Warzone 2s servers are in a bit of trouble. How has your experience been? I should note in terms of testing that my line connection is a 3Gbps Fibre to the premises connection and I ran some stability and health tests on it prior to recording this footage.

More people need to talk about this. I feel like this is by far the biggest issue with the game. Forget all the terrible gameplay changes they've made that's a completely different story. If the game doesn't run properly it's just not gonna be a fun experience. I already have pretty crappy internet so a lot of the time the game is unplayable for me but I go play battlefield or any other multiplayer game and it runs just fine maybe a little bit of lag here and there but cod I'm over 100 ping every game. That's just uncalled for from a multi billion dollar company.

This makes sense. Ping says 30ms but feels like 150ms sometimes which is probably the server

I'm gonna tell my kids this is why I'm bad at cod.

That problem is not just warzone, multiplayer at times is just as bad.

Its not like Activision will fix this! Im sure they know about this but they will push out new skins for the store!

Awesome video. Mw2 is the laggiest COD to date. The basics of the game to run properly had been subpar since launch. I’ve reset my modem over 400 times in the past 6 months and it was never my end. I just wish they will use the money they make in this game and improve on it. The fact they changed this title to a one year release pisses me off. I was hoping for a real change to this new COD for it to catch up to other newer titles. But I don’t see that happening and foresee myself back to Fortnite playing rust and other cod maps on a better server and platform that cares about the experience. COD cares about money.

Thank you for addressing this, I was beginning to think no one was gonna speak about the abhorrent tick rate this game has

The amount of times I've died completely behind cover is mind boggling. I usually play ranked and not warzone and ill be fully behind a wall and then die

This thing that bugs me is that when I play COD by myself I get roughly 30-60 ping, but when I play with my friends, I get 110-130 ping. But regardless who I play with it always feels the same. They're always beating me to the punch even when I'm already aiming down sights. And it always takes much, much longer for me to kill someone regardless of the ping.

Don't forget this was the "Most advanced CoD of all time."

This has been a problem for weeks now. Im sure it has driven a lot of players away.

These types of videos from you have been great. Very informative and it really explains a lot to me about why some gunfights just FEEL off in this game. I definitely noticed a massive difference in ping trying to play Al Mazrah, this explains why. Thanks again.

Great video! This definitely needs to be talked about more. I’ve been mentioning it to my friends for years, and it is one of the biggest problems with all COD releases. Unfortunately I don’t see it changing anytime soon. They have had garbage low tick rate severs for at least the last decade, but it’s still the same. They most likely try to maximise profits and will claim that increasing the tick rate won’t make much difference, diminishing returns etc etc. Yet battlefield have been using higher tick rate severs for years (30-60Hz).

I'm guessing that part of it will be the architecture they're using i.e. specific tick-rate, but I also expect other factors to be: how optimized the software itself is, and which instances they've decided to pay for on the cloud provider of their choice, opting to spin up on the cheapest instances they can get away with (as you'd expect from a business perspective)

Very well explained! Nice job. In my opinion (besides all the other stuff) the worst problem of warzone.

1:35 The number of players being almost halfed, your inspecting your weapon, the guy in chat saying "awesome" 🤣💀 It's perfect

Awesome work. Servers in this game are truly terrible. Everyone needs to see this and upvote.

Great video. It’s definitely a huge issue. Randomising gun fights is no fun and compounds the SBMM issue. When will they learn that the skill gap makes the game fun and give you a sense of progression!

This was the final nail in the coffin for me I was having horrible latency issues on multiplayer , I even had new faster internet installed and I play other online games with no problems so I just quit playing

In DMZ, I typically utilize the spotter scope to quickly assess the threat of AI and teams from a distance. However, I've noticed a massive decrease in AI spawning when scouting at even moderate distance like 80-100 meters and an increase in AI despawning at these ranges or greater. This doesn't apply to teams but it makes it difficult to plan my moves as I don't know what the threat is until I'm in the threat. This was not the case in season 1 as I was able to identify AI from much further away. I bring this up here because perhaps they updated the algorithm for AI spawning to decrease server load. Maybe to reduce crashing or something - however I still crash or get a server-disconnect on a daily basis.

