Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters don't even have to aim anymore

cod warzone s4 — (Image credit: Activision)

Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters have evolved. Since May, a type of cheat new to Warzone has been slowly gaining steam, with examples of its use popping up here and there on YouTube and the game's subreddit. The cheat is called Silent Aim, and turning it on lets you kill someone by looking in their general direction and pulling the trigger.

From what I can tell, Silent Aim is basically an evolved version of the traditional aimbot hack that will make every shot land perfectly on-target as long as the cheater is in the same zip code. Even if it looks like they're shooting ten feet to the left or straight into the ground, the server reads those bullets as hitting the targeted player.

As Reddit user notbilbo points out in the clip below, cheaters using Silent Aim don't even have to be aiming-down-sights to be perfectly accurate.

Yikes. The main benefit of Silent Aim seems to be its ease of use compared to a traditional Warzone aimbot. Not only is it easier to hide your misdeeds when your gun isn't artificially snapping to a target's head, but clips of the cheat I've watched appear to be way more consistent than other tools. I've seen traditional aimbots struggle to accommodate for recoil and bullet drop at long distances, yet Silent Aim seems to have no problem no-scoping a skydiving player from any distance on the first try. The most popular Warzone cheating site recently began offering hacks that eliminate recoil and bullet spread, so that could have to do with it, too.

As for anti-cheat efforts, well, Activision continues to play whack-a-mole against an ever-refreshing arsenal of game-breaking hacks. We learned in May that Activision has banned over 500,000 accounts for cheating since the game's release. On its face, that would be a significant chunk of the total likely pool of cheaters (PC players who cheat are a relatively small subset of Warzone's 100 million-plus total players), but in reality, we're likely talking about thousands of repeat offenders returning to the game with new accounts.

Last I checked, the most popular cheat engines can spoof the user's hardware ID so that Activision can't issue a more permanent hardware ban to their machine. And when one of their accounts is spotted by an Activision moderator or called out by a streamer and finally banned, they likely have four or five other accounts in their back pocket.

The problem isn't unique to Warzone, any free-to-play game (most recently Apex Legends) is especially vulnerable to cheaters that have nothing to lose by getting banned and making a new account.

What does feel unique to Warzone is just how thoroughly cheat creators have been able to compromise the game and how little Activision has been able to do to make these programs obsolete. We know that Warzone uses its own internal anti-cheat tools instead of proven third-party tools like Easy Anti-Cheat, which could be a factor in why cheat developers appear to be two steps ahead. The list of individual cheating tools on offer for Warzone is staggering and, unfortunately, growing.

Morgan has been writing for PC Gamer since 2018, first as a freelancer and currently as a staff writer. He has also appeared on Polygon, Kotaku, Fanbyte, and PCGamesN. Before freelancing, he spent most of high school and all of college writing at small gaming sites that didn't pay him. He's very happy to have a real job now. Morgan is a beat writer following the latest and greatest shooters and the communities that play them. He also writes general news, reviews, features, the occasional guide, and bad jokes in Slack. Twist his arm, and he'll even write about a boring strategy game. Please don't, though.