Competitive CoD: Warzone Players Are Forcing Their Way Into Bot Matches With A Cheat

A new cheat in Call of Duty's battle royale Warzone is now allowing a small group of competitive players to completely ditch the game's skill-based matchmaking and instead enter matches filled with low-level players and/or bots, according to Call of Duty YouTuber Drift0r.

In an interview with PC Gamer, Drift0r said that he was able to enter matches populated by AI-controlled adversaries about "two thirds of the time." The other third of the time, the matches were filled with lower-skilled players who are more likely to be new to the game. Some K/D ratios observed in these matches were as low as 0.72. Drift0r declined to explain how the cheat works, fearing it would add fuel to the already present fire.

Despite these bot and low-skill players being predominantly present in these matches, Drift0r also noted that there were other several high-skill players in these lobbies as well, likely using the same exploit to garner easy wins. While that impulse is maybe understandable in a vacuum, Drift0r is pessimistic about what it will mean for the Warzone scene as a whole if the cheat becomes more widespread. His expectation is that lower-level lobbies will end up becoming a 50/50 spread between new players and "really sweaty tryhards," AKA the other content creators using this exploit.

"It's not gonna be fun for the content creators because they're going to have to actually fight other content creators equally sweaty as themselves, and it's not gonna be fun for the [low skilled players] caught in the middle," Drift0r said.

After seeing various versions of the cheat from other competitive players, Drift0r notified Activision of its existence before posting his own video about it. Hopefully that will get this issue solved quickly, but the often-polarizing conversation around Call of Duty's skill-based matchmaking system will likely rage on.