Hackers are a big problem in many online games but perhaps nowhere are they more of a nuisance at the moment than in Call of Duty Warzone. Back in May, Raven Software announced that over 500,000 players had been banned since Warzone’s debut in March of 2020. That amounts to over 35,000 accounts banned each month since the game released. Despite that, however, hackers continue to plague the game and have recently gotten even more brazen.
One Reddit user posted an image yesterday of a Warzone player donning what seems to be a pink variant of the Dr. Karlov Operator skin. The only problem is that the skin doesn’t have a pink variant. Not just that but the skin looks very low res and has nowhere near the level of detail you can find on regular skins. Under normal circumstances, one might think the skin looks the way it did because of some weird glitch, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here at all.
The user who posted the image claims they encountered the pink Dr. Karlov player two times and in one match the player managed to pull a suspiciously impressive kill count of 46. Other users in the thread said they encountered the same player before, or at least someone who was wearing the same skin, and many of them claimed to have witnessed him cheating.
Generally speaking, hackers tend to maintain a low profile to avoid getting banned, but now they apparently don’t mind sticking out like a sore thumb. Perhaps even trying to make a point about Activision’s inability to stop the Warzone hacker problem even when the cheaters are running around in custom Operator skins.
Back in April, the developers themselves said in an interview that “no one hates cheaters more than we do.” Raven Software also stated that a specialized security team is constantly on the lookout for cheaters and that updates designed to stop exploits and hacks are being rolled out at a constant pace. And yet, those measures seem to be insufficient given that the problem still persists.
With Call of Duty Online shutting its doors in August it seems like western servers can expect a new influx of Chinese players in the very near future. It’s no secret that a significant portion of Warzone hackers are from China and there could be even more of them than before come August. Let’s just hope the developers can implement better security measures until then.
