Call of Duty: Warzone's Biggest Problem Has Nothing to Do…

As frustrating as certain Call of Duty: Warzone seasonal changes, weapon rebalances, and map rotations may be, none are as terrible as the game's most enduring threat: cheating. Wallhacks, aimbotting, overlays, and aim smoothing remain widespread despite large-scale enforcement efforts. Whether it’s casual matchmaking or a high-stakes competitive event, cheaters continue to undermine the integrity of Warzone matches. As a result, Call of Duty: Warzone often feels impossible to trust.

Since the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Activision’s RICOCHET anti-cheat system has grown increasingly aggressive, featuring server-side analytics, manual investigations, and a PC-level kernel driver designed to detect exploitative software. According to Activision, cheating accounts are now banned, on average, within four matches. Nonetheless, cheaters still appear regularly in both casual and ranked lobbies, and for many players, they have become a defining aspect of the Warzone experience.

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By Max Candelarezi

Cheating Doesn’t Seem to Be Slowing Down in Call of Duty

Since Black Ops 6 launched in October 2024, over 228,000 Call of Duty accounts have been banned, and more than 150 cheat resellers have been disrupted or shut down. RICOCHET’s seemingly staggering enforcement statistics paint a picture of resolution on paper, but for actual players, it somehow feels like not enough effort exists to stop the spread of cheating.

Despite the scale of those numbers, it’s still a common enough sentiment among Call of Duty: Warzone players that cheating is the worst it has ever been.

The most glaring concern is that cheaters continue to slip into regular lobbies with alarming consistency. Activision reported that most new cheating accounts are banned within four matches, but even if that’s true, a short window can be enough to ruin games for dozens of players. As long as Activision account creation is relatively easy, some cheaters will view those short-lived accounts as disposable tools, knowing they can just cycle through new ones and continue the loop of cheating and repeating.

Plunder Farming and Age Verification Show Activision Is Still Working

Even outside of cheating in its most direct forms, Activision has taken disciplinary action for other types of disruptive behavior. In recent months, players were banned for AFK farming in Warzone’s Plunder mode, a method used to gain XP without actively participating. Additionally, Call of Duty now requires players to enter their date of birth when creating Activision accounts.

This move, while currently only part of a broader push toward a more positive community, could lay the groundwork for more stringent identity verification in Warzone that could combat cheating. For cheaters, account disposability is critical, and removing that threatens their ability to operate freely. Banning AFK farmers and adding birth date verification to limit anonymity may be steps in the same vague direction, but they are far from transformative.

While a welcome addition for console players, the ability to turn off PC crossplay is more of an escape hatch than a fix, and it doesn’t apply to unranked Warzone.

Competitive Warzone Events Show How Deep the Problem Goes

Even the World Series of Warzone (WSOW), one of the franchise's most high-profile competitive events, couldn’t escape the cheating problem. Activision was forced to manually review the top 100 accounts per region and disqualify players for cheating, teaming, and boosting. Many of those Activision accounts were permanently banned or barred from Ranked Play for the rest of Black Ops 6’s lifecycle. If cheating can reach the top of a monitored leaderboard in a global competition, then it’s difficult to believe public lobbies stand any chance of staying clean.

In response to mounting frustration, Activision has begun implementing secondary measures. Black Ops 6 and Warzone added console-only crossplay, allowing console players to avoid PC lobbies, which remain the most vulnerable and volatile platform, despite being home to many of the franchise’s most dedicated players and creators. Rather than addressing the root issue, the option serves mostly as a quiet acknowledgment of the imbalance across platforms.

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Shadow Bans Add to Warzone Players’ Frustration

To make matters worse, anti-cheat enforcement has its own collateral damage. The anticheat system sends players suspected of cheating to Limited Matchmaking (LMM) lobbies, often referred to as shadow ban lobbies in Warzone. These are supposed to serve as quarantines for suspicious players during a review period, but in practice, they don’t really do much to stem the tide of actual cheaters. It’s also extremely common for regular players to be spam reported by those who abuse the trust of that system. For innocent players that get caught up in it, this system ends up becoming some kind of punishment.

These false positives aren’t rare, either. Players have found themselves shadowbanned after being mass-reported by opponents or flagged by mistake, despite playing legitimately. LMM lobbies also affect an entire party, so if even one player in a party is flagged erroneously, everyone is dragged down with them.

The intention behind shadowbanning may be to preserve the fairness of main lobbies. But, in execution, RICOCHET frequently targets the wrong people, while actual cheaters continue rotating accounts to stay ahead of detection.

Cheating Likely to Remain Warzone’s Biggest Problem

RICOCHET’s public metrics are impressive, and they’ve even recently improved, with Activision revealing that they’ve shut down over 20 cheat makers since Black Ops 6 launched. It’s dealt out hundreds of thousands of bans and disrupted dozens of cheat networks, but the average player's experience often tells a different story. New Call of Duty cheats still pop up, cheaters still join lobbies, and innocent players are still often caught in enforcement dragnets. The standard has left Warzone’s competitive integrity to feel more like a goal than a standard.

At the end of the day, Warzone's biggest problem is a lack of player trust, not a bad meta or a rotation of maligned maps. Players have to be able to trust that lobbies will be fair, and that cheaters will be removed. Trust that playing well won't lead to wrongful punishment for them and the rest of their team. Until enforcement systems can become smarter, more accurate, and less reliant (or more aware) on a playerbase with a predilection to misuse this kind of system, Warzone will continue fighting a battle it might not be able to truly win.

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OpenCritic Reviews: Top Critic Avg: 80 /100 Critics Rec: 78%

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Released: March 10, 2020
ESRB: M for Mature: Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs, Violence
Developer(s): Infinity Ward, Raven Software
Publisher(s): Activision
Engine: IW 8.0 & IW 9.0 (Warzone 2.0)
Multiplayer: Online Multiplayer
Cross-Platform Play: PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S