More Hackers Now?
Are there more hackers in Call of Duty Warzone now than ever before?
It's very trendy right now for popular streamers to announce a switch to other Battle Royal games due to an increase in experienced hackers. But have they actually increased and how do the Activision ban waves affect the player experience?
As per usual, we will be looking at Rebirth and Verdansk lobbies separately. For both, we will be looking at just the quads format.
Defining a Hacker:
To start, what defines a hacker and how can we detect them? To do this we scraped known hacker's data, then compare their stats to (my and my squadmate stats). Conditionals were constructed and employed to all players in the database of previous games. There are roughly, depending on game type, 25 different acceptance criteria/thresholds. Based on the number of passed conditionals a hacker probability is gifted to each player. This is complex, and will have its own post in the future, but I’ll include a simplified table below so you can visualize what is essentially obvious.
The rows are specific hacker usernames that I have played against. After the game was completed, I went back and scraped all the games they have played with that account. The data under the columns is the average for that specific stat per player. ‘* squad mu’ is the average for the team I play with regularly. This is an abridged version of the stats that are used. Focusing on ‘kdRatio’ as an example, a player would pass the conditional if they have an average kdRatio double the mean for my squad.
Rebirth:
Note that Activision and Raven Software regularly announce ban waves, on Twitter, these are highlighted via the red dashed vertical lines. The data included in these studies is current through 2021_07_20. The Cumulative and Running Means are of all players in the lobby aggregated together. Running Means were taken on a rolling 50 game basis.
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It's fairly obvious that the announcement of the ban waves does not directly correlate with a reduction in perceived hackers. In an observational sense, the announcements lag reductions (see the wave at 2021_05_14). We also see increases following Twitter posts (see the wave 2021_07_16).
Verdansk:
Verdansk is tricky, personal bias is definitely present as my squad almost exclusively switched to Rebirth after it became a regular staple in the playlist lineup around the start of 2021. The trends are consistent with the Rebirth analysis above, reductions are followed by a Twitter post, which is in turn followed by an increase in hackers. Before Activision and Raven began making announcements on Twitter, there were likely ban waves in July and December of 2020.
Conclusion:
Looking at the Cummulative Means from both maps, we see a steady increase in hackers over time. It's fair to say with the rise of inexpensive aim-bot and wall hacking plug-ins, more players have decided to start cheating as the game has aged. The Twitter announcements themselves should be taken with a grain of salt, as they always result in an increase in hackers afterward.
Obviously, this puts Activision and Raven Software in a tricky position, too few announcements, and the Call of Duty community screams for an anti-cheat. In turn, it is clear that the announcements themselves work as a beacon for cheaters.
