Hype for Black Ops 6 may be high among the Call of Duty community following its huge open beta, but retired pro player Scump believes a major issue plaguing the shooter’s predecessors needs to be fixed if it hopes to keep its fanbase beyond launch.
During his broadcast of the World Series of Warzone last weekend, a viewer asked Scump why he hadn’t picked Modern Warfare 3 back up and his thoughts on the cheating epidemic affecting the CoD title. Scump said the severe number of cheaters was why he dropped MW3 back in Season Two—and if nothing drastic is done for Black Ops 6, he won’t see himself playing it past the launch season either.
“I think the cheating problem gets progressively worse as the year goes on,” the CoD superstar explained, adding he’s lost interest in every recent CoD game after three or so months and that, despite Activision’s efforts, not enough is being done to halt cheaters in the shooter. “Deadass, every year, like clockwork, by season two I’m out of there. The longer the game’s out, the more people are cheating; the player base goes down, cheaters go up.”
While it’s the console player count that matters most, we can see Scump’s correlation on PC thanks to stats site SteamDB, which shows a marked drop over the course of MW3‘s opening season. There was a sharp spike in season two, but concurrents had dropped well below the launch count up until the “record-breaking” Black Ops 6 beta this past August and September.
The cheating epidemic affecting CoD has been well-documented now. Constant updates and the occasional win from anti-cheat service RICOCHET have done little to dissuade hackers, and players are getting fed up with cheaters swarming multiplayer constantly.
The issue is already on the minds of Black Ops 6 players thanks to hackers making it into the game’s beta while RICOCHET wasted time banning pros and legit players without cause.
Cheating has been an ongoing problem in first-person shooters for decades now, and most worrying many modern players believe the hackers are winning the perennial tug-of-war over Activision. Black Ops 6 releases in a little over a month giving the RICOCHET team time to prepare, but unless there’s something ready to go on day one, Scump—and many other casual CoD players—won’t be sticking around in the game for long.