I keep experiencing this in solos specifically, getting killed instantly the moment I am shot at, then the killcam shows they were shooting me the normal amount of time, but I’m obviously not getting this information on my end. I know the ttk is insane already, but this is ridiculous.

People need to stop buying skins and giving them anymore money until that actually prove they give a shit about this game. They don't fix major issues all they care about is making a new skin to sell.

It was a problem with caldera servers sometimes too so they just reduced the player count instead of fixing there servers or paying extra for more powerful servers to handle it better

Amazing video man .this Confirm everything I thought. We are all so focus on WZ2 not meeting the standards of WZ1 that nobody talks about how bad the servers are.

Playing BR duos with a friend yesterday was very rough. Multiple head-scratcher deaths for each plus completely chalked warmups. They need to remove AI, reduce player count, revert loot vomit, improve server farm locations & capacity, increase TTK… do whatever it takes! Feels like my mid-range gaming PC is a Nintendo Switch on wifi.

Uninstalling now , Activision isn't giving us what we paid for ... very disappointed, thanks for the information ❤

The worst thing is that Activision won’t acknowledge that they have server issues. They are silent in this regards, but when they release a new skin there is 100 of tweets about that..

There's also an exploit, which allows someone to overload the server with requests, which causes mass disconnections. I've seen this multiple times, followed by someone typing in chat their discord to "buy nukes."

Gun play and gun damage has always been inconsistent.. but especially in Warzone. Higher tick rates, less players, smaller map, no AI, no strong holds, no air strikes.. would greatly improve the games performance. Great review 👏

One of the many reasons why I uninstalled and walked away from the COD series for good. The decision makers and devs have totally abandoned their loyal customers.

Unfortunately its also present in the multiplayer, and has been since the launch. I don't know how they can mess up the netcode again I'd argue. The first Warzone was also pretty subpar.

bro okay I'm glad someone is covering this, bro i got fiber optic internet AND literally can't even play this game because I'm teleporting everywhere😂 always connects me to a 200ms ping server. EVEN WZ1 WASNT THIS BAD, 😂 NO OTHER GAME ever gives me connection issues when i play. Even massive MMO mega-server games like ESO give me NO issues, like NONE. A billion dollar company is so cheap that we all have to play on Walmart servers

Super frustrating when I spawn into DMZ, run into these servers, crash out and lose all my hard earned gear!

My friends and I have a hard time even finding a server at all, not to mention the terrible server performance once we get there. It's a shame as the game COULD be great, but it's continually a tremendous let down.

Not only the servers either, I’ve tested the render latency on just multiplayer and it’s quite literally double the latency of the last 3 cods which at 150FPS would be around 4-6ms but mw2 at 150FPS sits around 10-15ms so that clunky feeling we got with this game compared to the tighter feeling of the last 3 are even more clunky because it’s rendering twice as slow as those cods

Bad servers also affect Aim Assist, since data packets are crucial for it to work smoothly. When when ping spikes a lot, Aim Assist becomes inconsistent.

Insane that they insist so strongly that AI "needs" to be in the game when its existence directly impacts the quality of the player experience just considering connection... Never seen this level of ignorance to player QOL in any game.

Who else hates being shown 1-2 seconds earlier on the enemies screen than you could see them? (In the killcam)

Love the fact people are coming up with this theory now, ignoring the fact you released this vid weeks ago…ahead of the curve once again good sir

I’m having server issues like crazy and what sucks is when I’m playing I have to leave game or in DMZ it takes all my weapons and my loot SMH

That explains a lot of my experiences. The netcode is so bad I literally killed my gulag opponent, got credit for the kill but then was told I didn't win my gulag. Has happened to me twice in the last month. On top of all the other issues you mentioned. It's just crazy.

I've lost count of how many times the server decided that I'd be locked in the buy station and go into the matrix

I've been having this issue in MP. I thought my wifi was the problem, so I connected through ethernet, and I've still had the same problems.

Warzone sweat here, just had to get off AGAIN due to constant lag. Back in Warzone 1 I would get 30-40 ping here on the East Coast, now with Warzone 2 I don’t get under 60 ping when the server is ACTUALLY working. But pretty much every match it’s going from 70-140 ping non stop lagging. Just ridiculous.

