Cheating has long been a bane for many COD players, but with Call of Duty: Warzone it became particularly unbearable, spreading from PC to console and negatively impacting everybody's experience no matter the platform. The sizeable Warzone player base contains a proportionately sizeable number of cheaters, and the problem has become so bad that popular streamers have predicted that Warzone's popularity will “fall off,” openly mocked Activision’s dubious anti-cheat measures, and even quit playing the game entirely.
In August, Raven Software announced a new PC anti-cheat system for Call of Duty: Warzone, although not much information was provided about what players could expect or how it would work. But additional details will be made available in the weeks preceding the release of the 18th game in the series, Call of Duty: Vanguard, on November 5. While it may seem like Raven and Activision aren’t being active enough in thwarting cheaters, Charlie Intel estimated that by August 2021 a total of roughly 800,000 Warzone accounts had been banned for cheating.
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Charlie Intel shared some additional welcome news via Twitter for Warzone players fed up with cheaters. Gamers who were planning to continue their undesirable behavior in Vanguard should perhaps make other plans, because hardware and account bans will carry over from Warzone into the new game, which is good because nobody enjoys facing off with a Call of Duty cheater wielding five guns at once. As stated in the tweet, the reason should be fairly obvious, but it’s apparently not for some Warzone players.
A number of the responses to Charlie Intel’s post are from players who claim to have been erroneously banned from Call of Duty: Warzone, for example due to a hacked account, and are now angry that they won’t be able to play Vanguard through no fault of their own. It’s inevitable with any anti-cheat trawl that a few innocents will get caught in the net as well, and Activision’s new policy seems to have done just that. One disappointed player banned from Cold War and Warzone had already preordered the ultimate edition of Vanguard when the news dropped.
Considering how detrimental cheating has been to the gameplay experience and the number of people quitting Warzone because of it, Activision needs to take a stronger stance against the practice, both for its bottom line and to ensure the success of Vanguard. When Call of Duty: Warzone hacks evolved to a new level in July, with an undetectable cheat that would work on both PC and consoles, Activision stepped in, shut down its development and advertisement, and prevented it from even being released. How exactly the company did that is still unknown, but it showed that Activision is serious about stopping cheats that could ruin the Call of Duty ecosystem.
Call of Duty: Vanguard will be released for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S on November 5, 2021.
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Source: Charlie Intel