The Call of Duty franchise is an immensely popular one. There are those who play the games casually, just picking up a controller to wind down after a long day, while others make their living playing games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Vanguard competitively. With tournaments that can put thousands of dollars at stake, there’s plenty to be won and lost for a pro Call of Duty player, which makes it all the more frustrating when a player is discovered to be cheating.
Cheating is an issue in many games, and it plagues both the casual and pro scenes of a game such as Call of Duty: Warzone, which has seen hacks of all kinds from seeing players through walls to making cars fly. While Activision works to implement Ricochet Anti-Cheat, some Call of Duty hackers are finding ways around it, causing cheating to still exist even as countermeasures are put in place against it. While facing a cheater in a match is annoying, it proves infuriating for pro players who may lose out on big wins due to another player cheating.
A Call of Duty streamer called Kenji, who had won thousands in tournaments back in 2020, drew suspicion from some of his competitors. To prove that he wasn’t cheating, Kenji set up a webcam to monitor his screen during a 2v2 Search and Destroy match in Call of Duty: Vanguard. Kenji won his match, with his opponents still believing he had used hacks to support himself. When scrolling through the footage of Kenji’s gameplay, his competitors ImSasukee and iLuhvly noticed something more than suspicious.
In the footage Kenji posted, a floating rectangle can be seen showing the outline of a player, a common feature of wall hacks. Wall hacks, as the name suggests, allow players to see their enemies through the environment, meaning that the cheater can plan around where their opponent is at all times. Wall hacking is one of the more common forms of cheating in games, with Call of Duty: Vanguard even granting players wall hacks due to a glitch.
Still, wall hacking grants an unfair advantage to the cheater, or Kenji in this case. While Activision has given players interesting ways to combat cheaters in Call of Duty, the pro leagues have a simple answer to hackers and that is to ban them. The league Kenji competed in has issued him a permanent ban, and his collegiate team at Grand Canyon University will not be able to compete in competitive Call of Duty until 2023.
Call of Duty: Vanguard is available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
