Thanks to a temporary glitch in Call of Duty's anti-cheat software, cheaters spiked last week, and while Activision assured players that the issue had been resolved, more updates have come. [According to a Call of Duty Update X post, "The RICOCHET anti-cheat team has rolled out a new detection targeting cheaters and boosters in Ranked Play of Call of Duty: Warzone. Team RICOCHET has banned accounts caught in this sweep and the leaderboards have been purged...Similar detections have been made targeting Ranked Play cheaters in MW3 Multiplayer."
For ranked Warzone players, the high number of cheaters has been painfully obvious for some time. Many players scoured the leaderboards, looking for accounts with ridiculous SR gains or impossible win-loss ratios; "The Resurgence ranking leaderboards are now filled with boosters," said one player on Reddit. A photo attached to this post shows one account at rank 2 winning SR in 15 out of 18 matches, and in almost all of them.
Another player also noted that these accounts may not be strictly cheating. It is also possible to use a VPN to queue up a lobby full of bot accounts, farm hundreds of kills per match, and guarantee 300 SR or more; Activision has noted that boosters were also targeted in the recent wave of bans, so hopefully this practice will quiet down but.
While it is certainly good news that Activision is doing something about cheaters, there are still glaring problems, especially with the shadow ban system. 'Fix the shadow ban and the voice chat system,' one player said. 'How can you people be so blind? Are you forcing people to make skins? It's safe."
The shadow ban system relies on reports from other players. If someone is seriously good and dominating in a match, someone will watch that person and if enough people report the account, they will be shadow-banned. This will keep them out of the queue for 3 to 14 days. Most people who are shadow-banned are not actually cheating, so no further action will be taken against their account, but it can still be quite frustrating.
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