What To Do If You Get The Data Corrupt, Reset Rank ‘Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare III’ And ‘Warzone’ Season 1 Error

Today marks the launch of the first season of Modern Warfare III and Warzone. The former gets a batch of new maps, the return of Gunfight and some other bells and whistles. Warzone gets a brand new map, Urzikstan, with a bunch of other changes to movement, loot and more.

The update is around 35GB, though PC players are seeing a smaller update followed by an additional download when they try to access Warzone. Some Xbox players are being required to install the entire 200-250GB game instead of just an update.

Almost everyone is getting an error message when the update finishes. It reads:

“Your data is corrupt or didn’t download properly. You must reset your rank and unlocks to continue.”

You are given a choice of “Yes” or “No” at this point, but no other information is presented, like what might happen if your rank and unlocks are “reset” which sounds quite ominous. Will you lose all your unlocked guns and items? Will you be kicked back to level 1? Lose campaign progression?

Actually, none of this will happen. Answering “Yes” gets you into the game but none of that stuff is reset at all. However, you will likely have all your loadouts wiped into oblivion. That’s what happened to my squadmates and I.

Sledgehammer is aware of the problem, tweeting “Players logging into Season 1 may see an incorrect error message stating their data is corrupt. Rest assured that your rank, unlocks and purchases are not lost, although Loadouts, customization, and certain settings may be reset.”

This is obviously a bit obnoxious and frustrating, but not as bad as losing your unlocks or purchases. I needed to go through and work on all my loadouts anyways, and I don’t mind starting over, though having Killstreaks reset was irksome because I didn’t realize it until I was already in a match.

Still, it’s not a huge deal even if it’s baffling that such an error would occur in the first place. This is hardly the first big Call Of Duty seasonal update of all time!

So far, I’m enjoying Season 1 outside of these hiccups. I haven’t played a ton on the new Warzone map yet, and the verdict is still out on both the new map and the changes to the game, but I definitely love that Gunfight is back in multiplayer and I really like both Meat and Greece as 6v6 maps and the new Gunfight map is also quite good. I wish they had ported more older maps—including MW19 Gunfight maps—over for this mode, however.

Have you encountered any issues in Season 1 so far? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.