Modern Warfare 3 has finally debuted its second season, and along with all of the new content, the developers are also shipping new changes to how they deal with cheaters. Still, players only want one thing and that’s changes to the shadowban system.
Season Two Reloaded brings fixes for flying vehicles, anti-cheat speed optimizations for ranked, and upgraded third-party hardware device detection, according to a list of changes shared by the MW3 dev team on March 6. They also flaunted banning 26,000 accounts in the day since posting, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy frustrated players.
Cheating has been a major issue in Call of Duty for some years now, but nothing the developers have done seems capable of truly stopping it. While some players were happy to see the changes which look to be headed in the right direction, most responses call for the shadowban system to be abolished, or at the very least adjusted.
A limited matchmaking state—or shadowban—is a status accounts are given when they are suspected of cheating. Unfortunately, this doesn’t seem to be deterring cheaters and also has been wrongfully flagging players who aren’t doing anything wrong.
Some players have gone as far as to claim false shadowbans are beginning to turn them and other gamers away from returning to MW3 altogether, so it seems to be a major issue that the team will need to address at some stage soon. Ultimately, however, despite zero changes to shadowbans, today’s new anti-cheat implementations should be a small win.
It’s too soon to know how big an impact the new tools will have on the cheating problem in MW3, but hopefully, the unveiled changes should make a meaningful dent. The good news is that the CoD devs are already developing more updates to reduce the cheating problem in the game, so expect similar updates in the coming months. Hopefully one of these updates will come with the much-needed optimization of the shadowban system.
