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UpdateCall of Duty: Warzone permabans more than 475,000 users so far for cheating. (callofduty.com)

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[–]CloudAfro 1275 points1276 points  (195 children)

Question: how devastating is this to cheaters? I've always imagined they just make a new account and start all over again. Feels like trying to kill an infestation by slapping them with your hands.

[–]RdJokr1993 1181 points1182 points  (145 children)

Depends on how dedicated you are to actually cheating in this game. The average casual kids would give up after one account gets banned, because there's a whole process of phone verification and hardware ban circumvention. The people who really want to grief other players for a living would just buy new accounts and look into how they can spoof hardware IDs to bypass the ban. And then there are the cheat makers who need to run a business.

Fact is, there is no way to eradicate cheating completely. It's impossible, the same way crime exists in real life. You can't eradicate crime completely from this world, new criminals will always show up. Doesn't mean you give up fighting completely though. Gamers just simply don't get the legal barriers and hoops companies have to jump through in order to take down even one seller.

[–]jackcatalyst 292 points293 points  (59 children)

Hardware bans are only for repeat offenders. So they have to identify someone as a repeat offender first.

[–]RdJokr1993 249 points250 points  (46 children)

Hardware bans are already applied on a soft/shadow ban level. Had a friend who got shadowbanned for about a week. Tried using another friend's account to login on his own PC at first, and both accounts ended up being flagged.

[–][deleted] 71 points72 points  (41 children)

Why was your friend shadow banned?

[–]SpaceZombie666 24 points25 points  (0 children)

He didn’t defeat Maximilian Pegasus and now he has to chill in the Shadow Realm.

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    [–][deleted] 14 points15 points  (3 children)

    What is a shadowban in warzone?

    [–]RdJokr1993 48 points49 points  (2 children)

    It's what happens when the anti-cheat suspects you as a potential cheater. Basically you can still play the game, but your matchmaking range will shoot up to >350ms, and eventually you're matched with other suspected players as well. Putting cheaters in the same lobby, so to speak.

    [–][deleted] 12 points13 points  (0 children)

    Cool, thanks! I didnt know that this existed in Warzone.

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        [–]HenkkaArt 40 points41 points  (38 children)

        Making the game 60 dollars would most likely reduce the amount of cheaters, at least repeat offenders. I don't know how many people would stick around for multiple premium-priced copies of the game and continue to cheat.

        [–]RdJokr1993 83 points84 points  (34 children)

        I think you sorely underestimate cheaters these days. Many of them are already on premium cheat subscriptions. What's another $60 to them? If people are dedicated to ruining your video game experience then paywalls are just tiny roadblocks to them.

        Making Warzone a paid game would just kill the playerbase real quick, because you can't compete in the BR market unless your game is F2P. Hence why Apex, Fortnite and Warzone are all the rage while PUBG is practically silent now. Also another reason why Blackout (BO4's BR mode) died after one year (that and Treyarch being forced to put out a new COD in 2020 instead of 2021 per regular schedule).

        [–]Shunto 56 points57 points  (22 children)

        PUBG died because it was developed and changed by one of the most incompetent studios I've ever seen in a multiplayer game

        [–][deleted] 58 points59 points  (6 children)

        It was an ugly, sluggish turd from the start. I’d say the vision has been maintained.

        [–]HenkkaArt 34 points35 points  (5 children)

        I saw DrDisrespect play it a few weeks back and it still looks like asset store product like back in the day when it was just starting. Didn't they make billions with it? Maybe could have spend a couple millions in revamping the game's visuals.

        [–]OM_Jesus 13 points14 points  (1 child)

        Oh they made hundreds of millions and are now making billions from PUBG mobile. Their focus is pretty much on mobile now and it really shows with the PC version.

        But from what I know the engine they used was a modified version that they heavily invested in and had tons of problems developing and adding new features. Took them forever to add vaulting and even that was just pure shit when it was finally live. From the beginning they just really dropped the ball in terms of scalability with the game. The engine's limitations were reached and any further improvements meant a lot of time and a lot of money so it seems like they just said F U to everyone and ran off to mobile.

        [–]based_arceus 3 points4 points  (0 children)

        But they don't even develop the mobile game. There are plenty of real reasons to hate on bluehole but that's not one of them.

        [–]Sinndex 23 points24 points  (2 children)

        Or just let the game run it's course, call it a major success and retire.

        Honestly the game looks fine for what it is, the issue is the actual gameplay, it just doesn't feel good to shoot or move around. I was really keen on playing it when it first came out only to realize the the gunplay sucks and you are actively discouraged from engaging anyone until the very end.

        [–]evilsbane50 12 points13 points  (0 children)

        When it came out it was fun because it was the promise of something better, and while they did make it better, never at any point did it lose that feeling of being a super janky piece of shit.

