Want to play Warzone 2's new ranked mode? You'd better meet the level requirement

Call of Duty's big Season 3 Reloaded update hits today, bringing with it new maps, missions, and crucially, a new ranked play mode for Warzone 2. While the ordinary Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer has had ranked play for ages, Call of Duty's battle royale offering has yet to let you compete in a fashion that tells you how bad you are at it in a 100% scientifically accurate numerical way. Well, no more.

Hold your horses, though, because a tweet from Call of Duty's anticheat team informs us that Warzone 2's ranked play mode has a few villainy-deterring bells and whistles. There's new server-side cheat detection gadgets, a toughened password reset policy and, most interesting of all, a higher level requirement than MW2's ranked mode. You'll need to be level 45 or above before you can join the Warzone 2 ranked play club.

Level requirements for ranked play aren't new for COD: You need to be level 16 to compete in MW2 multiplayer's ranked mode—although that hasn't necessarily kept the cheaters out—but level 45 is quite a bit higher than that. 

As noted by ModernWarzone, hitting level 45 requires about 20 hours of playtime, and the hope is presumably that COD's anticheat systems will catch and ban anyone cheating before they can hit that level and start gunking up your ranked Warzone matches.

Of course, plenty of people have pointed out that a cheater might be able to scale COD's level system in far less time than that, what with, you know, the cheats and all. But still, it seems like a good idea to give COD's anticheat as broad a window as possible to catch hackers and the like before they can start interfering with the new mode. I don't imagine there are that many legit players under level 45—with the limited playtime that implies—that are champing at the bit to get into hardcore ranked Warzone play.

The Season 3 Reloaded update for Call of Duty: Warzone 2, Modern Warfare 2, and DMZ (why do these have to be three separate products despite launching from the same button in my Steam library?) will come out later today. You can find the full list of updates and changes here.