As you are probably already aware, Call of Duty: Warzone shares its new Season One Battle Pass with Black Ops: Cold War and Zombies. The integration and cross-progression between games will help players to level up quickly and encourages playing a variety of modes to keep things feeling fresh.
However, previous Warzone Battle Passes were shared with Modern Warfare – and the recent integration with Black Ops: Cold War has resulted in an unexpected issue that players are not happy about. As a part of these previous Warzone Battle Passes, players could earn Double XP and Double Weapon XP Tokens, which helped to gain levels quickly.
Lots of players hoarded these tokens to use during a big gaming session or for when new weapons dropped so they could level them up quickly. However these plans have been shot down faster than a helicopter over Verdansk, as any tokens earned in previous Battle Passes can now only be used in Modern Warfare – whether you own the game or not.
This was discovered by user u/HydroF on Reddit, who posted a screenshot of available tokens when they logged into Warzone and Modern Warfare respectively.
Looks like our MW 2XP tokens will only work in multiplayer from now on. Would have been nice to have some use for them after leveling every weapon. from CODWarzone
Players are understandably angry about the change – after all, Warzone is free-to-play and many fans of the battle royale game never bought or played Modern Warfare. The AAA game has a premium price tag, and Warzone-only players have effectively lost the tokens that they paid for via the Battle Pass.
The conspiracists among Call of Duty players suggest that this change was purposeful so that players now have to buy the Season One premium Battle Pass in order to get more tokens. Others suggest that the decision is intended to stop players from leveling the powerful new Cold War weapons (which now make up some of the best Warzone guns) too quickly.
Reddit user u/RGG-Dale is fuming, writing “I paid for the BP since season 3 and I never bought MW multiplayer so basically they’ve sent [the XP Tokens] somewhere I can’t use them? WTF?!” There already seems to be a lot of players in a similar position, whose only CoD action comes from Warzone, and many feel let down by the change.
There is currently no confirmation from Activision or Treyarch as to whether the change was intentional or not.