Warzone community members allegedly exposed a ring of cheaters who used a boosting service to earn spots in the Resurgence Ranked Play Top 250.
Professional Warzone player OMiT Brax posted a video of a group of players in a Resurgence Ranked Play match getting free kills on what looks like a large group of bots. “At least 100 of the top 250 players on the resurgence ranked leaderboard are hacking,” Brax claimed, and showed images of accounts that had abnormally large amount of skill rating earned. For example, an account went from the bronze division to the Top 250 in two matches, which should be impossible.
In Resurgence Ranked Play, everyone starts in bronze and progresses through six other divisions by earning skill rating (SR) before ultimately earning a spot in the Top 250. SR is gained by placement, kills, assists, and squad kills, but players also players lose SR for each time they die during a match and a deployment fee deducts SR at the start of every match. If players are hacking, like Brax alleged, it would mean the cheating service managed to create a lobby full of AI enemies and players earned easy SR by getting free kills.
This would not only harm the integrity of the game mode, but also could knock players out of contention for rewards even if they put in the time and effort. At the end of every season, players earn Ranked Play rewards based on the highest division they reached. For the Top 250, players earn an exclusive animated calling card, animated emblem, large decal and operator skin, with the number one overall player also getting an animated calling card and emblem. They are all only cosmetic items, yet players would still be disappointed if they missed out because of a cheater.
Warzone players already reported an uptick of cheating in season two, but the devs reassured frustrated community members on March 6 by confirming over 26,000 accounts were banned that day and improvements were made with the RICOCHET anti-cheat to detect cheaters more easily. Users thought this could have marked a promising step in the right direction, but this troubling wave of hacking shows there are still significant issues that need to be ironed out.
