Call of Duty: Warzone season 4 is well underway, with the launch of Fortune’s Keep and some potential new skins, but players claim to have identified an increase in the amount of cheaters in the battle royale, and have taken to Reddit to voice their frustration.
As initially reported by Charlie Intel, Reddit user bwash407 captured a video of Warzone Pacific, where a player they were spectating seemed to have an uncanny ability to instantly lock onto enemies. We have posted it below, and the way this player is able to instantly snap onto targets, seemingly without having to even look at them, makes it seem like a pretty glaring case of cheating.
“Ricochet must be on vacation this week,” writes the Redditor, referring to Call of Duty’s anti-cheat system, which punishes players who break the rules by making their opponents invisible, nerfing their damage output down to zero, or taking their guns away entirely.
Warzone fans however feel that the amount of cheaters they encounter has increased in recent weeks, severely affecting their battle royale experience. “It’s been really bad the last couple weeks,” comments one player, Spa_5_Fitness_Camp. “Getting to be unplayable. My squad sees them almost every game now.”
“I feel like there has been an uptick in hacking lately,” comments another Warzone player, Xkwizito, who argues that cheating has spread to season 4’s new map. “I’ve definitely seen a bunch of super obvious hackers on Fortune’s Keep as well as a lot of fishy potential hackers.”
Call of Duty professionals have noticed an increase in cheaters, too. Cleveland Cam, a Warzone content creator and world record holder, tweets that cheating has been “bad bad for me last 4 days. Multiple per day.” StellarMoves, a Warzone Twitch streamer, also comments “ran into 6 today in 6 hours. Each of them was a different cheater”.
On June 16, Ricochet published a progress report on its efforts to stop Warzone cheaters, which may explain the potential, sudden increase – as Ricochet evolves to counter one form of cheating, cheaters develop new methods of circumventing detection, creating a constant game of one-upmanship where ultimately some hacks slip through the net.
“Anti-Cheat solutions work like anti-virus software,” writes Ricochet. “While our team has been able to establish systems that can quickly detect and respond to bad behaviours, we know tomorrow will continue to deliver new and evolving threats.”