Activision Banned Over 300,000 CoD Warzone Players

Activision on Tuesday, along with developers Raven Software and Infinity Ward, at once removed 60,000 accounts that were confirmed to be cheating software. This brings the total number of banned accounts to 300,000 so far.

In a blog post, the companies say they are continuing their efforts to identify cheat software vendors. They also say for the first time that self-developed, internal anti-cheat software is used to detect cheating players. Warzone does not use well-known anti-cheat tools such as Easy Anti-Cheat or BattleEye. The game companies behind Call of Duty: Warzone did not provide further details about its own anti-cheat software.

Activision lists a number of measures that have been taken since the release of Warzone to combat cheating players. For example, weekly security updates are said to be implemented in the backend, the in-game reporting mechanisms have been improved, countless unauthorized software providers have been disabled and two-factor authentication has been enabled. The latter alone would have invalidated 180,000 suspicious accounts. Activision says the ongoing security and enforcement efforts extend not only to Warzone, but also to the base game Modern Warfare and Black Ops.

The problem of cheating in Warzone is widespread and has been complained about by players for quite some time. In April last year, about three weeks after the release of Warzone, more than 50,000 player accounts were already deleted. It is especially a problem on the PC version of Warzone, although that also translates to the consoles, because crossplay is possible.