Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has started to roll out its impressive Season 2, which brings back the series' worshipped Gun Game, but I'm less excited about a vintage game mode than I am about a subtle bug fix that restores free-for-all winner circles to what they should be.
The fix is buried deep in developer Treyarch's patch notes (and, as far as I can tell, not listed at all in its Season 2 announcement), but it should repair "an issue where final placements were being incorrectly calculated" and "an issue where the Winner’s Circle would not consistently display the Top 3 players," Treyarch says.
I don't understand why no one is outside my window playing a tuba and getting shot out of a cannon. This is an ignore-your-family, parade-in-the-streets-with-confetti-guns-type patch, right? Why isn't anyone else freaking out?
Before this apparent fix, for months, Black Ops 6's free-for-all mode was pestered by a bug that made winning a match worthless. Players discovered that, despite ranking in a match's top-three winner's circle with the most kills, Black Ops 6 would splash an infuriating "DEFEAT" graphic on their screen and disrupt their win-loss ratio. These players wouldn't show up in the winner's circle spotlight at the end of a match either, so no one could see their cool emotes, like the one where they go "shhh."
The winning losers were confused, too. "I got 0 kills," a Redditor writes in one of many threads on the issue. "Absolutely zero. And somehow I won the game??? How."
It wasn't fair, and it was bad for morale – in a game like Call of Duty, where even third graders are verbally abusive and the coolest skins look like they belong in a gumball machine, you need all the morale you can get. I'm thankful that, now that the free-for-all bug is supposedly fixed, we are free.
