Changes are coming to a third-party Call of Duty: Warzone app in response to a cheating controversy. The app is titled Warzone Companion and one of its main functions is to display detailed statistics to players so they can assess their own performance and how it ranks compared to others. However, the app has come under intense scrutiny when gamers discovered it also shows the K/D ratio for every single player in the lobby before a match starts. It has since been widely reported that the app has been used by cheaters, who have been taking advantage of the app's algorithms by analyzing the K/D ratios of their competitors and leaving lobbies that they deem unfavorable. This loophole spells trouble for Warzone's skill-based matchmaking system. It has prompted the app's developer, COD Stats, to release a new patch aimed at addressing this very problem.
Call of Duty has been enjoying a renaissance of sorts since Activision made the unprecedented decision to enable integration between Warzone and the latest release, Black Ops Cold War. Unfortunately, cheating remains a problem in the game and the presence of various glitches has done little to improve the experience for fans either, the most recent and widely reported error being the now infamous invisibility glitch.
According to Eurogamer, the patch mandates that players' K/D ratios will only be shown after the pre-match warmup and not before. Additionally, the average K/D details of the entire lobby will only be displayed when a match officially concludes. Some matches will now only highlight estimates instead of true numbers as well. The changes have already been added to the app and are live. The hope is these changes will address the very serious problem of cheating in Warzone. The app's misuse has even caught the attention of prominent gamer JaredFPS, a content creator for esports organization XSETgaming. He posted a video to his Twitter following of over 100,000 followers in which he shares his frustrations with the issue.
Warzone Companion was originally designed to help players identify and report cheaters, but has since been manipulated by those very cheaters to serve their own purposes. It is an ironic twist, to say the least. The intentions behind displaying player stats and K/D ratios before a match was meant to highlight players that already possess extremely high in-game metrics, giving others a clue for someone to keep an eye on for potential cheating.
The good news in this particular scenario is that the app developer quickly provided solutions aimed at curbing the amount of cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone. The hope is that this will not have to be repeated and that the new measures will make it significantly harder for cheaters to exploit the foundation of the game.