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          [–]Tenagaaaa 24 points25 points  (1 child)

          Pubg died because it didn’t evolve and better games came out.

          [–]stevew14 3 points4 points  (2 children)

          Games not actually dead. Play it every night still. This is EU FPP duos and ranked squads. It died in America mostly because of Chinese cheaters and Bluehole refused to do anything about it. We regularly get Americans playing on our discord looking for Europeans to play with. Plausible gaming is the name of the Discord if you ever fancy playing again. Although it can be a bit elitist. Wouldn't bother unless you above 200 ADR and even then it will be difficult. The reddit discord is still going and is more newbie friendly.

          [–]Shunto 1 point2 points  (1 child)

          Unfortunately I'm in Australia, and Bluehole killed the OCE server well before they ignored the Americans. When map select came in their buggy game finder couldn't group lobby's together and it killed our region literally overnight. It went from 10 second wait time for a game to no game being found. This was in April 2019 or so

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            [–]c14rk0 17 points18 points  (1 child)

            The real problem, in many situations, with thinking a $60 price tag or such will deter cheaters is that MANY of them know that they'll eventually get banned and never actually pay full price for the games to begin with. There's shady as hell black market key sellers in China and such that they will get keys to the game from for a laughable fraction of the real price. These keys will often be bought with stolen credit cards and such and the account/key might eventually get banned due to this but that doesn't matter if they're planning to use blatantly obvious cheats that will get the account banned fairly quickly anyway.

            [–]ItsMeSlinky 2 points3 points  (3 children)

            I liked Blackout. It’s a pity it wasn’t made F2P on its own.

            [–]9inchjackhammer 2 points3 points  (2 children)

            An absolute travesty honestly if they treated it like Warzone with updates, it’s own sub, F2P it would have smashed it. IMO it was so much more fun to play then Warzone.

            [–]FakoSizlo 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Agreed . Ovewatch was $60 on release and was rife with cheaters and smurfs . Money is not a hindrance to cheaters

            [–]DoctorWaluigiTime 1 point2 points  (0 children)

            Cheaters would still happen, but putting payment gates in front of things helps massively. A good example (despite its age) would be TF2 pre-F2P vs TF2 post-F2P.

            It's one of the (many) reasons I don't like multiplayer F2P games.

            It's all about making it harder and harder to cheat. You won't stop it, but if you make it inconvenient enough, that does have an impact.

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              [–]TTVBlvcksteel 3 points4 points  (0 children)

              Not true because in the history of cod being priced cheaters always jump on and hacked because nothing was done

              [–]Radulno 2 points3 points  (0 children)

              It would also reduce player numbers and Activision revenue drastically. Far more than cheaters are hurting the game

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                [–]Byroms 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                Warzones free, so they don't even need to buy a new account, they simply create a new one.

                [–]CloudAfro 8 points9 points  (2 children)

                But taking out 475k users will definitely have a lot who don't return. Thanks for that insight.

                [–]malibuflex 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                Hardware bans are laughable to get around and most fps cheats come with a built in hwi spoofed anyway

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                  [–]volticizer 19 points20 points  (3 children)

                  PrestigeIsKey on youtube talks about this stuff most days if you are interested. According to him the ban team said repeat offenders (ie multiple accounts) are receiving hardware bans so they can't just make new accounts without getting a new PC to boot. Or seems like there are ways around it according to other commenters, interesting.

                  [–]Phallic_Moron 2 points3 points  (2 children)

                  Would running the game on a virtual machine get around that? Or rather, just running cheats on the virtual machine?

                  [–]Orc_ 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                  No, you just use HWID spoofers to make it seem like your PC is a different one

                  [–]doodoo_brown 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                  Running on a virtual machine would be too resource intensive, even with a GPU pass through. It probably be easier to spoof a MAC address.

                  [–]bronet 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                  Probably stops a large part of them. Making a new account still takes effort, and cheaters probably care less about the game than those who don't cheat

                  [–]BaconJets 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                  I have a friend who used cheats for a few days on an account made specifically for trying the cheats out. When the next banwave happened, the cheat alt was banned and his PC was shadow banned but only for 10 days. That's the extent of the hardware ban, it's just temporary. They're not doing nearly enough.

                  [–]scottishdrunkard 13 points14 points  (4 children)

                  In some cases hackers hijack your account to cheat.

                  As this has happened to people I know and Activision has an extremely unclear and hard to follow account recovery system. Please send visual guides.

                  [–]LucifersPromoter 6 points7 points  (3 children)

                  I had mine hijacked a couple of months ago and didn't have a problem with their account recovery at all. The longest part of it was I had to create a new account to raise a ticket. But I got my account back in about a week without issue.

                  [–]scottishdrunkard 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                  We already created the temporary account, but we could not find the next step, which was linking the Activision Account to the PSN account... like, at ALL. There was almost no navigation advice, nor could we find any sort of visual guide to help.

