Season 1 of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 has barely had time to settle in, and the Zombies crowd is already burnt out on one thing: the new event grind that feels more like unpaid overtime than a game mode, even if you jump in with something like a CoD BO7 Bot Lobby to warm up. People expected new things to mess around with, a fun loop to dive into after work, but what they got instead is a recycled leaderboard event from Black Ops 6 that almost nobody was asking to see again. Players are calling it out on Reddit, with one post summing it up pretty well as “another FOMO event to reward the unemployed,” and you can see why that line stuck so fast.

How The Event Really Works

The setup looks simple on the surface. There is a leaderboard, you play matches, you earn points. The in-game text even spells it out: your rewards at the end are tied to where you sit on that board. You can pick up a few extra bits for finishing challenges, but the desirable stuff, the skins and items that actually stand out, depends on your final ranking. So you are not really playing against the Zombies anymore. You are playing against every other person in the playlist, including the ones who can afford to sit there all day. If you only have a couple of evenings a week to play, you are walking into a race that is basically already decided.

The Numbers Behind The Grind

Once you start looking at the scoring, the problem becomes pretty obvious. A basic Zombie kill is worth 1 point. A T.E.D.D task bumps that up to 50. Disabling OSCAR gives you 100. Then the big one: a full Quest clear hands over 5,000 points in one go. On paper it sounds fine, like there are different ways to play. But you do not need long in a match to figure out that only the Quest really matters. If you actually care about climbing that leaderboard, you are going to ignore almost everything else and just repeat Quest runs as fast as you can. It turns the mode into a loop where you stop thinking about what is fun and just ask yourself how quickly you can reset.

Where Casual Players Fall Behind

This is where reality kicks in for anyone with a job, school, or family. Say you log on after work, maybe two hours to spare, three if you push it. You bang out a couple of Quests, feel like you did alright, maybe even had some good laughs with your squad. Then you check the leaderboard and see players who are already sitting tens of thousands of points ahead, because they have been running the same Quest on repeat for ten or twelve hours. You can play well and still feel like you are sliding backwards. It is not that the quests are bad. It is that the only real way to stay competitive is to no-life the mode, and that is just not an option for most people.

FOMO, Rewards, And What Players Actually Want

The end result is this constant sense that you are missing out, not because you play badly, but because you do not have unlimited free time. The event feels tuned for streamers and sweats who can treat the game like a full-time gig, while everyone else just watches the best rewards drift out of reach. Most players just want to jump into Zombies, shoot some undead, and earn cool gear at a steady pace, not feel like they are being punished for having a life outside the game, which is why some folks look for safer, more relaxed ways to play such as CoD BO7 Bot Lobbies buy.