It’s a combination of the terrible servers and the terrible engine I’m afraid. Warzone needs a bare minimum of 60hz but really needs 120hz servers. The IW 9.0 engine should only be used for single player and it should be the old IW 8.0 (MW19/Warzone 1) engine that is used for both Warzone and multiplayer in my eyes. IW 9.0 has better physics and textures etc but throw in AI and Water and it’s a recipe for disaster! Activision have gone from making $5.2 million a day from Warzone 1 to an absolute shambles in less than 2 years. Mind boggling.

Thank you for mentioning this !!! I live in the Middle East and a 2 digit ping is practically impossible !!! Not including the crazy spikes like you have shown in the video .. if it weren’t for Ashika island I would’ve uninstalled the game long back , even though I’m more of big map person I really don’t enjoy it cuz of this

It feels to me like something other than bad servers is going on. I am on the East coast of the U.S. and I play with friends on both the East and West coasts. If I get an East coast server, my ping will be 30-40, and if I get a West coast server my ping will be 90-100 (I also get what I assume are U.S. Central servers quite frequently, with 60-70 ping). Despite the West coast servers having triple the ping, they actually feel like a more consistent experience to me, with my East coast 30 ping experience varying wildly. I freely admit my own ignorance on the subject, but is it possible there is some sort of system in place that takes a player with 30 ping, another player with 100 ping, and artificially delays the info going to the player with 30 ping to try to create a consistent experience between these players? And is it further possible that this system sometimes glitches out, so that the 100 ping player sometimes has the advantage?

I had no idea the WZ 2 servers were 20 tick.. That explains so much

I was playing COD and i noticed, that every game i'm in is lagging. Weird because my internet is on another level, but i found out that there are problems in servers. I think it is due to Season 3 upcoming release

Thx for raising this issue. Im playing on ps5 from UK and servers are terrible. My internet speed is really fast. But Im continuously playing with 2 or 3 precent packet loss and lags and shit fps is norm.

This video confirms my own experience. Al Mazrah can be such a pain to play with the server issues, I noticed Ashika is way more playable.

Thank you so much! I've been asking content creators for a video like this for such a long time! This is totally unacceptable from a multi-billiion dollar company!!

thanx for this info, makes sense why get lag spikes. i hope its resolved before Plunder hits because everyone loading in constantly with loadouts would def spike server latency. we saw this on WZ1

Finally my frustration with COD all these years is explained. I thought i was imagining things. COD servers are the #1 issue that's completely unacceptable for the money they're making.

here in brazil, i have "5~15ms" ping in warzone, i live litteraly like 5km from the servers, and still it feels like im being killed instantly, so the tickrate is a real problem, not only on cod, but other games that have low tickrate, cs2 is feeling soooo good as the new sub tick tecnology, those games need new netcode and ways to make the servers perform better

The last time COD had decent servers was COD4, and those were community servers (paid for by players). After that they started the P2P and COD's own dedicated servers, just like on console at the time, both were terrible. As PC players it was a huge step back and we are yet to step forward

What they havedone to this franchise? They've practically killed it

It'll be interested to understand where, what cloud services, what they've got running in memory vs hard disk. If they've a road map to update/ upgrade or increase server capacity. This is only a high level over view.

I would understand this happening at launch, or at the day the new patch drops, but the constant rubber banding and disconnects are present even with the lowest amount of players at night.

Having 20tick servers in a game with this pathetic TTK in 2023 is just a joke in itself. At least the game is slowly dying so people are kinda opening their eyes to this trash

Apart from the horrible servers we can also enjoy the splendid 12 tickrate gameplay which is so slow it's basically a turn based strategy game at this point.

I know a glitch in DMZ that just by running over a certain downed player, that crashes the entire server. That should say everything.

Dont forget that random lobby members dont get put into the game when in a party. random cutout of voicechat for some players in the party.

Good video. Gunfights in WZ2 just don’t feel that good, lag, frame drops, crashes, instakills, etc. Servers are (or feel) way better on DMZ and mp. Strange cuz DMZ is quite demanding as well, but runs miles better than WZ2

Thanks for this video. I even see in the text chat of your video that people think this is a "hacker" issue. The servers are so poorly implemented for what they have been trying to do for 5 years now it's insane.

