The mid-season update of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, called Season 1 Reloaded, is unlucky to take place no later than the very Thursday upcoming. The famous Call of Duty news site CharlieINTEL not only validated the date for the content release but also made the announcement on social media to the public. The ongoing update has set the stage for a huge diversity of new items including maps, modes, and weapons to be somehow the current player community’s new experience.
Season 1 Reloaded is REALLY officially, starting! Great, I guess? CharlieINTEL’s tweet is as simple as usual – just a date and a link, the standard for these seasonal reloads. But really, one should go to the replies and that’s where the real story would lie. It’s like a battlefield down there, but not the fun virtual kind. The players are battling hard with one another and the mood is…well, it is definitely not a unified cheer of excitement.
Let’s start with decoding the messages in there. The first group is of people who reject the game from the start. A user named Sharply Dressed_ asserts “who cares cod died at black ops 2” and that is quite close to the game saying again and again indirectly. This series has been exhausting the entire gaming community for a long time. It simply seems that the industry thinks it has been milking the franchise for more than a decade and everything afterwards is nothing but cash cows. Then there is a user called drblazeclan who just yells “COD is gay as fuck! They just need to give up and stop making games.” which is not really a critique but it does a good job at letting one know how strongly the person feels about the matter.
However, don’t think that only negative comments exist! In fact, there are quite a few positive people. For instance, yoyo0112358 writes “Holiday Havoc has been such a fun mode to try out all the random scorestreaks” and that is very charming way to describe the current event. And lucidglowz even goes so far as to compliment the new maps getting showcased in the media with “They actually all look great tbf.” So at least it is not totally a hate-filled wasteland.
But the absolute mess, the mayhem, is in the reply threads. There is a whole thread consisting of users like TwannCarson, legend_xt_oli, and XJasonJonesX that gets really ugly and really fast. It seems to start with one person, possibly XJasonJonesX, making a comment that gets called out as derogatory against a certain race, which leads to that person being deleted. Then it becomes a long discussion full of arguments about how many players are using the game at the same time, with oneuser saying that Call of Duty is only the second most played game because of the shared launcher for all the older titles, not due to Black Ops 7 itself. TwannCarson retorts calling people “Chronically online loser[s]” and “Grown man getting upset about a dying video game.” It is a whole thing, a perfect example of how toxic and defensive online gaming arguments can get over something as simple as a seasonal update.
Even though there are fights, you can see players who are engaged coming up with practical demands, like chubs72851 asking “where`s ranked play at,” a common request for competitive players. watch4luck10 responds with “Amazing game, still no rank…????” DaimianJ is calling for small maps and bjxrn_ is fantasizing about “10v10 nuketown.” Meanwhile, LDAR_COD is still begging for the return of Blackout, the battle royale of Black Ops 4, saying “Blackout needs to hurry. Its time we got what started the BR hype for cod and it better be good!” So even the people who are playing have a list of demands and are not shy about voicing them right under the announcement.
It is a weird division to be honest. On the one hand, the Activision company is practically drowning the players in this scheduled content like clockwork, trying their best to keep the machine running. On the other hand, most of the conversation around it is either very negative or caught up in petty social media warfare. It is hard not to think about the developers when they read these replies, just sighing, burying their heads in their hands. The passion is there, but it has turned into something… angrier.
The Black Ops 7 Season 1 Reloaded reaction absolutely sums up the bifurcated State of the Call of Duty community. Undoubtedly, the patch will give new things to the committed players, however, the contrary side is that the dominating sound around it is a mixture of nostalgia-driven rejection, toxic fighting, and specific gameplay requirements. This split shows how hard it can be for a long-running franchise to keep its community engaged across different platforms.
