Thanks for all the free Double XP tokens, Modern Warfare 2 – it’s a shame they suck

Over the weekend, we learned that modern warfare 2 developer infinity guardianand editor activision, were made aware of some issues players were having with the Vault Edition of the game. Because players who purchased the $100 version of the game were given the same in-game unlock as players with other versions of the title, Activision promised to give anyone who owned the premium version of the game a set of bonuses.

“We understand there has been some confusion about an exclusive prize in the in-game store for the Vault Edition,” the statement from the official Call of Duty account read. “Therefore, we have decided to reward all players who currently own or purchase any version of MWII Vault Edition with 10 hours of Double XP Tokens and 10 hours of Double Weapon XP Tokens.”

If you didn’t have these tokens in your account at the time of writing, you should now. But the thing is, as it stands… these tokens are pretty useless, poorly implemented, and seem like a complete waste of time.

I activated a few of them in-game last night during my Modern Warfare 2 session (yes, I have the Vault Edition). I have 10 Double Weapon XP Tokens and 10 Double XP Tokens – Trying to build the game for more unlocks and better loadouts, I cracked open a few of them before jumping into a couple of Quick Play games on my own. I could talk about how miserable the solo queuing experience is in the game, but that’s a separate article; Right now, I want to talk about what a shitty experience it is to use these so-called apology tokens.

When you activate one, there is nowhere, nowhere! – in-game with a timer that tells you how much time you have left. The UI is completely useless if you want to quickly open a tab to see if it’s worth jumping into another Domination game, or if you’re better off going to dinner right now. When you finally get to the results screen to see the fruits of your labor, only the operator level tells you double the XP you’ve earned – weapons appear to have the same progression graphs as you would without opening a tab. Hmm.

I ended up popping a token on the hour; I didn’t need to worry about pulling out my phone and running a timer if I was only playing from 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm, right? But that got me thinking; Do these tokens only matter in the game or is there more to it than that?

If you play MW2 multiplayer correctly, you will be in and out of the Gunsmith a lot. Tweaking attachments and experimenting with different settings on your favorite weapons is part of the joy of Modern Warfare in its most recent incarnation, and jumping into menus between games is essential. Making sure you have good loadouts for various maps also helps – where would I be without a decent SMG-based loadout in Crown Raceway, right?

By charlieintelligence, it turns out that these tokens are active for… an hour. I guess it says that on the tin. But other games, even previous CoD games! – only counts the time in the game. So if you took out a weapon XP token, it would only start counting down to zero when you were actually in a match. Currently in MW2, once you open one, it will immediately start the countdown, whether you’re in a lobby, in the armorer, or even if you turn off the game. Since MW2 has some issues with bans and lobbies at the moment, that’s not ideal. No wonder the developers haven’t put in a timer to show you the real-time fuse burning down to zero.

So thanks for the chips, Infinity Ward. But I’m sure you won’t blame me for holding them back for now, and only burning them when they’re worth a bit more of my time.