Activision isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to hackers and cheaters in Call of Duty, as one unfortunate streamer realized when he was banned from not one, but two different COD games in a single streaming session. A Twitch streamer banned during a livestream of Call of Duty: Warzone switched over to Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War only to discover that Activision’s banhammer extended to him there as well.
Call of Duty titles have had an especially disastrous epidemic of hackers as of late; an influx of cheaters that required Activision to take more drastic steps in order to curb the problem. With the Call of Duty franchise seeing a massive increase of active players in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need to take preventative measures to curb or eliminate hackers and cheat bots rose with it. The cheating problem got bad enough that a Modern Warfare tournament was effectively ruined by hackers, which ultimately put a damper on the game’s reputation. Activision, not one to take any threats to its profitable franchises lightly, was forced to take more drastic action to oust hackers.
Those actions included wave after wave of bans targeting any player using cheats like aimbots or other hacks. February alone saw Activision banning over 60,000 Warzone players for using popular cheating software, and the crusade to eliminate cheaters and hackers from Call of Duty is still pressing forward. This might be why Twitch streamer KD1PP found himself on the business end of the banhammer not once, but twice in the same stream. In the middle of a battle in Warzone, KD1PP appears to miss with a sniper rifle, but switches over to an MP5 and obliterates the competition without so much as batting an eye, before he’s abruptly disconnected from the server. After he switches over to Cold War, he receives the notification that he has been banned there as well. Twitter user ProRebornYT (via Game Rant) posted a video which captures the moment KD1PP was banned both times to his feed.
The recordings capture only a brief glimpse of KD1PP’s gameplay, and it can be argued that his MP5 prowess is due more to skill than to an aimbot; but that doesn’t automatically mean that he hadn’t used such software in the past in a way that Activision is only now punishing him for in this latest wave of hacker crackdowns. KD1PP has offered no information on the ban as of yet, but maintains that he doesn’t use cheats, and since he plays on the PlayStation 5, can’t use any hacks anyway.
In the court of public opinion, there’s a significant amount that the viewers don’t know is happening behind the scenes, and it’s impossible to ascertain why KD1PP was banned unless one or both sides comes clean about what actually happened to warrant it. Activision isn’t exactly the gold standard when it comes to reasonable business practices, but it does protect its assets no matter what it takes. And considering it probably isn’t a stretch to believe that Activision has a better insight how a player is performing in Call of Duty: Warzone, one of its most popular games, the conclusion seems pretty easy to draw.
