‘Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare’ Players Who Resort to 'Reverse Boosting' Will Not be Tolerated Says Game Developer Sledgehammer

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare players are facing bans for "reverse boosting," the practice of killing yourself during multiplayer matches in order to lower stats and be paired with lesser players during the games that follow. In a correspondence to Digital Spy, Sledgehammer co-founder Michael Condrey wrote: "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. 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. Call of Duty is both social and competitive, and we respect and honour that. Part of the competition that is core to our values is that players do not adversely degrade their team's ability to compete fairly." He told the site that reverse boosting will not be tolerated.

Activision's Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was released November 4, 2014. Developed by Sledgehammer Games with High Moon Studios and Raven Software, the first-person shooter video game is now available for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and Microsoft Windows platforms. The game's single-player story follows Private Jack Mitchell of the US Marine Corps and his interaction with Atlas, a private military corporation that sells its services to the highest bidder. Compared with the previous games in the Call of Duty series, Advanced Warfare does not use a traditional heads-up display during gameplay. Instead, all information is relayed to the player via holographic projections from the weapon used for shooting. Aside from exo movements and other new mechanics, the general gunplay however remains unchanged. Also, after each mission, the player is given a certain amount of upgrade points based on performance which can be used to upgrade the exo suit, or weapons.

In related news, Softpedia reports that an update for Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare for the PC version will be available sometime next week. The updates for the game console versions have already been released previously. The update for Xbox One fixes the rare crashes in Exo Zombies and the 'save game' issues. The more major updates for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 versions include huge changelogs that contain in-game updates, weapons balancing updates, security updates and anti-cheat updates, UI, Challenge, Clan and Store updates. Sledgehammer reportedly assured that they will continue to provide consistent patches meant to improve the gameplay experience, saying, "We'll continue to update you on these improvements, and everything Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare."