With tens of millions of players, the free-to-play Call of Duty: Warzone has been a hotbed for cheaters and cheat manufacturers who make and sell the cheat software. Activision and Raven have been persistently pursuing this issue from a variety of angles, attacking both at the account level and working to take out the cheat manufacturers at the source. With Season Three on the way, repeated teasing for a massive live event in Warzone on April 21st, and the rumored biggest change the game has ever had to the Verdansk map, Raven and Activision are issuing a new update about their latest Warzone anti-cheat efforts.
At this point, more than 475,000 accounts have been permanently banned in Call of Duty: Warzone, with seven high-volume ban waves issued just since February. Raven is also looking at accounts in between this larger ban waves, issuing bans daily to cheaters and other offenders. They call the combination of daily bans with the larger-scale ban waves an “integral focus of [their] efforts.”
More than just taking the issue on at the account level, however, Raven is attacking the commercial market of cheat providers and resellers. This effort includes identifying and banning accounts that are farmed for resale to repeat offenders, and 45,000 fraudulent, black market accounts recently fell to the ban hammer. Raven and Activision understand that many cheaters utilize alts in the chance they get banned, so banning the accounts and removing their alternates is “a key focus for the security teams.”
This security effort comes from a few places. The first is two-factor authentication, which allows them to more easily identify repeat offenders, and make it more difficult to access a new account for the purposes of cheating. They also issue hardware bans for repeat serial cheaters, meaning their entire machine is locked from playing Warzone via any account.
Raven and Activision are continuing to add additional resources to support security and enforcement teams in order to combat what seems at times like an insurmountable wave of cheaters in Warzone. In addition, they’ve warned would-be cheaters that there are some bad actors out there who use the sale and installation of of Call of Duty cheats to drop malicious malware on players computers.
Fortunately, consoles aren’t as affected by cheaters, so you can minimize your risk of running into a cheater or hacker by turning off cross-play and only playing with other PlayStation players. These additional anti-cheat efforts come ahead of a massive revamp inbound to Verdansk, with a live event set to happen in Warzone on April 21st at 12pm PT.
[Source: Activision]
