Warzone guru warns players about Windows force quit exploit impacting ranked matches
Activision Warzone YouTuber IceManIsaac urged the devs to address an exploit that allows players to earn free Skill Rating without any punishment in Ranked Play.
After finding great success with Modern Warfare 2 Ranked Play, Treyarch applied the tried and true formula to Warzone. In Season 3, Ranked Play became a first-of-its-kind competitive mode for the battle royale sequel.
Just as in multiplayer, players start in the Bronze Division and earn Skill Rating (SR) points to progress through seven different divisions before ultimately earning a coveted Top 250 spot. Players earn SR based on placement, kills, assists, and kills by their squad.
To make the grind even harder, a deployment fee deducts SR from a player before the start of every match, and the fee increases as you reach higher divisions. Unfortunately, some cheaters have allegedly discovered a method to avoid losing SR altogether, resulting in unearned Top 250 placements.
ActivisionIceManIsaac claims to catch Warzone cheaters red-handed
IceManIsaac claimed there is a “major cheating epidemic” in Warzone Ranked Play. Using the Top 250 leaderboard provided by WZ Ranked, the YouTuber looked at the previous match history of some of the mode’s highest-ranked players.
The YouTuber claimed that previously, top players usually reached around 30,000 SR at the end of a season. However, in Season 5, some players have already reached upward of 65,000 SR with weeks still left before a reset.
Higher placement points and a lower entry fee make it easier for players to earn SR than before, but something still felt out of place for IceManIsaac.
Using the Alt+F4 command is a common way to close an application on a PC, yet IceManIsaac pointed out that when players close out of a Warzone game using that command, they don’t lose SR.
IceManIsaac claimed: “People will force close their game the moment they lose, preventing them from losing SR. People are manipulating the system to get more SR for free.”
The YouTuber pulled up match facts on WZ Ranked and called out players for having upwards of 28 straight matches of SR gain. Usually, matches take around 30 minutes, but the data showed hour-plus-long gaps of no negative SR losses. And then, to hammer home the point, IceManIsaac showed several stream clips of Top 250 players purposely closing their game on stream right when they died.
Abusing SR gains is a problem because players earn rewards at the end of every season based on which division they finish in. So, some players could quite possibly be unfairly missing out on unique weapon skins and operator camos if the cheating allegations are correct.