Warzone devs planning update to stop ‘taps’ issue in Resurgence Ranked Play

In response to community members complaining about players unfairly getting rewarded Skill Rating (SR) for assists, Treyarch laid out plans today to resolve the issue.

Warzone ranked Resurgence features seven different skill divisions to progress through before earning a spot in the Top 250. Players advance to a new skill division by earning SR, which is acquired through placements, kills, assists, and squad kills. Before each game, a deployment fee deducts SR, and Ranked Play Resurgence introduces a new death fee that makes players lose SR each time they die during a round, to slow the rank-up progress.

At the end of every match, players see a breakdown of how much SR they earned or lost, but a bug prevents players from properly tracking how many assists they had. In the season two update, the devs fixed that issue, and it uncovered a massive flaw in the Ranked Play format community members dubbed “taps.”

What are ‘taps’ in Warzone Ranked Play Resurgence?

Taps refers to when a player downs an enemy, but they have their teammate finish off the downed enemy to earn SR for getting an assist. Community members slammed the strategy, as it unfairly awarded teams SR for getting unearned points. Taps also disrupted the flow of matches, as players would guard a downed enemy until their teammate could come over and finish the job.

Abusing this controversial strategy also appeared in WZ2 Ranked Play on Al Mazrah, but it didn’t gain as much traction because assists are more common on the small-scale Resurgence map. Treyarch finally addressed the issue plaguing competitive matches on Fortune’s Keep.

Warzone devs reveal plans to remove taps from Ranked Play Resurgence

“In a future update, we will adjust how Kill & Assist SR is awarded when engaging with downed enemies to mitigate ‘tap’ gameplay and increase competitive integrity of the SR system,” Treyarch announced on Feb. 14.

The devs didn’t specially mention a timeframe for the update, but did let fans in on what they can expect to change. Once the update goes live, players will only recieve kill or assist credit if they down an eliminated player or damage an eliminated player shortly before they get downed. If that player didn’t do damage shortly before the enemy was downed, they will earn squadmate kill SR rather than assist SR. After the same update, users will earn squadmate kill SR regardless if they are alive or not.

Treyarch explained the changes will “streamline gameplay” by removing any benefit from tapping, thus stopping the odd “stop-and-start” gameplay loop caused by squadmates waiting for someone else to finish a downed player.