Earlier this week, tens of thousands of Call of Duty accounts spanning both Call of Duty and Warzone received permanent bans. This was the seventh major “banwave” since February as the games’ developers look to crack down on cheating and black market accounts.
The Latest Major Call of Duty Banwave
“Cheaters are never welcome,” writes Activision, in a recent update about this latest Call of Duty banwave; “To date, our security and enforcement team has issued more than 475,000 permabans in Call of Duty: Warzone. Yesterday’s large banwave was our seventh high-volume set of bans since February.”
Of course, permabans don’t just happen during these periodical banwaves. In fact, according to Activision, their team issues many bans on a daily basis to deal with individual offenders. However, large-scale banwaves are effective at removing whole swathes of troublesome accounts, especially where they have some connection. “We recently banned 45,000 fraudulent, black market accounts used by repeat offenders,” reveals Activision.
The update goes on to detail how the Call of Duty security team is improving measures to tackle in-game cheating. These range from the use of two-factor authentication to simply providing greater resources to the security and enforcement teams. Additionally, the team will reportedly be increasing the frequency of their “high-volume banwaves” to stop repeat offenders from having time to establish themselves again. Finally, the update promises improvements when it comes to regular communications and updates. Call of Duty’s anti-cheat efforts typically go on behind-the-scenes, with Activision only rarely releasing updates or new figures.
Without a doubt, cheating and fraudulent accounts remain a major problem in both Black Ops Cold War and Warzone. However, it may assuage some players’ frustrations to see more clearly what Activision is doing to combat this. After all, a lack of updates or visible figures can lead to the false impression that Activision isn’t doing anything to tackle the problem.