While Call of Duty: Warzone continues to be incredibly popular with players, one aspect that the game has constantly struggled with is cheating. Considering that the game is free to play, anyone is capable of creating an account and logging in, which is partly why platforms like the PC have experienced a rising tide of hackers. Over the past year, frustrations have continued to rise among players as the seemingly endless wave of cheating and hacking doesn't appear to have an end in sight.
Activision and Raven Software continue to try and stem the tide of cheating, turning to ban waves to primarily handle the job of removing cheaters. Activision has also gotten creative in its fight against hackers by taking down YouTube videos highlighting or advertising Call of Duty: Warzone hacks and cheats. Even with all these moves, the game being free to play means there's a constant struggle to keep these players out.
Halfway through the month of July, Raven Software has given a brief security update, confirming that as of July 16, the latest banwaves removed 50,000 accounts. While that appears to be a large number, the reality is that 50,000 is actually quite small compared to Activision's claim that Warzone has over 100 million players. While removing known cheaters of any kind helps the community, many fans are indicating that this latest banwave isn't enough and more actions need to be taken.
Replies to Raven's Twitter statement came fast, with the majority of frustrated Call of Duty: Warzone players calling for more anti-cheat methods such as two-factor authentication. As of now, players who are banned can simply create a new account and continue as though nothing happened, basically invalidating the anti-cheat work done by the developers.
The other issue seems to be the amount of people caught in the banwave who claim to be innocent and never cheated in the first place. Some Warzone players have even gone to extreme lengths to prove their innocence. This leads many in the community to question how the current anti-cheat system flags accounts and whether or not it's actually finding the correct perpetrators. For many fans, these banwaves are not going far enough to correct the actual hacking problems the game is constantly under siege from.
In terms of cheating and hacking, things seems to be escalating for the game according to an anti-cheat Twitter account. In fact, the account warned of new Warzone hacking tools that can now infiltrate consoles, making it more of a trend instead of just on PC where the issue is currently a huge issue. Essentially, the new hacking tools utilize machine learning to send inputs to the user's controller whenever a valid target is visible. This means that hackers simply need to aim at enemies and the program will take care of the rest.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.