Xbox players can’t escape some PC cheaters
By
Tom Warren@tomwarren Jan 11, 2022, 7:30am EST
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Xbox players are growing increasingly frustrated at being forced to play against PC gamers. While crossplay was initially a popular request from Xbox and PC players that Microsoft has backed strongly for years, those playing first-person shooters on Xbox are struggling to opt out of the experience to avoid PC cheaters.
Games like Call of Duty: Warzone and Halo Infinite force Xbox players to match against PC gamers in a variety of playlists. You don’t have to look very far to see why people are angry about it. “Now that cheating in Halo is confirmed on PC, can we have to option to opt out of cross-play?” asked one
Reddit post in November, just weeks after the multiplayer version of Halo Infinite launched.
“Forced crossplay is a scam by Microsoft,” reads another post in
Microsoft’s Halo Waypoint forums. “Forced crossplay is a mistake,” says
another Redditor, and the list
goes on, and
on, and
on.
Halo Infinite and Call of Duty: Warzone are both suffering from an
influx of cheating, largely because they’re free-to-play titles so it’s easy for hackers to create a new account following a ban. While there’s an option to disable crossplay in Warzone, if you try to load into a playlist on Xbox it will ask you to re-enable it. Whereas on PlayStation you can simply dismiss the prompt and continue to the playlist with crossplay still disabled.
Warzone players on Xbox have been complaining about this forced crossplay for more than a year, with various
forum posts and YouTube
videos highlighting how irritating it is to be forced into crossplay. Most of the issues are related to PC cheaters, who have plagued Warzone for years before Activision finally
added a new anti-cheat system in October with a kernel-level driver to catch PC cheaters.
Now that cheaters are already
ruining Halo Infinite multiplayer games, the call to remove forced crossplay is certainly growing louder. Halo Infinite players on Xbox are matched against PC gamers in most playlists, and even in ranked modes you have to play solo or as a duo to avoid forced crossplay against different inputs. If you want to squad up as a team of three or four Xbox players, you’ll be forced to play against PC players in ranked Halo Infinite modes.