A Call of Duty: Warzone creator has unearthed an apparent discrepancy in damage numbers between playing in the battle royale’s public lobbies and in private matches.
‘TrueGameData’, who is renowned for creating full damage profiles of Call of Duty weapons to determine the best Warzone guns, has released a video showing off some damage stats from weapons in public Plunder lobbies versus a private lobby. While most weapons were found to have the exact same damage output and dropoff points, TrueGameData has discovered some have varying damage profiles in private matches.
Weapons that appear to have different damage profiles in private Warzone games are mainly SMGs from the Modern Warfare arsenal of guns. These include the MP5, AUG, P90, ISO, and Striker 45, according to TrueGameData. These strange changes in damage include guns having fewer range dropoff points (which essentially make them hit harder at long range in a private match than in a public match) and, in the case of the MP5, a mysterious increase in damage when shooting targets over 52 metres away.
This appears to confirm that some weapons in Warzone are behaving differently in private lobbies than you would expect in a regular public match. It’s worth noting that the public match stats were only obtained from Plunder games, rather than the standard battle royale modes, but it does appear that the issue lies in private lobbies.
The reason for these different damage numbers is not totally clear, but TrueGameData speculates that it’s likely private lobbies are used for weapon balance testing, and that lines of code have been left in the private build of the game that should have been removed or updated alongside public lobbies. However, this is not confirmed.
While private lobbies have been hailed as a potential new arena to host different formats of competitive Warzone, these findings will likely stop that in its tracks, even if the discrepancies in damage numbers are seemingly small.