Your own fan base occasionally showing unhinged disdain toward you comes with the territory of being an immensely popular video game franchise. As we approach Black Ops 6’s launch, Modern Warfare 3 players are adamant that it’s the most “brain rot” game in the series so far.
No yearly series is bigger than Call of Duty, and the scrutiny coming from its own fans is proportionately sized. A fiery discussion in the Modern Warfare 3 subreddit goes as far as to paint one particular aspect of the multiplayer with colorful descriptions such as “peak brain rot” and it being strictly for “ADHD squirrel-brain” players.
Of course, CoD lobbies have always been famous for the lack of name-calling and squeaky-clean language, but in this particular instance, the players complaining might have a point. The MW3 feature coming under heavy scrutiny is the map variety, or the lack thereof.
The original post points out that the vast majority of maps in Modern Warfare 3 are relatively tiny, which, in the poster’s own words, leads to “zero-strategy, grenade-spam camp-fests.” Several maps are being called out by name, with the main culprits being Rust, Shipment, Stash House, Das Haus, Emergency, Dome, Scrapyard, Checkpoint, and Meat.
Though most similar rants would end there, there is a proposed solution for the issue—giving the smaller maps their own separate pool so that bigger, more strategic maps can have their own place under the spotlight. The suggested name for the small maps pool, “ADHD squirrel-brain playlist,” probably won’t be too popular with fans, but the idea itself isn’t too bad or too alien for competitive shooters. CS:GO and now CS2 have been using rotated map pools for many years, in addition to individual map queues, so there’s no reason a similar structure can’t be implemented into Black Ops 6 if not MW3.
Commenters bring out a few theories about why things are the way they are and why they probably won’t change. There’s “CoD has a large ADHD fan base,” of course, but there’s also the suggestion that a large portion of MW3 players simply aren’t good enough to consistently perform well on larger, more tactical maps, so they’d rather get kills on the smaller ones that are much more random.
At the very least, this discussion shows that there is a portion of the player base that prefers tactical play to the usual hectic shootouts Call of Duty is associated with, and it would be nice if Treyarch and Raven Software give the tacticians more to work with in Black Ops 6.