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                    [–]TitledSquire 14 points15 points  (20 children)

                    That’s exactly what happens, because they have zero Anti-cheat. These updates are quite literally Meaningless to a free to play game that doesn’t have anti-cheat..

                    [–]Killer_Carp 99 points100 points  (19 children)

                    How on earth did they identify half a million cheaters without anti-cheat software to help? Are you saying that their announcements about strengthening their anti cheat systems and recruiting more engineers to work on these systems are just plain lies?

                    Genuinely interested. Don’t play war zone and not sure how this thread ended up in my feed.

                    [–]joelkemu 49 points50 points  (17 children)

                    (speculation ahead) I think it's more likely that they have nothing in place that stops you cheating, I could go download TotallyNotViruses.exe the aimbot and be cheating in minutes. Nothing will stop that. But I sure as heck am flagged in the background for the next banwave. Instantaneous bans generally only help the cheatmakers identify what causes a ban so they can work around it. Banwaves make it much harder.

                    [–]kukiric 27 points28 points  (15 children)

                    On the other hand, banwaves increase the individual value of cheats as paying something ridiculous like $100 for a single cheat won't be a complete waste of money if you're not instantly banned whenever you log in with it active.

                    [–]Boyzby_ 11 points12 points  (14 children)

                    Personally, paying for cheating at all is a complete waste of money to begin with. I play the game to play the game, not to hand it off to big brother when it gets difficult like a kid.

                    [–]thisistotallynotgood 16 points17 points  (1 child)

                    For a significant demographic, winning is everything. It doesn't matter if that means cheating to win, it's the win that counts.

                    100% don't agree, but it's a thing.

                    [–]toastymow 5 points6 points  (10 children)

                    You and I agree. I don't understand the point of using cheats to circumvent the challenge of playing a game. The reward only feels good because of the challenge. When people tell me about people who use cheats or engage in real-money trading in video games, I always wonder... why? Why? The point of the game is to play it, why are you paying to play less of the game?

                    [–]JDMcompliant 2 points3 points  (8 children)

                    I can give a little insight to this. Mind you, I mostly play single player games, and when I do play something multiplayer, it's non-competitive. I work a lot. I don't get a lot of time to invest in video games anymore, and sometimes I want to get in a game and just relax, feel like a superhero, and enjoy the story and other features of the game. For example, in the Witcher 3 (on of my favorites of all time), I took out all the tedious shit. Loot management? Gone, unlimited carrying capacity. Searching all 20 barrels individually in an area? Gone, it's one button to search a 5 ft radius. Now I can just spend time killing wolves and shit. I never truly go god mode, all items, etc., but I do balance the game to my liking.

                    [–]toastymow 1 point2 points  (7 children)

                    Right. Well, if I was in your place I just wouldn't play the game at all. I mean, I never even tried Witcher 3 so IDK exactly what its like. If you feel the need to modify or change the game beyond what the devs allow, then its clear you aren't the audience. Go play something else. That's my philosophy.

                    But I also know the kind of games I like and tend to play the shit out of them.

                    [–]JDMcompliant 5 points6 points  (6 children)

                    That's a weird take to have on video games, for multiple reasons. First, modders exist, and some mods have become the de facto standard for most players for certain games (especially older games that are no longer actively developed.) Take a game like Cyberpunk - modders have taken it upon themselves to fix certain issues of the game that the devs haven't. Second, how am I not the target audience of Witcher 3 (a huge RPG fan, I put a 100 hours into the game in the span of a year) because I don't like to deal with 5% of the mechanics? If I went and "played something else" for every game that I didn't enjoy 5% of, I wouldn't play anything. Third, I bought the game, and if I didn't like it to begin with (for example, anything in the 2k franchise with loot boxes) why can't I mod it so I can enjoy it? I'm not gonna grind 10,000 hours so I can earn a fucking hat, nor am I gonna pay 2k another 9.99 on top of a $60 game to earn said hat. Again, that's all in the single player experience - I don't try to hamper the competitive community. This is purely for my own enjoyment.

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                      [–]Killer_Carp 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                      Yeah quite so.

                      Seems from their press releases they are doing all the right things. Or trying to. Of course it’s always cat and mouse. It was the zero anti-cheat statement that caught my eye. In the past Activision have had good success going after the producers of software starting in the early days of WoW.

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                          [–]IC3MEISTER 297 points298 points  (49 children)

                          My brother’s account was hacked two weeks ago and then this week support was able to help him get it back only for it to be permabanned for cheating.

                          [–]kasual7 148 points149 points  (17 children)

                          The same thing just happened to me, I'm baffled how Activision doesn't use logic and common sense here : if my account got hacked and played with then of course the hacker will be cheating, how are you recovering account and not clearing reports after, knowing damn well someone else was playing with my account. sigh

                          [–]DarkusRattus 62 points63 points  (10 children)

                          This isn't new, Valve has been doing this with VAC for over a decade. A hijacked account is never unbanned.

