January 2026 and I'm still salty about how close I came to that Astra Malorum "Shower" camo in Black Ops 7. You've seen it in lobbies: shooting stars sliding across the gun like it's alive. I kept telling myself I'd shrug it off and just grind mastery, but every time someone flashes it on an AK-27, it stings. I even caught myself browsing stuff like CoD BO7 Bot Lobbies just to see what people are doing to speed things up, and that's not usually my vibe.
How The Bracket Got Me
The rules were simple on paper and brutal in practice: finish top 5 in your bracket, or you're out of luck. Not "pretty good," not "top 10%," just five names. I lived on Citadelle des Morts for three days straight. XM325 for the all-rounder work, Ray Gun variant when the map tried to bully me. I'd slam through the main quest, Acts 1 through 3 in under 45 minutes if the RNG didn't mess about, then switch to courtyard training for the long haul. Doppelghast conversions were the key for multipliers. I hit 58,000 points and went to sleep sitting in third, feeling safe for once.
One Night, Two Places Down
I woke up and it was over. Seventh place. Somebody slipped in with 62k like they'd been waiting for the last hour to pounce. That's the part that really hurts—there wasn't time to answer it. All that effort and the reward I got was "Cratered" for top 10%. It's fine. Lunar texture, decent on a few builds. But it's not the animated flex, is it. And yeah, the bracket sorting made it worse. You'd see mates in easier pools landing Shower with scores that wouldn't even sniff my leaderboard. It didn't feel like skill. It felt like luck plus timing.
What Players Do When They're Tired
Since then I've gone back to the normal climb: Gold, Diamond, Nebula. It's slower than people admit. Headshots in public matches, multi-kills when spawns are chaos, teammates stealing the last tag—same old grind. So you start hearing the chatter. Bot lobbies, "easy" camo sessions, the promise of 200 kills without sweating your brain out. I get why it's tempting, especially after a rigged-feeling bracket event. Still, I can't pretend it's the same kind of win. It's more like paying to skip the queue, and some days that sounds oddly reasonable.
Next Time I'm Not Going Solo
If Treyarch runs another mid-January blowout for the Season 1 finale, I'm switching up completely. No more solo queuing and hoping my bracket stays quiet overnight. I'm building a squad, scheduling runs, and treating the points race like a job. And if the wider grind gets too exhausting, I can see why people look at services that sell game currency or items, or offer faster progress options through places like RSVSR and think, "Yeah, maybe I just want my time back" before jumping into one more zombie train anyway.
