One Warzone player was locked from all their accounts. Was this an anomaly? Or is Activision trying to stop cheaters?
Call of Duty: Warzone has a cheating problem. Activision has banned literally hundreds of thousands accounts since 2020. However, that won’t stop cheaters for very long. Warzone is free to play so it’s easy to create a new account and get on with your business.
Activision said during the official unveiling of Call of Duty: Vanguard last week that a new anti-cheat system for Warzone is in the works and expected to go be rolled out later this year when the new Warzone map goes live, but as we noted at the time, it can’t come soon enough: Enthusiasm in the game appears to be sagging, at least in part due to rampant cheating and Activision’s inability–so far, anyway–put a meaningful dent in the problem.
It seems that the wheels are turning faster than we thought. A Tiktok user called rushman360 posted a video earlier this month claiming that Activision had locked him out of the game due to hardware ban. He cannot access his accounts or make new ones.
They said that all of their accounts were banned. “Every single one of them, without me even playing it. They hardware banned my account after I started playing the new accounts.
Activision actually confirmed earlier this year that it uses hardware bans “against repeat, or serial, cheaters,” but these aren’t always effective. A hardware ban targets the system you’re playing on rather than individual accounts, which as we explained in April is difficult–but not impossible–to get around. You might get a hardware ban because some cheating programs can spoof your hardware ID so it is not your hardware that’s being banned.
That may be what happened here: According to Charlie Intel, the cheating site rushman360 was using may not have launched its hardware spoofer properly, resulting in the effective hardware ban. Rushman360’s claim that there is no more cheating within Warzone is probably exaggerated. This is especially true considering that there hasn’t been a sudden spike of ban reports on Warzone subreddit. However, this could be an indication that Activision is actually getting control over the cheating situation.
Activision, as expected, played the whole thing very close to the vest and did not confirm or deny the report of hardware bans. A spokesperson stated that they would continue to target repeat offenders as we have previously stated. “We are evolving our programs in order to prevent repeat offenders from re-entering Warzone,” a spokesperson said.
Interestingly, a report last week also claimed that Warzone account sellers are running short of stock thanks to tighter security restrictions that have made it harder to steal and resell accounts.
