Premium Cheats In Warzone — The Past, The Present, And The Implications

Gaming is fun alone; it gets even better with a group of friends. There’s a timeless charm in gaming together with people you adore. Over the years, group visits to arcades and local co-op sessions were replaced by online games with the advent of the internet, but the spirit of cooperative play never left.

You can’t mention online gaming and not talk about Call of Duty, the cornerstone of the genre. I had a hell of a time with Warzone. But, just like other online games, Warzone has also seen the use of cheats and hacks over time. Today, I’m not here to point fingers or paint the morality of it. Let’s see how it began and where we stand right now.

Online Gaming And The Matter Of Cheats

Cheats, exploits, and hacks have been a part of gaming since its inception. It stems from humanity’s innate desire to get stuff done quickly without too much effort. We’ve all been guilty of using cheats sometimes in our lives. Playing DOOM with god mode or getting infinite money in your favorite JRPG to speed up the grind are but some examples.

It’s fine as long as we stick to single-player titles; the controversy arises in online games. It’s considered highly immoral when everyone’s giving it their all to win, while someone has it easy with all the fancy tools.

The truth of online game cheating
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Exploits have existed in the world of Call of Duty as early as the original Modern Warfare. You’d get killed out of nowhere, and the kill cam would show that it was indeed an impossible kill. It first started by figuring out some glitches in the map, but later transformed into full-blown hacks.

Cheating in online, server-based games was once considered difficult, but that was when humanity’s technological prowess hadn’t evolved as much. Warzone wasn’t even around for a month when the hackers emerged for the first time.

Evolution Of Premium Cheats In Warzone

Warzone was a worldwide sensation at the time of its launch. March 2020 marked the beginning of COVID-19 and the lockdown. People had too much time and too little to do, myself included, and Warzone came out at the perfect time. And that’s also when the cheaters appeared, flaunting the premium hacks.

Several companies soon emerged to sell these services, which were proven to be working, and they sold like hot cakes. People wanted to get a competitive edge no matter what; to level up in Warzone with premium cheats is an easy shortcut to faster progress, more kills, and frequent wins.

Stuff like aim bots, wall hacks, enhanced senses, and radar hacks became commonplace in the first year of Warzone. These premium hacks prided themselves on being undetectable, and it sure felt so. With the advent of the Ricochet anti-cheat, hacking saw a decline, but it wasn’t long before these premium cheats bypassed it.

In the post-Ricochet era, AI-powered aim assists, undetectable silent aims, and other soft hacks became commonplace in Warzone. Plus, even console cheats with the Cronus Zen device that provided aim assist and recoil modification started in 2022, being hardware-tied and thus not detected by the anti-cheat. There was a time of flying cars, even.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Warzone/comments/1gk0uub/the_flying_cars_was_something_else/

After Warzone 2.0 in 2023, wall hacks, aim assists, and recoil modifiers re-emerged despite the stronger anti-cheat. I mean, cheats were used in the biggest Warzone tournament of 2024; nothing else can be surprising. Even today, these premium cheats avoid Activision’s ban hammers and continue to evolve. Even stuff like weather manipulation with a single click is possible today.

Activision’s Efforts Against Warzone Cheats

Since people want to play games for fun, it’s only natural that Activision combats cheating aggressively. The tech giant’s early efforts in 2020 included manual reviews to ban cheaters, updating the matchmaking system to group cheaters together, starting a two-factor authentication system to boost security, and suing some of these premium cheat-issuing companies.

By March 2021, the first anniversary of Warzone, Activision had reportedly banned over 100,000 cheaters. However, hacks continued to evolve alongside Activision’s efforts. Hackers were seen using sophisticated exploits even in tournaments. Popular streamers called for a more aggressive crackdown and even hardware bans.

In October 2021, Activision announced its kernel-level anti-cheat Ricochet. It was advertised to detect cheating at a hardware level, learn from players’ behavior, and identify cheating patterns. And for some time, it was indeed effective. I remember a time when cheaters couldn’t damage normal players. But it wasn’t for long.

Premium cheats undetectable by Ricochet and the emergence of Cronus Zen were a thorn in Activision’s side, which then had to up its game. The big August 2022 update improved Ricochet’s detection, banned hardware exploits, and strengthened the shadowbanning scripts. Soon, Activision’s efforts slowed down a bit since Warzone 2.0 was on the horizon.

Warzone 2 and the improved Ricochet curbed cheating for some time, and continued to do so with improved third-party hardware bans and cheating detection as new exploits started surfacing. Unfortunately, the 2024 tournament fumble was a big one, and Ricochet even wrongly banned some people. This back-and-forth continued to the present day, and although Activision has made consistent efforts, premium cheats continue to match it blow-by-blow.

Conclusion

Both hackers and Activision’s consistent efforts have continued to evolve over the years, yet the former seems to be winning today, at the cost of the fun and challenge in online games. I understand the need to be the best and show off your stats, but is it worth doing so with crutches? Is gathering XP fast, leveling up your weapons, and shooting up that K/D with premium cheats even fulfilling? I’ll let you be the judge of that.