It has been a rough few years for the competitive gaming community as games like Call of Duty, Destiny 2, Overwatch 2, and many more struggle to provide players with a reasonable set of rewards for their achievements.
One of the best parts of playing video games is being able to play a game well and receive rewards equal to the accomplishments that have been made during time within the game. However, many games have been slacking over the years and turning a simple game mode into a slog of long grinds and painful setbacks.
Competitive Game Modes Become Harder to Enjoy Due to a Lack of Rewards
Competitive game modes have always been quite popular within the gaming community, especially those that provide player vs. player combat. Similar to games like Call of Duty, Destiny 2, and many more.
Unfortunately, it is becoming increasingly harder for players to enjoy these game modes as developers are making it harder to earn ranks within their games while also reducing the quality of rewards to next to nothing.
For example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3‘s multiplayer CDL game mode allows players to compete against other players in numerous objective-based game modes.
After completing these matches, players are able to get points towards ranks, which ultimately will provide rewards once the season ends, but sadly, these points are difficult to come by.
Even when players can win in their matches with high scores, they barely receive 150-200 points, which is a drop in the bucket, especially once they reach higher ranks and face harder challenges.
Understandably, there are extra ways to get points, which is by completing challenges, but these are very rare and also only provide a small number of points towards a player’s rank, making it barely worth it to play the game mode.
The Points Aren’t the Only Drawback, as Rewards Are Also Fizzling Out the Competition
Sadly, earning ranks within competitive game modes isn’t the only issue, as the rewards for climbing those ranks are barely worth the effort it takes to grind through the tough matches.
One of the most common sets of rewards players will get within a competitive game mode will be customizable rewards that will only change the style of armor and weapons depending on the game that is being played.
One example of this would be Overwatch 2, in which players can grind through the competitive game mode to earn a ranked specific currency that can be used to purchase weapon customizations that can only be purchased with said currency.
At the time of writing, there are only two weapon customizations within Overwatch 2 that can be earned this way: one is a gold skin, and one is a jade.
To make things worse, purchasing these weapon customizations is extremely expensive with each being worth 3,000 points and must be purchased for each character, meaning that buying the jade customization will only work on the one chosen character you pick, rather than for all of them.
This isn’t the only time that games have restricted rewards behind points and ranks, as Destiny 2 also blocked specific weapons behind its competitive ranks a long time ago.
Back when Beyond Light was released in 2020, Destiny 2 went through a process known as sunsetting, which blocked off certain weaponry from being upgraded, essentially making it useless.
During the sunsetting period, two weapons were removed from the competitive game mode rewards. These two weapons at the time were the only rewards worth grinding through the competitive ranks as they were highly effective and sought after.
These weapons were the Luna’s Howl and the Not Forgotten; at the time, they were two of the best PvP weapons available. But even with the Luna’s Howl coming back to life recently, and the old version of the Not Forgotten being usable again, it still doesn’t change the fact that the competitive game mode is still a pointless grind with no rewards at the end of the tunnel.
What do you think about these games providing nothing worthwhile after the grind players have to go through to earn them? Let us know if there are other games you feel don’t reward you enough in the comments below!
