What you need to know
- Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone are two of the biggest first-person shooters out there.
- Since launch, both games have suffered from consistent cheating and exploits that have detracted from the experience.
- Activision and the Call of Duty team have been ramping up their anti-cheat efforts, with a new update today.
- 60,000 accounts were perma-banned today, bringing the total up to over 300,000 since launch.
The Call of Duty franchise has been one of the best-selling series of video games for decades. It is currently carried by Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, the traditional online multiplayer, campaign, and zombies mash-up, and Call of Duty: Warzone, the massive battle royale. While both games continue to do what makes Call of Duty so popular, they have also suffered from an avalanche of cheaters. Today, Activision and the Call of Duty team have released an update on their anti-cheat efforts.
In Call of Duty (and Warzone, in particular), cheaters will take advantage of illicit third-party software and discovered in-game exploits to gain unfair advantages over other players. It's been a growing issue in multiplayer games in general, but Call of Duty has suffered a lot due to its popularity. According to Activision, a lot of steps have been taken to stop cheating in Call of Duty since launch, including:
- Weekly security updates
- Improved reporting in-game
- Two-factor authentication (2FA) for accounts
- Increased teams and resources
- Enhancements to internal anti-cheat software
- Additional detection technology
- Regular communication on updates and progress
- Zero tolerance for cheat providers
- Consistent and timely bans
Most notably, Activision mentions in their update that they banned an additional 60,000 player accounts today for cheating, bringing the total number of permanent account bans in Call of Duty and Warzone to a staggering 300,000. 180,000 accounts have been invalidated because of the addition of 2FA as well.
Hopefully, Activision continues to bring the fight to cheaters and cheat-providers in the future. They've promised monthly updates on their progress and have promised: "additional measures coming – both preventative and enforcement – throughout this year to root out both cheaters and cheat providers."
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone are both available on the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S, with Warzone being free to all players.
Call of Duty is an extremely popular shooter, but it's not the only game on our list of Best Multiplayer Shooters for Xbox. For any online multiplayer game, you'll want to be set up with one of the Best Headsets for Xbox Series X|S; that way you can hear every noise and communicate with your team effectively.
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War shakes things up with a campaign that delivers solid mechanical improvements. The multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired but things are improving with patches.
