Player returning to Warzone after years gets shadow banned instantly

Although immensely popular, Call of Duty's premier battle royale title, Warzone, has had its fair share of issues. From bugs, cheaters, server issues to even glitched skins, the game has seen it all. However, another issue with Warzone that's not heavily discussed is shadow banning. This refers to banning a player without their notice, resulting in them not being able to find matches.

A surprising revelation was recently made to an old Warzone player returning to the game after a year. The player reported that after finishing the tutorial, they were unable to find a match, despite waiting for an entire hour. To the OP's (original poster) surprise, they found out that this was, in fact, done intentionally by Activision to regulate cheating.

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Warzone players getting banned without playing a match

The post was made by the Redditor u/DebateRealistic6339 on Call of Duty Warzone's subreddit. r/CODWarzone. It explained how the OP wanted to play the game a year ago, but was unable to because of hardware issues. However, to his surprise, after returning to it a year later with better hardware, he still could not play the game.

Commenters informed the OP that this is not the first time a new account has been shadow banned.

In fact, they revealed that it is no secret that certain accounts, which are brand new or have been inactive for a long time, face a shadow ban from Activision itself. However, a shadow ban of this nature should not last for more than a week.

Users also went on to state that shadow bans like these are done to prevent hacking in the game.

Obviously, such a move is bound to frustrate players as they are not informed of the reason for the ban, something other video game companies such as Valve do. Players are usually not aware that their account has been shadow banned just because it is new and they generally have no choice, but to wait the ban out.

This sort of incident just adds to the rough state the game is currently in. Starting off strong from Verdansk, the game has gotten consistently worse in quality ever since. For many, the game is buggy and poorly optimized, with glitches being rampant and many players taking advantage of those weaknesses.

Hacking is a major problem that directly hurts the gameplay experience in Warzone. Activision heavily marketed its new anti-cheat, Ricochet, along with the release of Vanguard. The anti-cheat was supposed to be more potent and effective. However, it also received its fair share of backlash. Due to the anti-cheat requiring access to the device's kernel drivers, questions have risen about the reliability and safety of being given anti-cheat access to such a core piece of hardware.

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While this particular ban may have been unintentional, incidents such as this one go to show just how many issues the game has had with regards to cheating and hacking. Overall, most of the issues seen in the game are due to poor optimizing. Hopefully, this is something we can expect to be much more refined in Warzone 2.