Last week Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 officially opened its Black Market, which now includes the Contraband Stream, a battle-pass-style progression system that lets player earn content by playing Seasonal Operations. Unfortunately, many players found the Contraband Stream far too grindy – its first Operation includes over 200 tiers, and progress is strictly based on time played, not performance. Fans crunched the numbers, and found you’d have to play around 8 hours a day for the entire 52 day duration of the Operation (so 416 hours) to hit level 200. Yeesh. Following the latest update, ascending through the Contraband Stream tiers requires less play time, and Treyarch is promising to add earn-rate accelerators and challenge and event-based tier skips in the future.
Treyarch is also making moves to improve Black Ops 4 network performance. At launch, players discovered the game’s multiplayer server send rate was only 20hz, a third of what it was during the Black Ops 4 beta (and what Battlefield V will boast at launch). According to Treyarch, they’re rolling out network configuration changes in “targeted locations” and will carefully monitor results before the next round of updates.
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Here are your full patch notes for the latest Black Ops 4 update:
General
Black Market
- Fixes and improvements to Tier progression earn rate across all modes of Multiplayer and Blackout.
Miscellaneous
- General stability improvements across Multiplayer, Blackout, and Zombies.
Multiplayer
Playlist Updates
Weekly rotation of Featured category of playlists:
- Added “Mercenary Capture Moshpit” playlist added to Featured Playlist (5v5 Domination, Hardpoint, and Control with no Parties).
- Added “Hardcore Control” playlist added to the Featured Category.
- Added “Search and Destroy” playlist to Featured Category.
Miscellaneous
- Resolved an issue causing a UI Error in the After Action Report for Master Prestige players.
- Resolved an issue with the “Nuked Out” Calling Card not properly unlocking in the Hardcore Free For All playlist.
Equipment
- Resolved an issue where players were able to get permanent 200 Health if two players playing as Crash used the Tak-5.
Search and Destroy
- Resolved an issue where users could spectate the enemy team by changing classes during their Kill Cam.
Blackout
After Action Report
- Resolved an issue that sometimes led to a black screen during the After Action Report.
Zombies
Miscellaneous
- Resolved an issue where War Paints were not showing up in the reward stream until they were unlocked.
- Multiple crash fixes.
We’ve also made the following update specific to PC:
Memory Leak Fix
- Fixed memory leak issues that eventually caused the game to close with an error.
Treyarch will be focusing on the following issues in future updates:
Blackout Audio Adjustments
We are making several updates to audio in Blackout based upon our testing and feedback from the community to deliver the soundscape our players expect in Blackout. Look for this update to drop in the next week.
Blackout Quads Performance
We’re continuing to investigate occasional hitches in performance in Blackout Quads playlists, particularly on Xbox One. As we’ve mentioned before, though this hasn’t proven easily replicable during testing, we’re committed to tracking down the cause and squashing it.
Zombies Host Migration
We’re aware that matches in Zombies have been ending when the host leaves the game, and we’re planning a future update to address this. Thanks for your patience as we work on the solution.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 is available now on PC, Xbox One, and PS4.
