In Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare , Activision Blizzard has now announced that suspected cheaters will be placed in shared lobbies, a kind of “hell lobby for suspected cheaters.” Many fans are pleased about this. But can this really be a great solution to the problem?
This is the announcement from Activision Blizzard: In a tweet yesterday, the developers of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone presented a series of new measures to combat cheaters.
One sentence stood out particularly: Matchmaking has been revised so that players suspected of cheating are placed in shared lobbies.
Players under “suspicion of cheating” will thus have to compete against each other.
Cheaters in their own hell? Many are pleased
This was the immediate reaction: This news was received by many with a mixture of relief and schadenfreude. The tweet itself received unusually over 6300 “likes”.
Twitter users found it “satisfying” that hackers would have to play against other hackers.
YES!!! Matching hackers up with other hackers might be the most satisfying thing ever
— Silky_AN (@Silky_AN) April 22, 2020
Because in Call of Duty: Warzone, cheaters have become a serious problem. A tournament organizer even said CoD Warzone will die soon if Activision Blizzard can’t resolve the cheating issue.
Even if a player gets banned, they can easily create a new account since the game is Free2Play.
Therefore, there were two reasons to celebrate:
- one being the idea that cheaters vanish from their own lobbies – thus relief
- and the other being that cheaters now have to play against other cheaters – this is schadenfreude or joy over a kind of “poetic justice” along the lines of: Everyone gets what they deserve
What could speak against this idea? At first glance, it sounds like a good solution. But the question is: If this is so genius, why aren’t more games using such a “hell” solution for their problems?
One of the fundamental problems lies in the formulation:
- It’s not “caught” cheaters who are placed in these lobbies, as they would have to be banned immediately, like 70,000 others before them
- Players are placed in the lobbies who are “suspected of cheating”. So, it concerns players who are under suspicion but not yet proven
A particularly skilled player, people now fear, could, because their skill looks like Aimbot, be wrongly reported as a “cheater” by their victims and then end up in such a hell lobby.
This could quickly spoil an honest player’s enjoyment of the game, who has done nothing wrong except be very good, when they are increasingly unfairly shot down by Aimbots.
“Island of Cheaters” could make cheating the new normal
Another problem a reddit user mentions: Riot Games had once experimented with such an “island of convicts” at least as a thought experiment in League of Legends. The idea was to crowd players who had been particularly problematic.
However, Riot soon discarded the idea of such an “island of the convicted.” Because in “toxic matchmaking,” flaming would become so normal that players coming from these lobbies would be even more toxic than before. Therefore, Riot never implemented such a “hell island” for LoL. “If 10 toxic players were together, no one would improve,” it was said back then.
Applied to CoD means: If a “suspected cheater” is really mixed with other cheaters, the threshold for cheating could decrease and thus increase.
If everyone cheats, the honest player would be forced to cheat just to level the playing field. Similar arguments were once heard from professional cyclists.
Even if the plan looks cool and seems like poetic justice at first glance – whether it really works to lock cheaters in their own hell remains to be seen.
Players on PS4 and Xbox One have an easier way to combat cheaters: They can disable crossplay. Most cheaters are suspected to be on PC, a kind of personal cheater hell.
