Players have been eagerly awaiting the mid-season patch for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s ranked game mode. The ultimate way to show off your skill in MW3 is by getting as high a rank as possible by the end of the season along with the rewards you get. However it seems that climbing the ranked ladder is going to be much harder, with a recent influx of cheaters that is currently plaguing MW3’s ranked mode. Are Activision doing enough to tackle Modern Warfare 3 cheating issues?
In a now deleted Reddit post, a user posted a clip from their recent ranked game showing another player tracking the user through the wall and then killing them before the user could even peek. Unless this is an insane implementation of peeker’s advantage, it is quite obvious that the player in question is cheating and not doing a good job of hiding it. While the original post is now deleted, the comments of the post provided countless testimonials of other users agreeing that the ranked game mode is infested with cheaters.
Call of Duty games have always had an issue with cheaters, but the number of players who made normal encounters with the cheaters in casual game modes is much less common. But with ranked coming out, all the cheaters have a new place to target. There are a few reasons cheaters might be flooding ranked games, but the most common is likely to be boosting services, where someone will pay for another player to carry them to a higher rank, normally through the use of cheats to ensure they win every game.
Activision Tackling ‘Toxicity’ – But What About Modern Warfare 3 Cheating?
This influx has really put a sour mood on the already delayed ranked game mode that players were looking forward to. To make matters even worse, Activision has provided no clear feedback on how they plan to combat the cheating issue outside of an update to the terms of service. While this may sound hopeful, the main update to the code of conduct was done to expand on the toxic behaviour section as Activiosn seems to be more focused on combating that at the moment.
There is a small light for ranked players, as there was also an update to the cheating section of the code of conduct as well. However, the update was to add a line telling players that they are responsible for any activity done on their account, regardless of who does it, and that the use of any cheats or third-party software to cheat is unacceptable. While this could be targeted at players paying to get account boosts and later getting banned when someone cheats on their account to boost it, it doesn’t provide any direct relief for the current cheating problem in ranked.
Hopefully, we will receive some official news on what steps Activision is taking to combat cheaters in ranked. But until then, it seems like many players will be stepping out of ranked and back into casual queues until an update comes out.