Part of the problem is that the server is controlling even extremely unimportant stuff. Next time the game stalls like this, take a look around at what is frozen in place. Your muzzle flash, individually rendered bullets, birds, etc etc. This is all stuff that doesn't need to be calculated by the server to that level of detail. They're wasting so much processing power on stuff that doesn't need it.

Only thing i would add to this is, You don't connect direct to the game server in one hop, so any server on route that has a high traffic load will also effect your overall ping. I had this issue last night infact, constant 150-200 ping, after doing some testing it seems i was hitting a server on route that was causing this issue. It was also effecting other apps like Discord and Teamspeak, so before you blame the game servers just do your homework and make sure that's the case. But the info in this video was great to see and is defo something Call of Duty franchise need to improve for the future.

I love shooting first 95% of the time, hitting more shots with the same gun (sometimes headshots vs their body shots) and I die first. Happens over and over and over... I just call gun fights in this game a coin toss because that's what it feels like.

I hope this video can get some server improvement traction the way your audio video got them to look into foot steps. Nice work man!

PUBG got me back into multiplayer games, COD in the early 2000's with COD 1 and 2, made me pretty much quit multiplayer gaming until PUBG. Then Warzone 1 came out and I was glued to that. With Warzone 2's servers I don't even bother playing it, I barely play. Back to RE4, lol

This is not just a WZ2 problem, but the whole of MW2 is like this. Played at launch and was destroying ppl, now it’s like playing against ghosts and player snapping around and knowing exactly where you are without even looking. Was in a game last night and was getting shot instantly after spawning in Hardcore. The camera barely had time to zoom in on my player before I was already dead again 🙃 Which sucks, because at launch I really liked the game… now I’m just playing to finish the battle pass, and then put this away for a while again. If you have Battlefield, I highly suggest switching games just to see how intense the difference is.

My stable 200mbps internet gives me 20-30 ping in CS:GO, while in WZ2 my ping never ever goes below 70 and usually hovers around 100. That's how bad the servers are. To make matters worse, every single match there is at least one instance where the server just dies and shows 999 ping for at least 10 seconds. The game has an insane amount of potential and it would a shame if these server issues end up being the nail in the coffin for it. But still for some reason the devs/Activision is ignoring this huge issue and keeps giving us dumb weapon blueprints and camos instead of actually fixing what needs to fixed the most.

Also we played BR on the first 2 launch nights. 150 ping minimum. ain't played BR since. DMZ and multi is around 40-50 so that's all we've been playing.

battlenonsense already said the first game was low tick rate. they probably wanted to save up even more money and got worse servers. activision is trying to get away with as much BS as they can. increase the price of the game. reduce expenses. sell as many MTX packs as they can. the only thing that gets patched instantly is the shop...

Ping is king unless you play cod and it's been that way for a long time. I remember inducing lag in my network just to get a stable game with the server. There were times we would download torrents at the same time as playing just so we could be on the good side of lag comp. It amazes me that people are only just picking up on this issue, we've been talking about it in forums for the last 10 years

Know nothing about COD but the errors described are nothing new in Battlefield. Lot of the problems these days are so many high ping players. When you mix up low ping like 10-50 with people that are 180-250+ is nothing but a recipe for a bad experience.

It wouldnt be that bad if the matchmaking was based on connection and not SBMM. Why am i in England being matched up with people in Turkey and the middle east? I should be playing with people in the UK and maybe just maybe France

This isn't isolated to Warzone. Stuttering, lag, frame rate drops, aim assist not working because of tick rate etc etc. The servers are a complete embarrassment in this game on the whole.

Seeing this makes me worried about Warzone Ranked, people will get salty.

Great video. I found this video more fun to watch than playing Warzone 2.0 lol! Thanks Tacticalbrit!

Fantastic explanation, you just know the COD DevOps team will be crying watching this video

crazy how removing SBMM (moving to location based queuing instead) and removing AI would get us better latency AND make the game better from a gameplay perspective.......

