Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Players Rotate Between Wanting to Skip the Winner's Circle and Liking It Because It Gives Them Time to Check Their Phone Between Matches

ign.com:

With Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 now a week old, fans of the Multiplayer portion of the game are having their say on the controversial — and unskippable — Winner’s Circle feature.

The Winner’s Circle shows the top three performing players from the winning team after the Play of the Game has run its course. Under normal circumstances it lets each player who does well enough to appear on the podium perform an emote, most of which are either toxic or hilarious depending on your point of view.

Black Ops 6 isn’t the first Call of Duty to feature The Winner’s Circle mechanic, as it’s appeared in the likes of Black Ops 3, Infinite Warfare, and WWII. But it’s impact feels particularly pronounced this year, and the debate around it was only exacerbated by the recent release of fan-favorite map Nuketown, which in addition to the Play of the Game and the Winner’s Circle, shows a short cutscene of the map getting nuked before players return to the lobby.

There are a number of issues players have brought up with Black Ops 6’s Winner’s Circle. The main one is the time it takes to view: players have to sit through the Winner’s Circle whether they make the cut or not, and the handful of seconds it lasts can feel like an age when all you want to do is get into another match or check your loadout. Because of this, some players have called on Treyarch to add a skip button or even pull the Winner's Circle from the game entirely.

Then there’s the issue of toxicity, with some saying the ability to taunt your opponent after a victory discourages them from continuing to play having just lost a game. The slow camera zoom into the top player's face doesn't help matters.

Treyarch actually nerfed the Winner’s Circle following feedback from the Black Ops 6 beta so it had a shorter overall duration and “mitigated emote spam” for launch. During those preview weekends, players were able to spam emotes in the Winner’s Circle, which was certainly more frustrating to watch. Currently, you’re only able to