On February 2, 2021 Call of Duty announced they banned 60,000 accounts that were confirmed using cheats. Bringing their total number of permabans to over 300,000. This sounds great but when you look at the larger picture, this isn't even a drop in the bucket. So let's take a step back and see what this accomplishes in the long term for Call of Duty users.
Why did Call of Duty make these bans?
If you're a Call of Duty player, more specifically a Warzone player, you know how rampant cheaters/hackers are in the lobbies. It's so bad, it almost makes he game not fun to play. What really set this off was back in January 2021, there were suspected cheaters in the Twitch Rivals $250K Warzone Doritos Bowl which featured personalities such as DrDisRespect & zLaner. The Doc called out Call of Duty's lack of built-in anti-cheat software and Twitch's lack of process that led to the eventual disqualification of the suspected individual and their team. But being that this was a highly visible incident within the industry, Call of Duty felt they had to do something.
What do these bans mean moving forward?
Long story short... Absolutely nothing... The fact that Call of Duty does not have a built-in anti-cheat software means there are continually going to be a large amount of hackers. As of November 2020, Warzone had over 110 million users... they've only permabanned over 300,000... that's less than 1%, more precisely about 0.3%. So what we're seeing is Call of Duty is not REALLY punishing those who are cheating or really even actively looking at reports and banning compared to other games banning MILLIONS of cheaters over a short period of time. So essentially, these bans mean absolutely nothing until they implement an anti-cheat solution.
What can Call of Duty do to stop hackers?
Well, first and foremost, they need some sort of anti-cheat software, something like Riot Games has with Valorant with their Riot Vanguard. I think this is an imperative step if you're going to have a game that is to be played at a competitive level for large sums of cash that's not in a controlled environment like it is in the big arenas. If they don't address this initial step, as more tournaments are in environments that cant be explicitly monitored, these issues are going to continue, the integrity of these tournaments and the game in general will be questioned.
