Infinity Ward issues warning about Modern Warfare ‘rank reset’ bug

The massive January 22 update for Modern Warfare, unfortunately, features a serious issue that’s causing player data to become corrupted, forcing players to reset their ranks and unlocks to continue. Infinity Ward has issued a warning advising players on how to avoid having all of their progress reset.

Just days before the official launch of Call of Duty League, the Modern Warfare devs released a huge update that introduced the Crossbow, added additional loadouts, made weapon tuning adjustments, and more. The updated required 48GB of space on PC, 18.4GB on Xbox One, and 13.2GB on PlayStation 4.

However, it appears the patch added more than just fixes and features, as players began sharing screenshots of a very alarming error message that popped up when they loaded in.

The message reads “Your data is corrupt or didn’t download properly. You must reset your rank and unlocks to continue.”

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The game presents a Yes or No option. Infinity Ward tweeted out that they are aware of the issue, and advise players not to select either, and to “hard close their application.”

The developers thanked fans for their “patience” while they work on the issue, however the issued warning was met with more frustration than patience, with several players venting that they had already selected one of the options, some calling for more options, and other taking the opportunity to fire shots at the developers.

Some joked that this was an unofficial return of the Prestige system, a feature of previous games that let players reset progress once they maxed out everything.

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Activision and Infinity Ward are also collecting the Activision IDs of players who were affected by the reset before the warning was issued. If you were affected, you can respectfully reach out to Sr. Communications Manager Ashton Williams with your ID.

The actual update itself added the Crossbow weapon to the game, made a number of weapon balance changes, changed a rule in Domination regarding capturing flags, nullified headshot damage, and more.

Modern Warfare is no stranger to weird bugs and glitches, and while this one potentially has more serious ramifications than previous ones, the developers are typically quick when it comes to resolving them.

This is a developing story we will continue to update as more information becomes available.