Call of Duty: Warzone 2’s anti-cheat system examines statistics and checks its players’ hardware and software. But the report system is included in the assessment of who should be a cheater in CoD Warzone 2, which could be a problem for some really good players.
The story of Call of Duty: Warzone is also a story about cheaters. Especially in the first two years, the free Battle Royale suffered from a plague of cheaters, which only slowly leveled off with the introduction of the specially developed RICOCHET anti-cheat system.
But even a good anti-cheat system isn’t perfect these days: cheat developers are finding new ways to circumvent the technology, and anti-cheat solutions have to evolve every single day to stay in control.
That’s why RICOCHET lets you support them. You can use the report system to report suspicious players. As a result, the reported players are not permanently banned, but can receive a “shadow ban”. For really good players, however, this is sometimes a problem.
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What is a shadow ban? Since permanent bans in Call of Duty are only revoked in exceptional cases, suspicious accounts initially receive a shadow ban.
Imagine 2 soccer fields:
Players with a shadow ban get their own matchmaking and only play with and against each other. So Activision Blizzard wants to separate the suspicious players directly from the unsuspecting players.
You can even check at any time whether you have received a shadow ban. Typical signs are:
You can find more information here:
What is a shadowban in CoD Warzone and what can you do about it?
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What’s the problem with that? There are always reports of false bans in CoD Warzone. After the release of Warzone 2, there was even a small “unban wave” because false accounts were affected by a perma ban.
Reports of false bans in Call of Duty are always a double-edged sword. If cheaters hide their cheats or only use weak tools, it is rarely possible to say exactly whether cheating is taking place.
Permanent account bans are therefore only carried out manually by the security team at Call of Duty. Errors can also occur here, but this is done to reduce the risk of banning the wrong accounts forever.
With the shadow bans it works differently. Theoretically, each of us can trigger such a ban and this is where the problem lies.
If a player is reported too often using the in-game report function, an automated shadow ban may result. Really good players can lose all the fun of the game. Because really good gameplay is sometimes difficult to distinguish from cheating.
There are two other disruptive factors:
Sometimes players are reported because they are upset about their own performance at the moment. The report button is quickly pressed if there is only minimal something wrong with the killcam.
The killcam itself also causes problems because it is inaccurate. What looks like cheating in the short replay may have been caused by small inaccuracies in the creation of the kill cams. It’s actually clean gameplay.
The shadow ban topic is currently boiling up again. A Warzone streamer has been in a shadow ban since Christmas, was unbanned and immediately received a shadow ban again.
His tweet on the subject went through the roof and was seen and commented on by significantly more users than his usual tweets:
The streamer writes: “To let the public determine who is a cheater through a simple reporting system after they [im Spiel] taking it is the dumbest thing I’ve ever experienced.”
Some users ask if he has proof of his innocence? Others stand by the streamer and also find the reporting system problematic. Some even say the shadowban system is currently broken and not working correctly.
How do you feel about the topic? Which anti-cheat measures do you think are useful, which ones are perhaps exaggerated? Leave a comment on the topic.
If you’d rather read more about Call of Duty, then have a look here: CoD MW2: Players discover the worst visor in the history of CoD – “Thermal visors are noob traps”