Cover-Credits:
EA-owned Respawn Entertainment’s Lead Competitive Development Manager Eric “GH057ayame” Hewitt, and 100 Thieves content creator and Team Sheesh pro Jack "NiceWigg" Martin took a dig at Warzone live during the Apex Legends Global Series Split 2 Playoffs. A number of Warzone pros and content creator switched to Apex Legends over the past year including Nicholas “NICKMERCS” Kolcheff and Turner “Tfue” Tenney. Ghost and NiceWigg joked about how Warzone needs to sort things out, indirectly talking about the game’s cheating problem.
NiceWigg says Warzone needs to “step it up”
Ghost is a former Halo pro who joined 343 Industries and eventually moved over to Respawn Entertainment. He was talking about the challenges the Apex team faces when dealing with bug abusers and cheaters. NiceWigg, who is a caster for the ongoing Apex Legends Global Series event, looked at the camera and said “way better than Warzone!” Ghost tried to control his laughter and said “I just work here” before NiceWigg said that Warzone needs to step it up.
Apex peaked at under 120,000 players when it launched on Steam in November 2020 after over one and a half years of being on Origin. The player base has more than tripled since then with the latest season bringing in almost 400,000 players in February 2022 which is impressive despite titles like Valorant, Call of Duty: Vanguard and Halo Infinite releasing in the FPS genre in the past two years.
While NiceWigg’s comment about Warzone needing to step it up is true, Call of Duty devs have cut down on the cheater problem recently. RICOCHET Anti-Cheat is an attempt by Activision to bring a higher level of security to Call of Duty, bringing server enhancements to Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone. Last year it was launched in Warzone as a new kernel-level driver on PC before being integrated into Vanguard.
Kernel-level drivers are given a high level of access to monitor and manage software and applications on a PC, such as your PC’s graphics card driver. The system will check the software and applications that attempt to interact and manipulate Call of Duty: Warzone, providing the overall security team more data to bolster security. Once the kernel-level driver is deployed; it will be required to play Warzone. Last week, Activision reported that almost 150,000 players have been banned recently thanks to the new anti-cheat which is a great sign for the Call of Duty community.
