As our friends at Eurogamer discovered, cheating has become a real bugbear for Modern Warfare players. Platform-agnostic matchmaking is great and all, but it’s introducing our console-bound colleagues to a whole world of PC hacks and scripts. It’s not that consoles don’t have their own cheaters, but it’s a fair bit easier to pull off on home computers. Those platforms know exactly what hardware and software you’re using, which means they know when something’s not quite right. Go us, I guess? The problem’s apparently become bad enough that many seem to be ditching cross-play altogether, just to get away from our lot. While not so much a problem with Modern Warfare’s smaller matches, this makes it much harder for Warzone’s massive 150-player Warzone lobbies to fill up. The game will even pop up a warning before queuing that games may be hard (or in some cases, impossible) to find if crossplay is disabled. The way crossplay works in Modern Warfare means an Xbox player can’t just ditch PC and play with PS4 folks, either. It’s all crossplay, or no crossplay. Infinity Ward, for their part, are keeping an active role in stamping out cheats. This week, the team reported via Twitter that they’ve issued over 70,000 bans against cheaters worldwide, a marked increase from the 50,000 figure reported two weeks back. “We’re continuing to deploy dedicated security updates and work continues on improving in-game reporting,” Infinity Ward warned. “We’ll share more details soon. We are watching. We have zero-tolerance for cheaters. But fighting off cheats is an ever-escalating arms race, and comes with its own set of risks. That’s something Riot found out this week, issuing staggeringly-high bug bounties to assure fans that their controversial Vanguard anti-cheat system isn’t a security hazard.
