Modern Warfare 3’s party XP boost is alienating solo players

Modern Warfare 3 players are none too pleased with a recent change to the XP system, which gives more XP to people who play in larger groups.

As part of the recent update to Modern Warfare 3, the game’s XP system got a tweak that hands out more XP to players who are with a group, with it increasing for each person added to the party.

This new system is a great change for those who consistently play with squads, but it also leaves out those who don’t.

While it makes sense to encourage people to play together, giving an advantage for doing so is going to cause some toxicity.

Over on the MW3 subreddit, people are already upset with this tweak to Modern Warfare 3 XP, with one user having been annoyed with the parties before this was introduced: “Parties playing already having a massive advantage, this is just annoying now.”

One issue is that when a solo player goes up against a team of people partied up, they are naturally at a disadvantage. Now, give that party a boost in XP, and people will surely be stacking up just to get that, further complicating the issue.

“Not a fan of this tbh, just encourages playing in full stacks and punishes solo players. Can you at least show in pre game lobby when you’re about to play against parties then? Or give a Mercenary playlist would be great.”

Mercenary playlists used to be a constant of CoD multiplayer, where only solo players could queue up for it, which gave a nice way to counteract the benefits of parties.

But without a dedicated Mercenary playlist, parties have even more of an advantage and people have more of an incentive to run through multiplayer in massive groups.

One Modern Warfare 3 player is so upset by this change that they regret paying for the Season 2 battle pass.

It’s understandable that as a multiplayer game, Modern Warfare 3 is going to push playing with others more so than other games, but this seems a flawed way to do it.

Because the people partying up have most likely already been doing so, and the issue was with those who played solo. There still is no easy way for those players to find people to play with.

If the devs are going to change the system to be like this, then they also need to stop disbanding lobbies after every match. Doing this would allow players to get to know each other better, possibly friend one another, and then party up to get the bonus XP.

As one user says, “Now don’t disband lobbies so I can make friends.”

As it stands, the system just doesn’t make sense and isn’t going to fix the problem at hand. Instead, it’s going to alienate the solo players and make it more of a slog for them to play.