Activision just nuked MW2 and MW3 leaderboards and it's making me nervous about live-service stuff

Activision’s Latest Call Of Duty Announcement Is Upsetting And Bewildering Fans

So Activision dropped a little bomb yesterday. They're permanently disabling leaderboards and combat records for Modern Warfare 2 (2022) and Modern Warfare 3 (2023) ahead of MW4's launch in October. Their reason? "Optimizing backend services." Sure, that makes total sense.

Fans are understandably pissed. Years of stats, gone. People are posting SpongeBob memes about how there's "no correlation" between old leaderboards and new game servers. Reddit's full of comments saying the leaderboards were already broken anyway, which is somehow even worse. They couldn't even keep them functional, and now they're just pulling the plug.

I'm sitting here thinking about GTA 6 and how Rockstar handles this stuff. GTA Online is still running on a decade-old game, and while it's not perfect, they haven't just deleted everyone's progress because a new title is coming. Can you imagine if Rockstar announced they were wiping GTA Online stats to "optimize" for GTA 6? The community would riot.

MW4 drops October 23, barely a month before GTA 6 on November 19. That timing is wild. Two of the biggest games of the year right on top of each other. But one company is out here deleting player history with a vague excuse, and the other is (hopefully) building something that respects the time we put in.

I'm not saying Rockstar is perfect. They've got their own issues with monetization and re-releases. But at least they're not pulling the rug on years of player stats with a hand-wave about backend optimization. If anything, this makes me more confident in my GTA 6 pre-order. At least I know my Vice City adventures won't get memory-holed when the next thing comes along.

Source: GameSpot · Curated content.