Like a Hans Zimmer soundtrack, the latest Call of Duty: Warzone glitch (or exploit, if you ask me) involves spamming the same tactic over and over, potentially reaping rewards with no end in sight. All you need is a revive pistol and the willingness to be obnoxious—a tall order, I’m sure, for Call of Duty players.
Revive pistols are a new addition to Call of Duty. A concept familiar to shooters like Rainbow Six: Siege, the gun lets you shoot someone to revive them when they’re in a revivable, downed state. In Call of Duty you can now find such pistols laying around the map, or purchased for a mere $2400 at a Buy Station. While players usually use this gun on fallen comrades who are just out of reach, it appears the game doesn’t discriminate when it comes to who you shoot it at. Even plugging an enemy with a revive dart will get them back in the game. And that’s where the exploit comes in: You can, it appears, just corner a downed enemy, revive them, shoot them, revive them, shoot them, revive—okay, you get the point. Refill the revive pistol’s ammo at a nearby Buy Station, and the only limit is how much cash you have on hand.
As spotted by PCGamesN, Warzone streamer GUARD Issac tweeted out a video demonstrating the exploit. With the enthusiasm of a schoolyard bully pinning someone down and yelling “stop hitting yourself!” he repeatedly downs and revives an enemy. And, the XP continues to tick up as if he’s just downed them for the first time—stopping only when he seems to have had enough of the torture.
Kotaku has reached out to Activision for comment.
Reactions to this display of game systems exploitation range from folks laughing at the absurdity, dropping the requisite “he’s already dead” Simpsons meme, and commenting on how cheap and silly it is. “In the future,” reads a reply from one such opinion, “games will not have objectives, it will just be empty space where people hurl abuse at each other.”
Call of Duty has already seen a number of patches to mitigate unintended means of farming XP. Whether this exploit falls under that category remains to be seen. $2400 is fairly trivial to earn in a match. That said, I hope they don’t kill the ability to revive downed enemies. That sort of thing allows the game to have its own level of simulation and internal logic that I think makes for interesting, unexpected events. In solos, I could easily see reviving a downed enemy at a distance to cause havoc for other foes, for example. While it’s fun to be cheeky and silly, this kind of exploit arguably ventures into, dare I say it, unsportsmanlike conduct. Two minutes in the penalty box for you.