Warzone Cheating is holding Its esports scene back – What can be done?

Cheating is pretty common in Call of Duty Warzone. Many players runs into a cheater at least once a session while playing the game.  Turns out, it isn’t any less frequent in competitive events either. In recent weeks, accusations of cheating have completely ruined even large scale events tournaments.

Cheating in competitive events makes it difficult for pro players to devote all that much time to the game over more stabilized competitive events, so what can Warzone do to grow its esports scene?

Warzone Cheating in Tournaments

Call of Duty Warzone has been a huge success as a Battle Royale since it launched. The game has had impressive download numbers and been one of the few new Battle Royales to actually hold a candle to Fortnite. However, the competitive scene of Warzone isn’t all that well developed at this point. Despite having huge streaming numbers and lots of pro players flocking to the game, the esports side of things seems to be stuck. In part, this might be because of the widespread Warzone cheating.

In recent weeks, we saw a Warzone team get been banned from participating in a huge tournament because of cheating allegations. The Twitch Rivals Doritos Bowl event had a trio ejected just before launching into the final game. After review, their gameplay was found to be ‘unnatural’.

This isn’t the first ban from a tournament for cheating, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be the last ethier. Coming mid-tournament though, this is pretty disruptive. Just because the team was banned, it doesn’t mean no harm was done. A Battle Royale proceeds in a different way if you take a single team out. Like the butterfly effect, it is too hard to say what the games would have played out as if the team had been removed from all games in the course of the tournament.

These kinds of incidents make it difficult for Warzone to grow a healthy competitive scene. What is the point in grinding to perfect Warzone when it’s full of cheats? It is definitely holding things back.

Fortnite similarly rolled a huge streaming audience into a competitive scene, and one that occasionally has cheating allegation. Epic’s response is pretty different though, maintaining a healthy competitive community by coming down hard on cheats. What sets the best Fortnite players aside from the best Warzone players? Aside from  the big difference in prize money on offer, one set has to constantly fight against a game’s population taking unfair advantages.

Warzone Has a Long Way to go in Esports

Warzone’s huge success should make it a shoe-in for a growing competitive scene. It has maintained a popularity that eluded other Battle Royales like Apex Legends. However, when the game’s lobbies are filled with cheats at all levels, it is difficult for it to become all that competitive. 

Cheats go as low as 15$ for daily usage or 160$ for a whole month. Streamers that can hide their cheating well, can pose as legit players and rake in thousands of donations. On top of that they get invited to events and ultimately drop a wrench in the esports potential of the title.

To improve the scene, there needs to be a stronger hand taken towards cheaters in-game. This should apply at the highest levels, but also at the lowest. If the game is struggling to hold competitive events that aren’t compromised, then those big money tournaments might just have to wait. Before Warzone can really break through as an esport, it needs to fix this problem.

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