Vanguard players slam devs over “pay to win” Whitley LMG in Season 2

Call of Duty: Vanguard players are calling for major nerfs to the newly added Whitley LMG, calling the Season 2 weapon “overpowered” and “pay to win”. 

After a delay to allow Sledgehammer and Raven to maximize the efficiency of their patches, Warzone and Vanguard Season 2 dropped on February 14.

While Warzone’s patch sought to solve as many bugs and glitches as possible, Vanguard’s brought a couple of new maps and weapons to the game, including the Ice Axe and Armaguerra 43 SMG.

Amongst the plethora of new content added to SHG’s annual CoD instalment was also the Whitley LMG, which has proved more controversial than any other weapon addition.

When added to the game, the Whitley was designed to be high damage but, with no real weaknesses in terms of handling or recoil, it has been incredibly powerful.

Drawing attention to the weapon on Reddit was player ‘Nezev3‘, who said that they were “genuinely curious how this gun got past pre-release balance tuning, [it’s] just unfair.”

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Attached was a clip of them destroying enemies with the Whitley, taking out enemies in milliseconds as they flew forwards on Das Haus. Among the kills are a number of fairly lucky wall-bangs, illustrating just how deadly the LMG is through surfaces.

Plenty of Redditors echoed the comments, criticizing the weapon as “pay-to-win” and “overpowered”. Many suggested it has been dropped too strong to encourage players to spend money and earn it, only to be nerfed in a future update.

One said: “They always make battle pass guns OP, so people rush to level them, spending lots of money and time, promptly before being nerfed a week later.”

Another commented: “When will you understand that it’s a pay-to-win lite scheme? A shameless one at that.”

Currently, the Whitley LMG can two-shot opponents fairly regularly, on top of having a massive magazine. They combine for an absolute behemoth of a weapon – and one that players want to be weakened as soon as possible.