Cheating is one of the biggest issues in Call of Duty: Warzone. The game is notorious for the number of cheaters who sneak through the cracks of its anti-cheat system and exploit the game’s various weaknesses to dominate games unfairly. To help combat this, the Warzone team uses a few different methods, including the practice of shadow banning suspected cheaters.
Getting shadow banned isn’t quite the same as being banned. Players who are shadow banned can still open the game and play, seemingly like normal. What shadow banning does, however, is take accounts that are cheating and group them into a separate player pool, away from the normal servers of players who aren’t suspected of cheating. The logic is simple: make the cheaters play against other cheaters, instead of ruining the game for players who are legitimate. The game does not tell you if you’re shadow banned to keep cheaters playing the shadow ban version of the game for as long as possible.
Unfortunately, this system isn’t perfect. There have been plenty of cases of players who weren’t cheating but still managed to get shadow banned. If you think you might’ve been shadow banned, here are the signs to look for to confirm it and how to get rid of the shadow ban.
How to tell if you’re shadow banned in Warzone
The first and most obvious way to tell if you’re shadow banned is if you notice a sizable uptick in cheaters in your lobbies. This can sometimes be a bit difficult to tell, however. Sometimes, it just seems like everyone in the lobby is better than you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Generally speaking, accounts of players that aren’t already good at Warzone usually won’t get shadow banned, meaning that cheaters will be most noticeable if you generally got good results while playing Warzone and then suddenly seem to hit a wall for no reason in gun fights.
Of course, not all cheats are created equal. If your killcam constantly looks like your opponents have inhuman aim, you might be playing in shadow ban lobbies.
On the other hand, there are cheaters who don’t get shadow banned and still manage to run around in regular player lobbies. In this case, another good way to tell if your account has been shadow banned is if your queue times suddenly get considerably longer. Since the shadow ban pool of players is so much smaller than the regular pool of players, it takes longer for lobbies to bring in enough players for games.
One final way to tell if you’re shadow banned in Warzone is if you suddenly start seeing your game struggle with ping. If you’re used to a certain level of ping and then your game seems to consistently go over 300 ping for no reason related to your internet connection, it’s another clue that your account might be shadow banned.
All of these signs might indicate a shadow banned account, but if you seem to notice more than one of these clues, or all three, the odds that your account has been shadow banned increase considerably.
How to get unbanned in Warzone
If you think that you’ve been mistakenly shadow banned, there are a couple of ways you can go about trying to lift the ban from your account. The first way is the easiest: wait a while. If you’ve been banned on accident, shadow bans usually lift in a week or two. After that time period, your game should return to normal and you can play in regular Warzone lobbies again.
If that’s too long to wait, players can also appeal the ban via the Activision Ban Appeal page. This will require you to log into your Activision account (which you can do with your information from the platform on which you play Warzone), and then plead your case to Activision. If you were cheating, on the other hand, trying to submit an unban request in this way is extremely unlikely to help your case.
It may be that you submit an unban request and it turns out that your account wasn’t shadow banned at all. And while that might be a little hit to your ego, there’s no harm in still trying to see if you can lift a shadow ban if you think one has been mistakenly placed on your account.
