Warzone developer Raven has now banned over 500,000 players

Raven Software has been swinging the banhammer once again, and now the total number of banned players in Warzone has risen above 500,000 – or half a million.

Cheaters are nothing new to Warzone. Raven Software has been battling with hackers and cheaters pretty much since the game went live. Back in February, we heard the developer had kicked off over 300,000 accounts for cheating, and then in April we heard the studio lament hackers were “ruining some of the [studio’s] best work”.

Over the weekend, in another attack against the constant stream of cheaters, Raven banned another wave of players. "Banned over 30,000 malicious accounts across Call of Duty yesterday," said the developer on May 14, "bringing us to over half a million accounts banned in #Warzone." Yeesh.

It's fair to say that the studio is doing a lot to stem the tide of dishonorable players in the game – the developer has even created a dedicated enforcement team to catch cheaters out.

Community input and a dedicated security team are essential to managing the servers, but with over 100 million players, it's always going to be difficult to catch every bad apple in the game.

The studio has outlined its policy on cheaters in great detail, thanks to a blog post published back in April. The blog outlines a pretty stringent punishment for repeat offenders, where the studio warns:

"Some have asked if we issue hardware bans. We do issue hardware bans against repeat, or serial, cheaters. This is an important part of our effort to combat repeat offenders."

The company also warned that its security research team published a report on malware hidden as a “dropper” in a fake cheat that was being offered for sale, and you can read more about that here.

Warzone's most recent patch nerfed the AMAX, FARA, Streetsweeper and buffed the PPSh-41 – you can read more about that at the link.