“Call of Duty Warzone 2.0’s P2W Controversy: Paid Skins with Advantageous Features”

Even in Black Ops 4, Call of Duty, which had a lot of talk about pay-to-win (P2W), was embroiled in controversy by adding special abilities to new skins.

The controversy occurred in the DMZ, a PvPvE content that exists in Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. DMZ is a mode to escape by farming items after battle with AI or users like Tarkov.

However, from Season 3, which was updated on April 13, paid skins began to be sold with additional effects of these special ability levels. These skins provide items with effects such as reducing weapon cooldown and increasing defense power from the start, but the Rosé character paid skin, which began selling from May 9th, is even equipped with a UAV. UAV is a kill-streak that can detect the enemy’s location by detecting the surroundings for a certain period of time.

In particular, this UAV affects the balance more as the number of people increases. Either a 3-person squad wears skins and rotates and uses 3 UAVs, or 6-person UAVs are used through teaming (union between squads using simultaneous matching), which has recently become a problem. In fact, already in the DMZ, cases where Dyne Squad uses UAVs multiple times are frequently found.

Users were aware of the existence of these additional features in the skin through data mining in advance, but they expressed their opinion that they did not know that they would release it as it is. In addition, although the DMZ may not be official PvP content, it is pointed out that the P2W element was added in a mode with PvP added as a problem.

Infinity Ward, the developer of Call of Duty, made a patch to disable all killstreaks for one minute immediately after the start of the DMZ, but user reactions are not good as it is not a fundamental solution. Looking at the official forums, opinions continue to worry that such a P2W controversy will not arise until ‘Modern Warfare 2 2022’ in the future.