A mysterious bug is causing players to lose XP in Black Ops Cold War

Andrew Highton

One player has managed to find a curious bug that shows XP actually decreasing as they’re playing a game. It perhaps demonstrates the common theory of leveling up being slow in BOCW.

This grievance has been aired constantly since Black Ops Cold War’s launch and some evidence has now come forward that can could provide some insight as to why this is the case.

Outside of Double XP weekends, it’s been a slow grind trying to level up a weapon to unlock some of the best attachments that it has to offer. Treyarch has adjusted the XP rates several times, but this new issue could throw the whole argument wide open.

adler in cod bocw

Bug that loses a player XP in BOCW

It’s so frustrating when you’ve eyed up an attachment that will improve the performance of one of your favorite weapons, but each game you play only makes the progress bar increase at a snail’s pace. That seems to have been the consensus for Black Ops Cold War thus far.

A Reddit user called Difficult-Rest8524 has potentially stumbled across an intriguing discovery that may explain why your weapons can take an eternity to level up. During a game of Die Maschine, they are running around the level and stop to pause the game, and check the XP bar of their pistol.

The footage is then sped up and whizzes through some Zombies gameplay, during which a handful of zombies are killed and would naturally reward our player with XP. After about 15 seconds of fast-forwarded gameplay, our user pauses the game to check in with their weapon’s XP bar one more time.

The bar has inexplicably gone from being nearly full to being nearly three-quarters full. So in actuality, killing some zombies and progressing with the game of zombies has decreased the player’s weapon’s XP.

This is an alarming realization as not only is this player losing XP, but you then have to question how long this has been happening. It could be an aberration that won’t happen again, it could be a recent issue prompted by the Season 1 update, or it could be something else entirely.

Treyarch is going to have to address this sharpish as they won’t want to face anymore backlash regarding XP grinds.

Image credits: Treyarch

About The Author

A content creator for Charlie INTEL / Dexerto that earned a degree, wrote for PlusXP, Twinfinite, and Keengamer, before finally securing his dream job of being a professional video game writer. When not writing about games, he's very busy playing every game in existence and adding to his 11,000+ PlayStation Trophies and 150+ Platinums. You can contact him at [email protected].