Well I knew it was bad. Now I know why it is bad. Thanks for the information. I now feel less frustrated with my own experience and more frustrated with Activisions lack of support for their own titles.

The poor latency and FPS drops is insanely frustrating in this game...also "Super Bullets" = more proof the TTK is bad, and AI is dumb. The game can't even support it. Thanks for the vid! Share it

All those times I’ve gotten killed by magic JFK bullets after getting behind cover… 🕵🏻‍♂️ I KNEW IT!

I feel like the most frustrating part of this issue is the cause not being really even desired by they playerbase for the most part. The move to 150 players per match, while a great buzz term for investors (as it is an easy to understand stat for those who do not play the game but have a financial interest in it), is not really improving the experience for the players at all. Honestly, it is not even really something that I could see the community wanting, asking for, or really having an overall positive impression of at any point in the game’s life so far. While I admit that is based on extremely limited data, it still is telling that no one really seems to have wanted it according to even that limited data. On the AI enemies, this was even more obviously unwanted, not even neutral as with the larger player count, and other than the strongholds being a possible addition to options to get your loadout (which could easily be resolved by some basic tweaking of values and timing) it does not really add much of anything to the game other than a mostly random advantage that heavily favors you for a win for little to no input other than being the right place when they activate, and being able to survive one of the most basic fighting experiences to complete the stronghold. So, we have a bad server system on the base level that is being made much worse by 2 features that seemingly no one asked for, and which seem to not provide much to the majority player experience (obviously those who use them to advantage regularly like kill racers and stronghold/blacksite hunters would view it differently). That does not seem to be a good strategy, or a good experience for the vast majority of players.

Honestly. I've completely left DMZ because I've lost high tier stuff over a dozen times because of network/server issues.

Now imagine this. You live in South Africa, when the resurgence maps came out, no one played the big map. If you play the big map it puts you on a European server and by doing this alone, your ping is at 180ms to 200ms by default. Add in the bad servers and it feels like you playing while constantly doing the robot. WZ1 we also had to play on the 200ms servers, but it never felt this bad. So now we forced to play resurgence only.

Idk anything about network engineering, but my experience lines up with your data, which is reassuring. I only play multiplayer but lag spikes and rubberbanding is a huge issue there as well

Could this be why the audio isn’t ‘spawning’ in? I’m not very tech savvy so I could be very wrong. The helicopters for example sometimes have the sound lag and you fly away from the sound it’s making

I love how you explain things. Good with words.

Cod was better in P2P connection. No fixed patented SBMM corrupt algorithm Host migration was doable. Only 1 person had an advantage in the game. Now the game decides whos health and damage to buff nerf mid gunfight and accuracy as well. Every F thing in the world thesedays is some AI algorithm fixed BS. Im sick of it.

Hasn’t this game had a problem since launch

Been preaching CoD tick rate issues for years but yet they do nothing

This has been an issue with all the CoD games and it's just exacerbated more and more with the bloated scale of Warzone and then Warzone 2. To me, it's one of the biggest things that makes Call of Duty feel awful to play. Unfortunately, I think it's something casual players don't realize and since they make up the majority of the playerbase, server issues get buried more easily and just become worse. Hopefully it's something that can be addressed, but I think it would take a united front from Call of Duty creators to push for the change together and try to raise as much awareness about it as possible. But even outside of Warzone, a lot of the issues have been here as early as CoD 4. Inconsistent ping, dying from around corners, insta death, and lag spikes when killstreaks are present have been prevalent for over 15 years in the series, just less pronounced with the smaller scale, and server performance has always been worse in CoD compared to other AAA FPS titles (and even some AA and indie titles).

Our last hope is that maybe after microsoft acquisition they'll work in based kn feedback, coz Activision is hopeless

Activision doesn't give two sh**s about player experience. They're in the money making business, and people are giving them plenty of reason to continue on their course..

I think servers are even scaled to fit the gamemodes, probably for them to cut off costs of running bigger and more expensive servres - because I've noticed that when playing 10vs10 in the multiplayer, I often have lag spikes, and I don't have those in regular 6vs6.

profits just aren't high enough to afford servers. maybe if we buy more skins, they could afford it.