With a number of Call of Duty: Warzone kill records being broken recently, suspicious members of the battle royale’s communities have been digging into how players are able to find easy lobbies – or “bot lobbies” – to achieve these high-kill games.
The two main culprits that the community has found over the last few weeks are geo-blocking routers, which can be used to find matches on specific, easier regional servers, and the extremely useful Warzone Companion app. The app will not only track stats, but will show you in real time the calibre of players in your lobby, with their K/D ratios being displayed and an average K/D for the lobby also being calculated.
Unfortunately though, the latter is allegedly being used by Warzone players to determine whether a lobby will be too difficult to achieve a win or a high-kill game. If the average K/D looks too high on the app, they simply back out and search again for an easier lobby.
With so many using the Warzone Companion as a tool for getting around the skill-based lobbies that the game wants to put players into, the app’s developer has been forced to make changes and says it is “sad” players have used it for the wrong purposes.
“What is a bit sad is that most of the discussion is focused on finding ways to abuse but not about the advantages and positive sides of the app,” the app’s owner, Dmitry Shymko, tells Eurogamer. “Cheaters are one of the worst problems of Warzone and online gaming overall. We wanted to help the community and highlight those players that are having extremely high metrics in their previous matches and at the same time give an instrument for players to see that they just might die to the lucky shot.”
With so many using the app as a workaround of Warzone’s SBMM, the app has now been patched to only show player K/Ds after the pre-game warm up has finished. It will also only display a lobby’s average K/D once a game has completely finished.
However, this compromises the app’s function to detect cheaters and hackers. Because metrics will only be displayed after the pre-game warmup, you’ll only know if you have a suspected cheater in your lobby once you’re already dropping in.
With hacking and cheating still rife in Warzone, an overpowered meta with the addition of new Black Ops Cold War weapons, and the recent addition of reverse boosters and SBMM exploitation through the use of the Companion app and special routers, it’s safe to say there’s a lot that players aren’t happy with in the game right now.