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While Call of Duty and Battlefield have always had a pretty heated rivalry, things are being taken to a new, almost bizarre level this year with the debut of Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1.

The most intense battleground is not a series of reddit threads or in the comments of news articles about the games, it’s on YouTube, where there’s currently a war going on to bury Call of Duty’s trailer in dislikes, and ascend Battlefield 1’s trailer to the high heavens.

Whatever is going on, it’s working.

Last week, Call of Duty Infinite Warfare’s reveal trailer was the most disliked video game video of all time with about 300,000 dislikes. Today, it’s the most disliked trailer ever, and the 8th most disliked video period in YouTube history with a frankly unbelievable 1.2 million dislikes.

On the other side, Battlefield’s numbers are no less significant. The Battlefield 1 trailer has now passed a million likes, putting it in the top 250 most liked videos ever, and making it, by far, the most liked trailer of all time, across movies, TV or video games.

These numbers are not normal. Take the reveal trailers of wildly popular games like Grand Theft Auto V and Skyrim, games that have 280K and 50K likes respectively. Or even with movies, the official Marvel trailer for The Avengers has 82K likes. The Dark Knight Rises has 86K.

To repeat, Battlefield 1 has gotten a million likes in the four days since its release. Call of Duty has 1.2 million dislikes in a week.

I started drafting this article yesterday, and by the time I’m going to publish now, both have amassed another 2-300,000 likes/dislikes. Refreshing the page, both are getting about 5-10 a second. This is not normal. 95% of the other videos in these most liked/disliked lists are music videos that people play repeatedly for obvious reasons, and many have taken years to amass their numbers.

I just don’t believe that anyone has the capacity to organize a campaign to massively like/dislike these two trailers on this level. Rather, it has to be some kind of botting push. The only thing that makes me think this might not be the case is that YouTube seems to have no interest stepping in, but if I was Activision, I would certainly want this investigated.

As Erik Kain noted in a post earlier today, all of this is getting very stupid.

Yes, there are fundamental issues here that are important to discuss. The Infinite Warfare trailer is not very good, and the decision to remain in the future as a setting is questionable. The Battlefield 1 trailer is great, and WWI is a more interesting idea.

With that said, come on. The Infinite Warfare trailer is not 50x as bad as any other video game trailer that’s been released, nor is Battlefield 1 50x as good. Initially, these YouTube wars were interesting, but now, racking up millions of dislikes in a matter of days in clearly unnatural ways, they’re just silly, and no longer really mean anything, if they ever did. It just seems like the internet has figured out a new “protest metric,” as demonstrated by the recent reaction to the Ghostbusters reboot trailer which became the most disliked movie trailer ever with a week or so. Could it be better? Sure. Is it the worst trailer of all time? Certainly not, but someone has figured out a way to make it seem that way, and like Battlefield and Call of Duty, I question how many of Ghostbusters’ dislikes are genuine. Something is going on here that YouTube needs to look into.

And while I fundamentally agree with the fact that the Infinite Warfare trailer was worse in concept and execution than Battlefield 1’s, we have to take a step back here and understand that we know almost nothing about these games, and have seen nothing from them other than sixty seconds of footage and a few screenshots. How much can we possibly know about them to have this “Call of Duty will be murdered this year by Battlefield” narrative the internet is currently obsessed with?

Further descriptions of Infinite Warfare, which involve a customized space-fighter and breaching and boarding missions in open space…actually sounds kind of cool, and I would like to see how it works in practice. And for as good as Battlefield 1 looked, filming a trailer “in-engine” is in no way an accurate representation of how the game will actually look in practice, and I have my doubts people will be thrilled about returning to a time when mobility was lacking in shooters, as much as they may want to get away from the future.

I am not saying Infinite Warfare will be better than Battlefield 1. And I will say outright that judging by these two trailers, Battlefield 1 certainly looks more interesting. But no one has the information at this point to start shoveling dirt on Call of Duty’s grave while holding up Battlefield 1 as some sort of paragon of video game excellence, all based on two total minutes of footage between the games.

There are a lot of dumb fanboy wars in the business, but this one, trying to flood YouTube as a way to bolster or sink the marketing for one game or another, is beyond idiotic, especially if it’s being manipulated by botters posing as “upset gamers.”

Yes, Infinite Warfare has a lot to prove and I do fundamentally think a mistake was made setting the game in the future. But this level of hostility toward the game has been completely unwarranted, and so has the desire to treat Battlefield 1 like the second coming when it also has a lot to prove.

So, maybe Infinite Warfare will pass Justin Bieber and be the most disliked video ever, while Battlefield 1 ascends into immortal Gangam Style-level likes, but at this point, it means nothing. The core of the story is important, fans wishing COD did something different, and Battlefield filling that gap, but everything else? It’s just noise, and there’s honestly nothing more to say until we see more, a lot more, from each of these games.