Spawning

Spawning is one of the most talked about subjects in Ghosts, and it’s one of the most talked about subjects here at the studio as well. We’ve been addressing bugs with the current spawning system, but feel we can do more to make the experience better. We are currently working on significant changes to the spawning system based off of the learnings and play data that we have gathered over the last 5 weeks. Work is progressing here and we recently had our first internal playtest of this new system. The designers are working feverishly to get it ready to go live and we will keep you up-to-date on our progress.

Weapon Balance/Sniper Rifles

We constantly evaluate and re-evaluate weapon balance. Any changes we make have a ripple effect throughout the game so we test things heavily before they go live. After much feedback and many hours of internal testing, we recently made adjustments to the MSBS.

Sniper Rifles are something we are also looking into; as we said before, we changed Sniper Rifles from MW3 to Ghosts. Those changes are:

No aim assist from the hip, which was a huge part of how Quick Scoping worked in previous games. Players now have to aim unassisted until fully scoped in.

Hip fire reticles for Sniper Rifles were removed and hip spread was increased drastically. This reduces the effectiveness of hip firing with a Sniper Rifle.

The Quickdraw perk’s Aim Down Sight (ADS) speed scale was reduced significantly for Sniper Rifle.

Moving forward, we are testing adjustments to address the Time to Kill for Sniper Rifles versus other weapons. These Sniper Rifle balances include:

A reduction in the flinch benefit of the Focus perk.

An increase in overall ADS time.

Sniper Rifles with a silencer are being changed to a chest-up kill instead of a waist-up kill.

Hacking/Cheating

We have a dedicated Online Security department enforcing our online code of conduct for Call of Duty: Ghosts. This team is actively banning cheaters, cleaning up the leaderboards, and fixing hacked stats. The development team is fixing hacks and exploits as we find them.

And you can help! When you report someone in-game, it goes directly to our Online Security team and they investigate every issue. You can also report issues to Activision Support, either through Twitter or online.

Squad Points

We are making a change to the amount of Squad Points your soldiers earn. For ranks 1 – 5, each rank up will now give you 5 squad points (increased from the usual 2 squad points). So each Squad Member that you take to level 5, you’ll get 25 squad points.

Operations

We are looking at large, potential changes for Operations. For instance, we are looking into increasing XP rewards for completing operations. More info to come.

Infected

We are in the process of adding new loadouts to the Infected playlist. This is currently being tested internally, so be sure to look out for more variety in the future!

New game mode

We are in the process of adding a new Heavy Duty playlist that increases player health. We would love to hear your feedback on this new mode, so make sure to try it out.