Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s Much-Maligned Gaia Operator Skin Is Now Temporarily Disabled

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Well, it’s finally happened. After announcing that they would disable Call of Duty’s infamously hard-to-see Gaia and Gaia BlackCell Operator Skins for the Nova Operator in a Reddit AMA, Sledgehammer Games has gone and pulled the figurative (literal?) trigger.

Players will no longer be able to equip the problematic skins until they are “re-enabled in a future update,” according to the official Call of Duty Updates account on X/Twitter. Sledgehammer did not comment on when said future update might be released.

The move has been a long time coming. The Gaia and Gaia BlackCell Operator Skins have been giving the Call of Duty community fits since it was first introduced in Modern Warfare 2 during Season 6, which debuted in late September. Modern Warfare 3 allows players to bring forward any weapons and skins they’ve unlocked, purchased, or otherwise acquired in Modern Warfare 2, including the Gaia skins.

This isn’t the first time Sledgehammer has had to tweak what the community has come to call the “Groot” skins, so named because of the resemblance the tree-as-fashion cosmetic so closely resembles everyone’s favorite Guardians of the Galaxy sapling. Sledgehammer quickly implemented a fix in October to make the skin more visible in Modern Warfare 2, but it seems that bringing the skin into Modern Warfare 3 opened some old, hard-to-see wounds, particularly on maps like Estate and Wasteland. Naturally, the Call of Duty community was not pleased, and has often gone so far as to call the skins “pay-to-win.”

Perhaps acknowledging the extent of the community’s discontent, the announcement that the skins have been “temporarily disabled” until they can be fixed is the very first item in today’s Modern Warfare 3 patch notes.

Unfortunately, details on what those fixes might look like were vague:

“Adjustments to improve the visibility of the Gaia Operator Skins are underway,” the patch notes read. “Until these changes can be released to all players, these items will be unavailable to equip in MWIII.”

The patch notes also detail several other updates, including fixing glitches and adjusting spawn points on specific maps, addressing known exploits, cleaning up bugs in the user interface, and improving progression tracking for several challenges. Hopefully, the fixes related to the Gaia and Gaia BlackCell skins arrive quickly.

Still, hard-to-see skins are the least of the problems facing Sledgehammer after Modern Warfare 3’s troubled launch. The single-player campaign was nearly universally regarded as a disappointment, but the bigger issue has been the bugs, glitches, and exploits plaguing Modern Warfare 3’s multiplayer. The list of problems is long: several maps had to be pulled early on due to spawn issues; it takes nearly 76 hours to grind out Modern Warfare 3’s most desirable camo, and snaking, a hilarious-looking movement glitch, has returned from previous games.

For more on Modern Warfare 3, check out our review of the campaign and the multiplayer, all of the details on Season One, and the changes Sledgehammer is planning to implement in future updates. If you’re playing the multiplayer, be sure to check out our guides for the Best Modern Warfare III Loadouts and Class Setups, and guide to Modern Warfare III’s Zombies Mode.