Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare dev hands out "reverse boosting" bans
Grenade yourself, get ahead.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare developer Sledgehammer Games is banning players who deliberately kill themselves to "reverse boost" their levels.
The reverse boost tactic requires you to continually commit suicide during a multiplayer match (dropping a grenade at your feet is a popular method) so you are next placed with lower-level players.
By cleaning up in the resulting game, players can progress faster than if they simply played games normally against match-made opponents.
The tactic is enough of a problem that Sledgehammer boss Michael Condrey has addressed it in a new blog post, and warned that offenders will face being hit by the studio's ban hammer.
"Playing at home, I've been randomly matched with players doing this and it's incredibly frustrating to lose based largely on my team being down a contributing teammate," Condrey wrote.
"We've also had a lot of players bring up their same concern about playing in matches with these players. No one wants to lose an objective based match by effectively being outnumbered while their teammate shoots grenades into their own forehead 100 times in the corner.
"It's not right, and it hurts you and your team's online experience... and we have increased our focus on reverse boost banning to combat the growing issue. No one is trying to restrict the fun factor of playing Advanced Warfare with this policy, nor are we actively banning against particular styles of play, like trick shots. However, we have a low tolerance approach to people who ruin the experience for others through cheating, boosting, reverse boosting or being caught with toxic emblems in game."
