystal clear via a tweet that gamers should go to the Call of Duty website and confirm their account email. This gives you the right to claim a lovely gift pack for both Black Ops 7 and Warzone. You would receive five 1hr double XP tokens for your level, another five for your guns, plus five more for the Battle Pass. In addition, you would receive ‘Veiled Aurora’ which is a universal weapon camo, that sounds awesome for sure!
The opposite is true because such promos from these huge publishers are never that easy. The intel account charlieINTEL has monopolized the tweet, and immediately there was a flood of replies. And, these replies were not one of thanks but rather a multitude of questions and a great deal of frustration. They probably thought they had opened the gates to a support forum instead of a hype train.
What’s the main and the biggest issue? A lot of players are saying that they have already had their email verified for ages. You can say it goes back to the time they created their Activision account. So, they just keep looking at the tweet and wondering … ‘Okay! What next?’. Gamer Dennis Wingqvist put it bluntly: ‘Already verified but didn’t got it.’ He is not the only one as Ahmed came in with ‘I did it but I didn’t get my rewards😅’. It seems to be a shared mood. The comments are more like ‘why isn’t this working’ than ‘great free stuff’.
Another headache is that what if you cannot access the email that you used? This is a huge problem for many people. Gamer NelanXT asked, “What if you can’t access the email anymore that you used to create the account?”. AlliSnake backed him saying they were unable to get in to change it. This is a classic problem of the digital age, as you may have created that Hotmail account in 2012 and forgot about it after that. Now it is the hurdle that stops you from claiming your sweet double XP.
And there is still more confusion. The users are even asking the most basic question: ‘How?’ I mean, where do you get this done? Cameron was simply asking, ‘How do you verify?’ and Gamer_STP1 was asking ‘Where do I verify it?’. The instructions were not really clear and hence many players were just clicking around the website without any luck. Brad even replied to someone else’s post saying ‘How do u do it I see no option…’ which shows that this was in fact the case for a lot of people.
A few players have been able to sort it out or at least think they did. There were some success stories among the noise. Adis Narbaev said ‘It really works 🙌🏻’ and a person with a username JesusIsGod (very bold) thanked charlieINTEL for the ‘pretty cool intel’. But for each of those, there would be five more like Marc saying, ‘Tried this a million times. Doesn’t work.’ Corey Wells went even further by being more blunt: ‘I call bullshit.’
This whole saga is a strange tension that developers and publishers have built around pre-launch bonuses. They want to do the user verification and keep the game hype going. But the players just want the loot and they want it to be seamless which, when it is not, leads to a lot of negative chatter. One gamer, Reysor even used this as an opportunity to complain about the weapon leveling system in Warzone, arguing it takes too long even with tokens and should be removed. You see? One promo tweet and you ignite one more debate.
So, what is it? Is it bugged? Are the rewards late? Do you have to re-verify even if you have done it previously? The community is full of questions. Some replies suggest trying to verify again or changing your email and then confirming the new one. But that’s just other players helping you, not an official message. It’s the kind of situation that makes one just inhale and shut Twitter for a while.
In the end, it is simply a matter of getting some double XP tokens and a camo. It is not so crucial if you do not get it. But it is the matter of principle, and many players are engaging with this on their PlayStation and Xbox consoles.
