It is honestly rough loading into Zombies now when you know there is a route that turns the mode into a joke, and the whole thing starts to feel closer to a scripted CoD BO7 Bot Lobby than an actual survival fight.
The Old Rush
For a lot of us, Zombies used to be about that constant edge-of-your-seat feeling. You were kiting a messy horde round a corner, checking your ammo, praying your last mag would carry you through one more wave. You messed up a slide or a reload, you paid for it. When you hit a high round, you knew it meant something because you had to learn spawns, timings, little movement tricks. It was sweaty, it was a bit stressful, and that was the point.
The Ashwood Exploit
Then you drop into Ashwood Sheriff's Office and you see this crossbow setup that just wipes all of that away. You stand in one boring corridor, line yourself up once, and that is it. The zombies file in like they are stuck on rails, straight into a wall of bolts. You are not tracking heads, you are not juggling windows, you are basically just holding down fire. The infinite ammo loop means you barely glance at the HUD. People who are not even that good at the game can park there and cruise to triple-digit rounds without ever really learning how to survive properly.
When Playing Turns Into Idling
It gets weirder when you realise how close this is to being fully AFK. You have probably seen screenshots of runs sitting around Round 422 and higher where the player barely had to move. Tape the mouse, set a simple macro, and the game plays itself. At that point you are not climbing the board because you adapted to tougher waves. You are just feeding a machine. The mode starts to feel like an idle clicker running in the background while you do something else, with the round counter drifting towards that hard cap of 999 and no real danger ever creeping in.
What It Does To The Mode
You can see why people lean on it. The XP, the calling cards, the flex on the leaderboard, it all still triggers, and nobody wants to spend hours grinding the hard way when there is a free lane. But when the strongest tactic removes your decision-making almost entirely, the heart of Zombies gets hollowed out. There is no rush when you never have to clutch a revive or manage a bad pull. The whole thing turns into a dull farm, more like ticking off chores than playing a shooter. Watching the community slowly shift from chasing skillful high rounds to chasing the easiest scriptable run feels pretty sad, like we swapped a tense survival mode for a cheap CoD BO7 Bot Lobby in RSVSR and just hoped no one would notice.