Hacking is nothing new to the world of online gaming, thanks to free-to-play games rising they are even more prominent than ever before; recently the biggest concern has come from players in Activision’s insanely popular Call of Duty franchise, namely Warzone. Earlier this year Activision finally let players know that Warzone uses an ‘internal anti-cheat software‘ to help identify and ban cheaters, this followed with Raven Studios proclaiming that they made ‘…300,000 permabans worldwide since launch…’, they made another update in April claiming to have ‘…issued more than 475,000 permabans…’ and even gave players a look at how their system works.
As seen on the official Call of Duty website:
Removing cheaters and taking away their ability to move to alternate accounts is a key focus for the security teams.
As we’ve mentioned previously, we’ve increased our efforts in several key areas:
· Utilizing 2-factor authentication to make it harder to access new accounts simply to cheat
· Ramping-up additional resources to support our security and enforcement teams
· Increased frequency of high-volume banwaves in addition to our daily banning of repeat offending accounts
· Improving regular communications and updates
How We Work
Some have asked if we issue hardware bans. We do issue hardware bans against repeat, or serial, cheaters. This is an important part of our effort to combat repeat offenders.
So problem solved, Activision has everything under control, right? As the Arbiter would say, ‘If only it were so easy.’, Warzone still has a massive cheater problem along with fellow free-to-play titans, Apex Legends (EA/Respawn Entertainment/Panic Button Games) and Valorant (Riot Games). How is this even possible, how is it that these multi-million/billion dollar companies are still playing catch up when they all use state-of-the-art anti-cheat software? That is something that can only be answered by the people who continually bypasses these softwares and even profits from them, hackers.
I was fortunate enough to find multiple people who were willing to speak with me about the subject, some of the people I spoke with only used hacks, but I was also able to speak with some that actually makes the MW hacks that have been so prominent in many YouTubers’ and Twitch streamers’ compilation videos. In order to gain my interview I told each of the people I spoke to that they would remain anonymous, so all of the names from here on out will be made up (I spoke to these people via messaging, so I don’t know their real names to begin with), for the sake of avoiding repetition (many users and sellers answered my questions the same way) I will be using the most distinctive answers and the most common ones together while using Hack User/HU as their names.
BagoGames: As I mentioned in the post, you will stay anonymous, do you use hacks or create/sell them?
Hack User: Sure. No, I am a Consumer of these kind of products, and well for a reason many people don’t understand. They have a single viewed Mindset. We have multiple reasons for using them, should I state them?
BG: Please do.
HU: So the reasons are in this order 1) Backward Boosters. So Basically backwards boosters are people who are gods at the game, they basically make a new account and use their sweaty skills On the newbies. 2) Streamers. Same like backwards boosters, but have you noticed, they only get lobbies who don’t shoot back. 3) Many of these sweats also use hacks too. We newbies who are trying the game out for a first time, get sweated on. Due to pressure, we have no direction but to hack and get to a decent level, we usually hack to get to a normal level and from there play properly. This helps us escape that cage. Another problem we face is that hacks are paid, we need some free hacks too, so we can not have to pay to win.