                          [–]kasual7 30 points31 points  (9 children)

                          Then what's the point of having a recovery process at all? It seems counter-productive to not fix things all the way through.

                          [–]DarkusRattus 24 points25 points  (3 children)

                          Bans aren't often applied for all games on the account.

                          [–]kasual7 10 points11 points  (2 children)

                          I've been in touch with Activision chat and been told they're gonna investigate (again) so I'll see what comes out of it.

                          However as a console player I have never experienced so many issues as I have with Modern Warfare/Warzone. It's undeniably a very good COD but plagued by so many shortcomings: cheaters, hackers, game size, general lack optimisation and few broken gameplay design.

                          I hope to be done coming this fall once more games release.

                          [–]DarkusRattus 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                          Best of luck! I'm surprised they even told you they'd investigate, I hope it works out for you.

                          Their official policy on hijacked account bans (if they have one) may be that there's no exceptions - to deter people from cheating and claiming their accounts were hijacked. For example I'd imagine some hackers may use VPNs to hide their IPs when hacking to make it look legitimate. (not implying this is you)

                          [–]PrizeWinningCow 2 points3 points  (1 child)

                          That would just make it easier for people to cheat unharmed. Act as if your account got hacked (log in from another ip, change passwords etc.) start cheating for a while, start recovery process, get cleared.

                          Thats why they wont do that.

                          [–]kasual7 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          See I didn't think of that, it makes sense... the great lengths some people go just to cheat is scaring. In this case how can they tell the original owner or someone else (hacker) was cheating?

                          [–]Jaggedmallard26 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                          They don't do it because people use it as an excuse and it's easier for them to just blanket say "no" than have to figure out who is being honest. There's situations where you'll get your account compromised but they won't cheat on it so its not like its completely pointless.

                          [–]only_says_perhaps 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                          More like why the fuck would your account get hacked... This baffles me

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                            [–]Rayuzx 18 points19 points  (0 children)

                            It's probably because how easy it is to use a VPN to say that the account got "hacked". Thus letting any potential cheater off scot-free.

                            [–]Jaerin 11 points12 points  (1 child)

                            Because cheaters often claim they were hacked when caught

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                              [–]USxMARINE 13 points14 points  (1 child)

                              hacked

                              Bad password

                              [–]NaoWalk 8 points9 points  (0 children)

                              Or phishing, or other forms of social engineering, or malware mods intended to steal game passwords (common with games like Minecraft).

                              Still shouldn't get banned because someone hacked them. Developers can enforce strong password policies and 2FA to significantly reduce those risks, but for a multitude of reasons they don't, so they have to deal with people getting hacked and should try to help them.

                              [–][deleted] 6 points7 points  (21 children)

                              Could it be that the people who hacked his account used cheats? Regardless, you should contact Activision again if it is a false positive.

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                                [–]Lokito_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                Be happy you dont have to play that game anymore then.

                                [–]Swineflew1 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                                Does he not have 2FA?
                                I’ve set up 2FA on practically everything and haven’t had an issue in forever.

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                                  [–][deleted] 59 points60 points  (5 children)

                                  Being free to play has its own disadvantages. People will just create another account and start using hacks again. I know many people don't like fortnite but the anti cheat in fortnite is a lot better than warzone and battlefield. You add any file to fortnite folder and you get insta ban. Warzone needs a good anti-cheat that bans people left and right.

                                  [–]Circuitkun 2 points3 points  (3 children)

                                  EAC isn't even that good of an anticheat.

                                  Sure you see less cheaters but they still exist, same goes for siege and battle eye. Apex is filled with cheaters still and siege is still a cesspool.

                                  Valorant is probably the best, but most intrusive of them all.

                                  Plus with it being F2P it wont make much of a difference since people can make a burner account over and over.

                                  [–][deleted] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

                                  Tbh I have not seen any cheater in valorant so I think you are right

                                  [–]nfl_derp 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                                  I dont even play valorant because of that stupid anti cheat being required at startup

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                                    [–]blunted09 34 points35 points  (7 children)

                                    Meh, got hacked by an obvious hacker last night running up 20+ kills. All you have to do is look up the global standings and see level 4 guys with 40kpd. In fact, the top 100 players in warzone have a kps of 10 or greater.

                                    Most cheaters have a very easy time getting back online in a few minutes.

                                    [–]curt_schilli 15 points16 points  (5 children)

                                    Last time I checked the leaderboard the top player had 9999999999 kills per death lmao

                                    [–]HEBushido 3 points4 points  (4 children)

                                    There's actually a guy on there with over 300 million wins, and his kills are something -2,000,000. It's so so ridiculous and I don't understand why they don't just remove them from the leaderboard.

