Over the past few weeks, Call of Duty: Warzone has taken over the Battle Royale world; bolstered in part by the lockdown, but mainly because it provides fresh, exciting, and balanced play. Unlike Fortnite which essentially demands more building skill than shooting skill to win, and Apex Legends which makes use of specialized abilities, Warzone returns to the PUBG roots of the genre which focus on losing, shooting, and the occasional trip in a vehicle. Warzone freshens this take on the genre however with outstanding graphics, a blend of traditional fast-paced CoD action and slower long-range encounters, and an exciting one on one deathmatch in the Gulag every time you die where the winner gets to re-deploy.
As the game is free to play, it has seen great success across platforms, and it offers full cross-play between consoles, and with PCs. What console players, especially those who have cross-play switched off, however, is that Warzone, and Modern Warfare as a whole, has a massive cheating issue on PC. Infinity Ward announced on April 13th that they had already issued over 70,000 bans to prevent cheating in Warzone.
Banning is not a perfect solution as Infinity Ward has to be fairly sure that you are actually cheating in order to ban you, and many cheaters are able to slip through the cracks. Their newest solution to catch those who slip by, but are still suspected, is to give them a taste of their own medicine. Suspected cheaters – who generally use cheats such as aimbot to get an edge – will be placed in lobbies full of only other suspected cheaters.
This should effectively cut down the number of wins that cheaters are able to pile up by essentially leveling their playing field and making them fight each other. And hopefully, it will have the added effect of showing cheaters just how infuriating it is to play against them firsthand. If it convinces them to stop cheating, that would be amazing, if it makes them rage quit the game… well that would be very satisfying as well. Infinity Ward will also be introducing the ability to report players from the killcam stream rather than trying to find a name buried in the 140+ names in your recently played with tab, which should greatly increase the number of accurate reports of cheating. Hopefully, these changes will be enough to slow down cheating to a manageable rate and prevent them from ruining such a great game.