With Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War having such a heavy focus on online multiplayer, cheaters were always inevitable. But while Activision and developers Raven Software and Treyarch have taken steps in the past to try and prevent it from happening, there have been many criticisms of the games' anti-cheat measures to the point where some might argue that they're pretty ineffective.
Fortunately, Activision did promise to improve said measures and, over the last month, Raven Software has stated that it has been rolling out massive ban waves for Call of Duty: Warzone. Only yesterday, it confirmed over Twitter that another wave of bans has been issued. This is good timing as the second season of content is expected to start very soon and, with many new players likely to join thanks to the free week access (which includes Cold War's multiplayer and Zombies mode), Activision no doubt wants to make sure those players stick around and aren't immediately put off by rampant cheating.
This is the third ban wave and although Raven Software hasn't shared how many players have been banned (it was previously reported that over 60,000 accounts were banned at the beginning of February), it's still good news. Hopefully, following improvements to the anti-cheat measures, cheating will be much less of a problem, as it has even spread into competitive events. While losing a casual match to cheaters is infuriating enough, it's especially bad when prize money is on the line and only threatens to delegitimize such events and discourage people from taking part. Some professional players have even quit the game as a result.
It will admittedly be a while until players know for certain how effective the bans have been. There's always a chance it will end up being a short term solution and the cheaters will figure out a way to come back or bypass the improved measures, which would only start the cycle all over again.
Both Warzone and Cold War are unfortunately plagued with other issues too besides the cheating. There have been frequent complaints regarding glitches and bugs that range from being simply irritating to outright game-breaking. Examples include loadout drops being dropped into the ocean, making them unobtainable, and one seemingly reoccurring glitch dubbed the infinite stim glitch that allows players to spam the healing stim and essentially make themselves invincible.
Despite all these issues, though, the Call of Duty series is performing extremely well financially. Black Ops Cold War has even already become one of the best-selling games ever in the US market after only launching in November.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.