                                    [–]Zerothian 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                    Leaderboard hacking has been a thing forever in CoD, it's annoying as fuck. I used to care about grinding LB back in Black Ops 1 for SnD. I eventually just gave up and started just doing competitive ladder on gamebattles and stuff instead. The official leaderboards have kind of always been a mess.

                                    [–]kp33ze 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                                    They literally dont give a shit. They'd have to spend resources telling an employee to fix it but that means that employee isnt working on some new skin for the store now

                                    [–]Ayoul 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                    Your point still stands, but FYI people who would work on tech to counter cheats aren't the same people making skins.

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                                        [–]mr_antman85 150 points151 points  (49 children)

                                        Why don't they just go after the people/websites that sell the hacks?

                                        I mean, permabans are a great start but they will just make alt accounts and do it again...

                                        [–][deleted] 239 points240 points  (14 children)

                                        They already have before. But realistically this approach isn't going to work alone. Litigation is a long and expensive process, which (1) almost certainly can't be handled in a timeframe which is relevant to the playerbase of a video game and (2) could end up being fruitless if the cheat seller is located in a country which has lax enforcement for this kind of stuff.

                                        Robust anti-cheat systems with detection and bans will always be necessary, and announcements like this one are just a cherry on top trying to discourage other players from cheating. (also good for showing your active players that you're taking the issue seriously)

                                        [–]dak4ttack 21 points22 points  (10 children)

                                        Blizzard did it in wow - wowglider and others were dominating the game, they went after the source, and now it's really hard to find a bot. The dude lost all the money he made.

                                        [–]TowelLord 43 points44 points  (2 children)

                                        It isn't hard. Bots and Gold Sellers both (who use bots) are common to find ingame in pretty huge numbers. It's like weed that just keeps growing again. Heck, the whole topic is a regular "discussion" of the day over at /r/classicwow where the people relentlessly complain and use "it's easy to remove all the bots if Blizzard bothered investing money" as an argument that is their irrefutable matter of fact.

                                        [–]parker0215 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                        I can't speak for all regions or servers, but on NA the difference in bots now compared to Wrath/Cata is night and day

                                        I used to fly into SW late Wrath and would see bots hacking characters into the sky to spell out their gold selling site's name, and I'd get a solicitation or two in my /w every day lmao. Haven't seen that in years, its absolutely improved. How much of that is Blizzard combating it vs the game naturally losing popularity and notoriety, idk

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                                          [–][deleted] 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                                          It can definitely work sometimes. The article I linked is another example of Activision being successful. I still think though that if the market exists and there's no physical in-game mechanisms to detect and stop things, there is always the possibility of someone outside their reach setting up shop. A combination of both ways is always good.

                                          [–]Kurise 27 points28 points  (0 children)

                                          You clearly do not play WoW or follow WoW, if you think it's hard to find a bot.

                                          Should try looking at the sub reddits. Botting always has and will continue to be a massive issue in WoW.

                                          [–]200000000experience 13 points14 points  (0 children)

                                          You really shouldn't talk about things you don't know anything about... Bossland/Honorbuddy and WoWGlider were historic cases but they took years. The case against Bossland first started in 2012 (not even counting any time Blizzard spent beforehand preparing the case). Bossland lost in 2017 and the website still exists and is now owned by another person who is making bots for ffxiv, diablo, etc., the actual developers for Honorbuddy just moved to other bots, and Bossland made likely millions more than he actually had to pay.

                                          This is not an easy battle.

                                          [–]soulreaper0lu 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                          Bots are running rampant in WoW

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                                              [–]8-Brit 20 points21 points  (7 children)

                                              They do. Blizzard has taken bot making companies to court and demolished them. The issue is these tend to be based in obscure countries, or countries difficult to prosecute in as an American company. Like Russia or even China.

                                              And if you take down one, another has already taken its place.

                                              [–]SeamlessR 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                              Software at this size will never be secure enough to stop all potential hackers. It's genuinely easier for them to attack the problem at the angle they have direct access to.

                                              [–]Wehavecrashed 7 points8 points  (13 children)

                                              Because selling cheats is lucrative.

                                              [–]DonnyTheWalrus 16 points17 points  (12 children)

                                              For people struggling to understand the business model here, it might help to know that in certain countries, cybercafes exist that will provide PCs to rent with cheats for a game already installed. So the customers are paying for the PC time, which is how the business justifies spending the money on the cheats themselves. And nothing draws some sorts of people in like the promise of being able to sit down and instakill a server or two... Also keep in mind that in these countries, it may be prohibitively expensive to buy a personal gaming pc, meaning that if people want to play a game, they have no choice but to rent time at a cybercafe, which means that they are going to have a really hard time playing enough hours to get legitimately good at the game. So you can see how something like an aimbot could start to sound very attractive.

