Warzone devs reiterate promise to fix cheating and “improvements” to anti-cheat

Warzone has reiterated its promises to players to overcome the game’s hacking issues and make significant “improvements” to its anti-cheat system. 

Warzone’s first year has been an unmitigated success, with millions of players around the world dropping into Verdansk and enjoying CoD’s second attempt at a battle royale, after Black Ops 4’s Blackout.

However, certain aspects of the game have become common targets for criticism. The strength of skill-based matchmaking and the prominence of hackers in games of all standards have been incredibly frustrating for fans.

What has worsened both issues, though, is the lack of a tangible response from Activision. Players have been incredibly frustrated by the silence from the billion-dollar company, which they argue has more than sufficient resources to solve the cheating issue and implement a robust anti-cheat system.

While there has still been no major public announcement – from a Twitter account or senior staff member – an in-game daily message that was originally from April has resurfaced, being displayed to players once again.

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The message, highlighted by Redditor ‘SSMKh’, is titled “Cheaters Not Welcome”. The player’s own caption of “Are you sure about that Activision?” tells us much about the scepticism and frustrations among the community.

“We work aggressively to keep Warzone fun and fair,” the in-game communication says. “24/7 security monitoring, ALL possible cheats, hacks reviewed, Planned improvements to in-game cheat reporting, 50,000+ global perma-bans to date, More updates coming soon.”

The message is originally from April of 2020, but appears to be being shown to players in game in January of 2021. It goes some way to explain why the number of permabans stated in the message is so low. It’s unclear whether messages of the day are chosen specifically or on some kind of automatic rotation.

With Activision’s inactivity already under scrutiny, the reiteration of a 7 month old message seems all the more bizarre. We’d like to think that the number of permabans is now far higher, especially given the incredible amounts of people who have dropped into Verdansk.

The re-statement of improvements coming will be welcome, but the sceptical responses make clear that many believe the issue has already got out of hand, and been allowed to go on for far too long.