Treyarch is facing backlash over a recent decision made regarding Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Players are complaining about the apparent disabling of the stat tracking.
Just last week, Treyarch updated Black Ops 4 with a patch released on March 1. In addition to the usual buff and nerfs, the patch introduced changes for both Multiplayer and League Play. While it cannot be directly attributed to the patch, it appears that changes were made to the API of Call of Duty. This has resulted in player data being restricted. Players who attempt to get this data and do not have permission get a "not permitted" error message.
This change has not only affected players, even third party sites like Call of Duty Tracker seem to be disabled by the update. While CoD Tracker did manage to put in a fix, the site recently revealed that it no longer works and the stat are no longer updating. The group behind the site mentioned that without help from either Treyarch or Activision, they "will no longer be able to do stats for Call of Duty."
Our temporary fix no longer works. COD Stats are not updating again.
— Call of Duty Tracker (@CODTracker) March 7, 2019
Without @Activision or @TreyarchPC help, it looks like we will no longer be able to do stats for Call of Duty. https://t.co/67ffHNFwBA
A reddit user by the name of BMilla9 has even posted a "Stat Tracker shutdown rant." The post says that Treyarch and Activision promised combat records and leaderboards, but has failed to deliver them. The post adds that the tracking statistics have been slowly phased out over the past several years. BMilla9 believes that the stat tracker was disabled in order to hide the current player count.
The community agrees that API restrictions are necessary in order to prevent third party abuse. However, if this change is deliberate, these restrictions have been taken a bit far and clearly has a negative impact on the player community.
There is no word yet from both Activision and Treyarch about these changes. Released in October 2018, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is a multiplayer first-person shooter and is the fifth game in the Black Ops sub-series. Black Ops 4 is also the 15th overall game in the Call of Duty franchise. The game has received positive reviews and won the 2018 Gamer's Choice Awards as the Fan Favorite Shooter Game. The game is available for the PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