                                              [–]WaltzForLilly_ 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                              Literally happened 2 weeks ago

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                                                [–]Speedy_Von_Gofast 16 points17 points  (1 child)

                                                I think this changes nothing considering the game is Free To Play, they just create a new account and there they go cheating again...

                                                [–]selffufillingprophet 48 points49 points  (14 children)

                                                Jesus those numbers are nuts.

                                                Also bear in mind the circumstances that one person cheating will ruin the match for potentially 149 legitimate players.

                                                The problem has gotten so rampant and activision being so negligent about it I can only imagine the number of people who've given up warzone completely.

                                                This is what happens when the BR market has no similar competition

                                                [–]hyphygreek 38 points39 points  (9 children)

                                                Wasn't pubg banning like half this each month for a while? 475k total seems low.

                                                [–]Szarak199 29 points30 points  (4 children)

                                                Pubg was at 13mil two years ago and that's a game that costs $30 while warzone is free

                                                https://www.pcgamer.com/13-million-pubg-accounts-have-been-banned-since-mid-2017/

                                                [–]Jimbuscus 6 points7 points  (1 child)

                                                PUBG had valuable unlocks that could generate real money via Marketplace & third party websites before Steam clamped down on the market.

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                                                  [–]buzzpunk 44 points45 points  (3 children)

                                                  Half a million bans for a game as big as Warzone is abysmally low. At times CSGO would have half a million bans a month, and that was back when you needed to buy a new account every time.

                                                  [–]illage2 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                                                  It's gotten so rampant that they're also banning people in Zombies when they get to high rounds.

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                                                    [–]ShinyBloke 12 points13 points  (9 children)

                                                    That's so many cheaters, why even bother playing this game?

                                                    [–]lemonylol 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                    It's still fun from time to time.

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                                                      [–]J_Triple 7 points8 points  (5 children)

                                                      Does this include chronus zens? As I know lots of people who use these and have still yet to be banned

                                                      [–]firedrakes 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                                                      this reminds me of a player in bf3 on pc. said i dont hack/cheat... look at the k/d 50 kills zero death. user also took by last count 300 rounds to the body. no damage. then we are whole side targeted the user we got 10 deaths on him . end of game he got 150 kills.

                                                      [–]Mattisthe1 53 points54 points  (38 children)

                                                      How many of those bans are false positives, though? Are they still having issues with that?

                                                      [–]isotope88 28 points29 points  (0 children)

                                                      Wherever there's uncertainty, there will always be false postives AND negatives.
                                                      It's hard, if not impossible, to eliminate those. Especially when you're analyzing statistical datapoints of millions of players.

                                                      [–]CookieMisha 73 points74 points  (4 children)

                                                      They banned hundreds or maybe more people last week in cold war just for playing zombies

                                                      I would bet on that

                                                      [–]Prohunter211 9 points10 points  (3 children)

                                                      Do you have any links to clips that prove that? I asked on the Cold War Zombies sub and got downvoted because “look it up yourself” lol. I’ve looked it up and all I get are Reddit threads and YouTube videos citing Reddit threads. I’d just like to see some more proof that this is actually happening since I’d really like to get back to my camo grind.

                                                      [–]Impressive-Pace-1402 14 points15 points  (0 children)

                                                      There were a bunch of clips being posted of people on-stream getting hit with the error code and relaunching it to be told they're banned, all with roughly the same long current game time when it happened.

                                                      If you can't find the posts, it probably says more about the mod team than anything else.

                                                      [–]OutcastMunkee 21 points22 points  (0 children)

                                                      Here's a video from MrRoflWaffles on what is going on. He's a prominent Zombies YouTuber and goes in to detail on just what on earth is going on. It's ONLY happening on PC as well.

                                                      [–]CookieMisha 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                      I wanted to link the video the good sir above me posted. It's basically that. Nobody knows what went wrong, the the community manager was so vague about it that people got even more angry.

                                                      Many good streamers even played to see if they would get banned and some of them did. Were they cheaters all this time then?

                                                      It seems like the ban triggers the bug message that displays in game. But why were these people banned. And will Activision do something,? They probably won't, let's be real. If that was just a new anticheat test, then it went horribly wrong but they won't admit it.

                                                      It seems like the banning has stopped. Everything is weirdly calm, but that's because the moderators of r/codzombies keep removing the posts, even though the discussion there is very civil and appropriate to the situation. I know people throw around bad words, but who wouldn't in this situation.

                                                      [–]slvrbullet87 7 points8 points  (0 children)

                                                      According to every player who has been banned 100%. None of them ever cheated, they just had their cheat software open and managed 99% accuracy and no deaths because they are good. They also were never assholes who trolled or spammed the comments with racist garbage.

                                                      An actual estimate? Maybe 1% who had their account hacked.

                                                      [–]burniemcburn 9 points10 points  (0 children)

                                                      ☝️ false positive here. I just swapped graphics cards so maybe something happened there, but the complete lack of an appeals process is garbage.

