Warzone isn’t a stranger to a glitch or exploit. Being able to duplicate Juggernaut suits, fly helicopters under the map, or become completely invisible are all things that have cropped up over the 10 months since the mode launched. None of those are as infamous as the Infinite Stim Glitch however, which has returned once more this week, and it’s more widespread than ever.
The glitch has reared its ugly head a few times already. It first infiltrated Modern Warfare’s multiplayer last July, before appearing in Warzone in early October and mid-November, only to be patched a few days later each time.
The stim glitch lets you sit in the gas anywhere on the map, healing yourself with the Medical Syringe tactical item over and over again, presumably for ever, or until Activision turns the server off at least.
Anyone not doing that will then be killed as the gas closes in, resigned to being cheated out of a win, leaving the exploiting player(s) alive somewhere else on the map for the free Warzone victory. You can see below exactly how it works.
It’s a frustrating glitch that’s returned to the game over the last 24 hours, and more players seem to be using it than ever before.
When it last cropped up, you’d come across a player or team using it maybe once in every three games. It was frustrating, but you could still win in the majority of matches. Not many players used the infinite stim glitch, even though it isn’t a tough one to do, causing the majority of matches to go to the deserved winners.
This time though, things are different. Now that the stim glitch is so widely known, thanks to its previous appearances, its use is far more widespread. Playing for a few hours last night, there was no more than one or two rounds in which someone wasn’t taking advantage of the exploit to try and get a free win.
As it turned out, the win wasn’t always free though. Sometimes, more than one team would be using it, so the winner was decided by whoever got bored last.
In one game in particular, my team was the final one left alive in the final zone (which would ordinarily be a win) but there were still five teams left in total.
Somewhere around the map, four separate teams were using the glitch. One was in Promenade East, one was in Prison (outside even the first zone), and two were God knows where. They’d clearly been sat there for up to half an hour, just repeatedly pressing the tactical item button, and there was nothing we could do about it.
Who won? We’ll never know. But I like to think they’re still there now, 12 hours later, finger on the edge of falling off as they continue to stim endlessly. I can only imagine how boring that must be – all to get one win added to your total on the leaderboards. Personally, I don’t get the appeal of winning in that way.
A bug like this appearing once is fair enough, it’s something that can easily slip though the gaps, but for it to keep rising from the dead every month or two is incredibly frustrating for the majority of fair players. It makes Warzone unplayable for a few days as the community waits for another fix. With the DMR-led weapon balance issues that are already plaguing the battle royale title, it didn’t need a glitch like this to return, and Raven Software really needs to fix it quickly.
Since it’s been supposedly fixed in the past, only to return once more, maybe another short-term in-game fix is something that should be considered. Removing stims entirely isn’t an option, since it would mess with the meta of Modern Warfare’s standard multiplayer, which shares loadouts, but a game time limit could work.
Raven could add a 20 or 30 second countdown to the end of the game, once the final gas zone has closed in, with no-one winning if it ends before there’s only one player (or team) left standing. It’s not a perfect solution, but games rarely last that long anyway and it would remove any benefit of sitting in the game as long as possible.
Players might choose to sit in the gas, trying to shoot the final team from there and win that way, but it’ll remove the ability to sit on the other side of the map for half an hour, ruining any chance of another team winning.
While a permanent fix for the infinite stim glitch could take a while, a hotfix of some kind needs to arrive as soon as possible, because Warzone is unplayable at the moment… and not for the first time.
Published: Jan 12, 2021 10:50 am