6k CoD Cheaters and Hackers Taken Down in 4 Days. Gamers Doubt It's Enough

Activision banned more than 6,000 rogue Call of Duty players in four days. However, fans of Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 agree - this is just a drop in the ocean.

Source: Activision

Cheaters have almost always been a real nightmare of multiplayer games. Any game that is based on an online model will inevitably encounter a group of cheaters at some point. It's enough to mention a few of the latest titles: Palworld, The Finals, and Escape from Tarkov - each of these games has already had to deal with cheaters. The problem seems to be constantly growing in recent years, and further bans aren't proving to be effective.

The same goes for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and CoD: Warzone. In the post regarding the latest update, Activision stated that in recent days, Team Ricochet (the team responsible for monitoring cheating in CoD) has banned over 6,000 user accounts due to cheating and hacking. It's worth mentioning that in the past, these figures could have been even higher - the record from July 2023 was 14,000 bans in a single day.

Cheaters believed that Activision had disabled the anti-cheat system for the weekend

Recently, Activision developers have faced allegations of disabling the anti-cheat system in CoD. Over the weekend, many complaints and evidence of a particularly heightened level of cheating in CoD: MW III and CoD: Warzone were reported online. The players suspected that the company had switched the Ricochet system to offline mode for some reason. In the mentioned post, the dev, however, explained everything:

As part of ongoing security updates, a single telemetry system was taken offline for upgrades over the weekend. This action resulted in cheat developers claiming RICOCHET Anti-Cheat was offline. It was not. Team RICOCHET was able to identify and ban over 6000 accounts for cheating and hacking from February 16 - February 20.

It might appear to be a decent outcome, but many players believe that it's simply not sufficient. According to them (based on posts on Reddit and X), those banned users will just make a new account and return to what they were doing before. Fans say that this solution is like fighting a losing battle, and the problem calls for specific, wide-ranging actions rather than one-time efforts.

After the update, the game crashed

As if the problems with cheaters weren't enough, system errors also appeared with the latest update. Players have started to report problems in finding matches, having their stats reset, and, most importantly, some have even lost progress in events and the Battle Pass. Activision addressed this on their official X profile:

The company clarified that the issue arose suddenly, and efforts to resolve it are still underway. Furthermore, within a few hours of posting the above, the devs added that not only players of CoD: Warzone and CoD: MW III may encounter the mentioned errors, but also those playing CoD: Modern Warfare II. It seems that the developers have a lot of work ahead of them, not only because of cheaters.