Call of Duty: Warzone was only out for a week before players reportedly began dying under extremely suspicious circumstances. Their opponents were either tracing targets through terrains or locking onto them with laser-guided accuracy. Fast forward to today and most often every second or third match has not one but multiple hackers racking high kill-counts in Verdansk.
As such, wallhacks and aimbots have pretty much taken over Warzone and even more concerning is that Infinity Ward is yet to make a statement. Will the developer be updating its naive anti-cheat? Or will the developer bid its time before everyone shifts over to the next Call of Duty arriving later in the year?
The community obviously wants answers but more importantly, stern actions to prevent hackers from ruining Warzone so early during release. One of the biggest demands right now is for Infinity Ward to add a report button in the game. Unfortunately, Warzone is free to play. Hence, even if reporting a player results in a ban, they can always return by creating another account.
The developer could possibly look into hardware bans or a prison island where hackers get matched against hackers. Unfortunately here as well, there are ways to bypass them all. It would be a bit wishful to think that Infinity Ward can chalk out a robust anti-cheat system within days or weeks. This sort of work should have been done beforehand. As for the prison island, the free-to-play model takes care of that by allowing them to get back in with another account.
The one thing that Infinity Ward can do right now to reduce, not zero, the number of hackers in Warzone is to force region-locking. The largest amount of hackers are coming in from China, as evident from their in-game handles. The situation is not even surprising since the same has happened with other games in the past such as PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Apex Legends.
The only way to stop the flow of hackers is to prevent Chinese players from getting matched with the rest of the world. Mind it, region-locking will not take care of the hacking problem entirely. The rest of the world also has players using hacks in Warzone but in limited capacity. Locking China away will at least grant Warzone relief for a brief period where Infinity Ward can think of a way to improve the non-existent anti-cheat system.
Also, it goes without saying that the hacking problem is on PC. Those on consoles can disable cross-platform support so that they are never matched against PC. However, such a solution is not practical for the community. Infinity Ward needs to step in right now or risk having Warzone completely destroyed by wallhackers and aimbotters.
Warzone has well over 30 million players right now considering that the latest figure was revealed by Activision last week. The current tally is presumably past the 40 million threshold since the coronavirus outbreak has forced everyone to stay at home where the best way to pass the time is to drop into Verdansk. The large number of players just means that Infinity Ward needs to take care of the hacking problem sooner or risk alienating a part of the player-base.
For those still unaware, Warzone is the previously rumored battle royale mode for Modern Warfare. There are two ways to gain access. Those who already own Modern Warfare have to simply update their client. Those still sitting on the fence about the latest Call of Duty installment can just download Warzone for free — without getting access to the main single-player and multiplayer of course.
Call of Duty: Warzone is now available on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.
