In a truly gut-wrenching series of events, popular Call of Duty streamer NoahJ456's remarkable 6-hour Zombies run in CoD: Black Ops - Cold War was suddenly cut short by an affliction that not even a ray gun can stop: server bugs.
The tragedy occurred as Noah was cresting round 208 in a solo run of Zombies. After almost six hours of progress, he was on pace to be the first to finish round 256 (the last round you can reach before the game stops counting) and exfiltrate safely. Not long after reading a viewer's chat message about losing a Zombies match to server issues, Noah's came to a grinding halt, followed by a black screen that eventually called an error message with a grimly funny name—Zebra 112 Vicious Stallion.
It was hard to watch. If you've given the new Zombies mode a try in Cold War, you'll know how absurdly hard it is to last the first 20 rounds with friends, let alone making it to 200 completely alone. After days spent only playing Zombies (he hasn't touched Campaign or Multiplayer yet), Noah had found a steady map rotation that allowed him to kite zambos into a chokepoint perfect or the ray gun's splash damage. Gassed up with six perks and the best weapons in the mode, it was just a matter of time until he reached his goal.
Noah was visibly (and understandably) frustrated as he closed the stream, but took the L from Activision with grace on Twitter.
The good news is that the "Vicious Stallion" server bug Noah encountered doesn't seem to be widespread. There are a few posts on the Cold War subreddit with examples Zombies matches ending with a server error, but they appear to be isolated instances for now.
That said, if my world record run of anything was ruined by a bug outside of my control, I probably wouldn't chance another attempt until it was resolved. Treyarch is moving quickly to resolve issues in the first week of Cold War. Earlier today, a major nerf for the MP5 dropped after the default SMG had been outclassing every other weapon since launch.
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