Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, by most accounts, is a rousing success. The move to multiplayer only, led by the excellent Blackout battle royale mode, hasn’t hurt the game one bit. But some fans have called out Treyarch for a server downgrade from the beta.
During the beta, the server send rate, which controls the pace of communication between the servers and your console/PC, was 60hz. The servers post-launch, however, have reportedly hovered around 20hz, a third of the beta rate. Unsurprisingly, this has caused some issues online and led to disappointment among fans.
One user on Reddit claimed that the drop has negatively affected aspects of both the traditional multiplayer and Blackout modes. “Also, it would seem that matchmaking sometimes chooses servers that are undesirable in terms of latency. It would be nice to have the ability to whitelist server locations which give the best experience to prevent this from happening.”
Another Reddit user wrote: “Downgrading performance once the game releases is deceitful- we all know that betas like this are also used to get people to buy the game, too, so the standards they set should be held to the proper release as well.”
Acknowledging the discussion surrounding the servers, Treyarch offered a response on Reddit. “We’re constantly working to optimize the game, and particularly network performance, to ensure the highest quality online experience for our players. For a game launch with as massive a population as ours hitting so many global servers at once, we configure our infrastructure to ensure game stability as the highest priority over all other factors,” Treyarch wrote.
While Treyarch virtually admitted to the drop-off without using the figures, it sounds as if the discrepancy between the beta and retail servers may only be temporary. “Over the course of the next two weeks, we will roll out several updates to our network setup that will continue to improve upon the experience of our players since launch.”
For what it’s worth, we did not experience noticeable problems caused by lower server send rates when reviewing Black Ops 4. Obviously the experience will vary from user to user, but our time with the game has been roundly positive.
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