Call of Duty’s lag situation is only getting worse and needs to be fixed

Server stability in a competitive FPS is of the utmost priority for a developer; if their infrastructure is unable to offer smooth gameplay with zero desync, then players jump ship. Call of Duty finds itself in a minefield of player-reported issues regarding packet loss, lag, and desync, and now it's time for some answers.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 lag and packet loss

Throughout the last Season in Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone more and more players are standing up to draw attention to the unstable servers and lag in CoD lobbies. Whether you are dropping into Resurgence or the big map in Warzone, or you are loading up a Search and Destroy, there is a chance you'll be hit with some terrible lag or packet burst.

Reddit user Confident-Village769 hopped onto the Modern Warfare 3 subreddit to complain about their laggy experiences with the game. They supply not one, not two, and not three, but four examples of their struggles. The obvious question to ask here is whether Confident-Village769 has weak enough internet to cause these issues. They claim 1500MB internet, however, so that is unlikely to be the problem.

If this issue had only one person showcasing their lag then maybe it could be explained away by looking at the service provider or construction in their area—many factors affect your internet speed and connection. However, Confident-Village isn't the only one experiencing these problems.

Over on the sister subreddit of CODWarzone, user Luerro dropped a thread to discuss a fix for extreme packet loss reaching 24%. Unfortunately, there wasn't much anyone could offer as a solution to the problem—everyone pointed the finger at Activision's horrible servers.

Players in the thread are all outraged by their consistent issues with bad latency, packet loss, and lag. The consensus is that these are issues from Activision's servers and there's generally nothing any individual player can do to apply a fix. Some commenters offer the ethernet cable as a potential solution, but given the myriad of people affected by Call of Duty servers, it is unlikely that change would eliminate the issue immediately.

Reddit is not the only place fans have been visiting to air their frustration; X (Twitter) is overflowing with fans sharing their experiences. CarlosBitMe shared a screenshot of their packet loss reaching 27%—an unacceptable number.

Not everyone was seeing such egregious amounts of packet loss: iizroberto posted a video that showed a consistent 5% packet loss and while that is substantially lower than Carlos' experience, any amount of desync is completely unacceptable for a competitive FPS.

No matter where you look players are complaining about the consistent problems with servers and it's time Activision addresses the issue and works on a fix. The pessimist in me expects that nothing will change until the release of Black Ops 6 where new server infrastructure can (maybe) be put in place.

That's everything we have on the Call of Duty server issues. If you're looking for similar content check out CoD Fallout bundle labeled “lazy” by fans, Black Ops 6 weapon leaks include SA87 (SA80) and LW3 Tundra (L96A1), and more on Pro Game Guides.