Activision has finally responded to the ongoing cheating crisis affecting the popular battle royale game Warzone, revealing that it has issued over 60,000 bans in its latest wave and announcing enhancements to the game’s anti-cheat system.
If you’ve been eager for Activision to say literally anything about the cheating problems affecting Warzone then there’s some good news.
The publishing giant has confirmed that they have issued a large number of bans in their latest attempt to eradicate the game of cheaters: “Today we banned 60,000 accounts for confirmed cases of using cheat software in , bringing our total to date of more than 300,000 permabans worldwide since launch.”
This would make the February 2 ban-wave the second-largest in the game’s history following the 70,000 cheaters they removed in April of 2020, just a month after the game was released.
While no other details were specified about the nature of the accounts that they struck, Vice reported, based on their sources, that most of the affected players were using hacks purchased from EngineOwning – one of the biggest distributors of video game cheats, especially in Warzone.
The company’s Discord channel was filled with customers complaining that the hacks they’d bought had been exposed and led to their account being banned, while the EngineOwning website itself was showing the Warzone hacks as “updating,” while all of the other games were “undetected.”
Purchases of the Warzone cheating software are currently disabled while the company makes these changes.
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That’s not the only big news to come out of Activision’s February 2 announcement; at last, after nearly a year of being kept in the dark, the publishers finally confirmed that Warzone does have an internal anti-cheat system that they’re working to improve, including better reporting, monitoring, and detection technology.
That was just one of several items on their to-do list when it comes to this issue:
- Enhancements to our internal anti-cheat software
- Additional detection technology
- Adding new resources dedicated to monitoring and enforcement
- Regular communication updates on progress; more two-way dialogue
- Zero tolerance for cheat providers
- Consistent and timely bans
Finally, Activision also confirmed that it will be looking to broker a more consistent line communication between Raven Software and the Warzone player-base. The publisher is pledging to provide updates on bans, anti-cheats, etc at least once a month, and possibly even weekly.
This news comes after a slew of content creators and players announced that they were either considering or have already decided to step away from Warzone until something is done to mitigate the hacking issue.
Most recently, star content creator Vikkstar confirmed he was quitting the game after witnessing blatant cheaters streaming on Facebook with no repercussions, which then forced Facebook Gaming to respond with stricter policies regarding streamers who broadcast themselves cheating.
To date, Activision has issued 300,000 bans in both Warzone and Modern Warfare, although most would probably agree that these efforts haven’t done much to nip the issue in the bud. Here’s hoping that these changes finally bring an end, or at least significantly address, the cheating issue plaguing the game.