                                                      [–][deleted] 16 points17 points  (10 children)

                                                      The vast majority of “false positives” are people that were accurately banned but don’t agree with the result. This is a straw man use case used by cheaters to try and find some veil of legitimacy for their continued cheating.

                                                      And before you tell me to assume positive intent, we’re talking about cheaters. They’re going to do and say anything to benefit themselves.

                                                      [–]VonLinus 8 points9 points  (9 children)

                                                      How do you know?

                                                      [–]SerialPandaSnuggler 20 points21 points  (7 children)

                                                      This sort of thing happened daily in the LoL subbreddit.

                                                      Person comes crying in about being banned, big bad company vs little innocent me.

                                                      Then RiotLyte comes out with the evidence that they cheated, where toxic, or whatever they where banned for.

                                                      Happened so much people realized most of the time the person was lying about the ban, and just trying to spin a narrative in their favor.

                                                      [–]slvrbullet87 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                                                      I remember the first time they said they were going to explain bans on the message boards. Every person who asked why they were banned would swear up and down they were not a toxic player who never quit or flamed and there must be some mistake. They all got a response similar to this:

                                                      4 matches where you went AFK after 5 minutes

                                                      11 matches where you griefed a teammate, here are the chat logs

                                                      176 uses of the word N****R in the 15 matches we reviewed

                                                      [–]Rafske 3 points4 points  (0 children)

                                                      dont know about LoL, but Riot gave me and a friend AFK penalty in Valorant for no reason after a nromal round. wasnt a big deal, but they do give false punishments

                                                      [–]ADThrw 3 points4 points  (3 children)

                                                      They ban or suspend even on stats alone.

                                                      I was suspended/shadowbanned 2 times (and I guess cleared after that) for sitting in spawn in Ground War using Pointman and doing 150-4 with killstreaks.

                                                      How is that fair to get suspended just because people report me?

                                                      [–]Spooky_SZN 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                                                      You can't realistically expect them to individually check every ban before it's enacted. There needs to be some trust in the community to not just mass report because they are getting bodied.

                                                      I'm curious is there no sbmm in that mode or something? How did you do that well? Seems pretty hard unless you're smurfing but I'm not familiar with League enough lol

                                                      [–]VonLinus 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                      Do you think it's in anyway remarkable that activision aren't coming out with the evidence then?

                                                      [–]VonLinus 10 points11 points  (0 children)

                                                      I got a permanent ban, never cheated in my life. I used to play with my neighbors for an hour or two a week in the first lockdown. It's shite.

                                                      [–]Adios555 7 points8 points  (7 children)

                                                      I'll give you my example.

                                                      • I was banned because I had cheatengine open for a single-player game I was playing (not even attached to warzone, just open)
                                                      • Warzone doesn't even start if you have cheatengine open, so it's impossible to cheat with that (and why would you...)
                                                      • The 3rd time i accidentally did that, i got permanently banned (there was no explanation given, but it couldn't be anything else)
                                                      • I tried contacting support multiple times to appeal this but i was told it cannot be done... I asked them to contact management or an appeals department or ANYTHING, and I was told "no"
                                                      • Since i had modern warfare bought and couldn't access the game at all (you can't even start a single-player game, even though you paid for it...), i appealed to my credit card company for a refund for breaking our agreement. I was absolutely shocked i couldn't use a product i actually paid for.
                                                      • Activision didn't even bother replying, so i got my money back for the game, as well as the game-passes.

                                                      I've never used aimbots or any other cheats on warzone or any other multiplayer game, which is why i was very happy for someone at that company to actually check this... Also helps that my K/D is like 0.8...

                                                      Edit: obviously have stopped playing. I'm not giving money to a company that doesn't even have an appeals process/department.

                                                      [–]Versk 8 points9 points  (1 child)

                                                      The 3rd time i accidentally did that

                                                      hahaha, ok then

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                                                        [–]Ganonderf 6 points7 points  (5 children)

                                                        I was caught in the last big ban wave for no reason. Multiple weeks worth of playtime in MW/Warzone on Xbox, tried it for ONE WEEK on PC but it ran like shit so I dropped it and went back to Xbox. Then one day I go to play it and boom, Permaban. No idea what happened, no reason given, support closes tickets immediately and won’t respond to any other form of contact.

                                                        Fuck Activision, they’ll never get another cent out of me.

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                                                          [–]Blackngold4 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                          The player base must be shrinking significantly in order for them to start ramping up this anti cheating measure. I don’t know anyone who is playing war zone. I recently started playing MW 2019 again. I missed cyber attack / search and destroy.

                                                          [–]YatagarasuKamisan 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                                                          Sure it's all fine to ban a lot of cheaters and boast about it. It's better than doing nothing at all while looking at other avenues like going after the creators of the cheat etc.

                                                          Problem for me is I'll never play a competitive FPS that's F2P or dirt cheap to purchase ever again after the fiasco with Warzone and APEX anti-cheat. I want to know that the moment a hacker gets banned, that's at least 60£+ going out of his/her pocket for good, never to be seen again.

                                                          Sure, there are hackers in paid games as well. But from my own experience over the past 15+ years, there are a lot fewer of them, most likely due to the aforementioned up front cost they stand to lose.

                                                          [–]EliTeGhxsT96 21 points22 points  (18 children)

                                                          They'll have new accounts by the end of the day. Waste of time. You need to actually block the mods and hacks rather than ban the users.

                                                          [–]Kekoa_ok 27 points28 points  (0 children)

                                                          porque no los dos

                                                          [–]Ignifazius 4 points5 points  (2 children)

                                                          Yep. There was a 30k banwave 3 days ago, since yesterday i get a huge amount of player lvl 30 and lower playing "suspiciously good".

                                                          [–]Artyloo 10 points11 points  (0 children)

                                                          that is indeed indisputable evidence

                                                          [–]EliTeGhxsT96 0 points1 point  (0 children)

                                                          When I started getting shredded by noobs or what seemed like noobs I gave up. I'm fairly decent and it just isn't fair to people who don't want to cheat. I just play RDRO alot now and some CW zombies

                                                          [–]direktorfred 3 points4 points  (10 children)

                                                          The decision not to implement an anti-cheat system is purely profit-based, because honestly they dont want to lose that big of an audience and know the PR from these headlines is gonna placate a majority of people who don't play enough to see how endemic cheating is, and know that these bans are ineffective as crap.

                                                          [–]200000000experience 12 points13 points  (8 children)

                                                          The decision not to implement an anti-cheat system is purely profit-based

                                                          You don't genuinely believe they have no anti-cheat, right...? How exactly do you think they caught 475k people in the first place?

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                                                            [–]EliTeGhxsT96 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                            True, I even downloaded it again just to see for myself. I am actually rather irratated by it as I really enjoy cod and can't even play one game without it turning into a hacked lobby or whatever. I miss the good old days.

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                                                              [–]platonicgryphon 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                              I love the hemming and hawing in these types of threads, they either have no anti-cheat at all or it’s too strong or it’s a lot of false positives or etc.

                                                              [–]Trumpet_Ace 1 point2 points  (1 child)

                                                              Good riddance assholes. Those that make the software need to be held accountable in some way too some day.

                                                              [–]system3601 1 point2 points  (11 children)

                                                              If so many cheaters exist, someone need to create a game just for them. To keep them entertained and cheat each other.

                                                              [–]Farlandan 46 points47 points  (0 children)

                                                              They wouldn't play it. The draw of cheating is usually the sense of power they get from being better then others... or just depriving someone else of fun.

                                                              [–]poopellar 17 points18 points  (4 children)

                                                              Don't some games do this. Matchmaking where known cheaters are matched against each other.

                                                              [–]sikjoven 6 points7 points  (0 children)

                                                              World of Tanks uses “dunce servers”

                                                              So if you get reported enough for being a douche, you get special matchmaking with other dbags

                                                              [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                              Yes, but it is done secretly behind the scenes AFAIK.

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                                                                [–]Noggin-a-Floggin 15 points16 points  (2 children)

                                                                We call those "practically abandoned FPS games from 10+ years ago"

                                                                [–][deleted] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                                Not even 10+ years. BFV (on pc) has had rampant cheating since the beginning, and the devs just gave up on the game.

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                                                                  [–]Relnor 5 points6 points  (0 children)

                                                                  The whole idea about cheating is to have an unfair advantage over others, if everyone else is cheating, it's even again, and you might have to rely on dubious things like skill. That's no fun for people who cheat.

                                                                  [–]nsitajes 2 points3 points  (0 children)

                                                                  There used to be cheat servers in CS1.6, UT and Quake for testing/competing, but nowadays it wouldn't be possible from the user perspective since games don't come with dedicated server tools

                                                                  [–]MassSpecFella 1 point2 points  (2 children)

                                                                  How are the 475,000 cheaters? Are there really that many utter losers?

                                                                  [–]Nettwerk911 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                                  They pay money to use that shit too.

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                                                                    [–]HaveYouNoShameLOL 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                                    Isn't it a free fucking game? Can't they just make a new account and immediately log back in at zero cost lmfao

                                                                    [–]BIG-Z-2001 0 points1 point  (1 child)

                                                                    Can’t believe there’s really that many cheaters out there. Why can’t they just play the game normally like everyone else? These people ruined W@W only 5 years after it came out maybe even less then you go on ghosts and everyone is using aim bot

                                                                    [–]Nettwerk911 1 point2 points  (0 children)

                                                                    A large amount of them seem to be facebook gaming streamers that want to look good for their 2 viewers.

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