Anti-Cheat Week in Milsim: Gray Zone Warfare Bans 293, WARDOGS Fights on Three Fronts

Two of the biggest names in milsim spent the last week fighting the same enemy, and it wasn't the other team.

Gray Zone Warfare opened Rogue Ops on October 22 with a ban wave already loaded. About two hours after the update went public, MADFINGER Games posted a Security Report saying its improved cheat detection in Update 0.5 had caught 293 accounts cheating during the Supporter Preview and the first few hours of the public release. All of them are permanently banned. Over in WARDOGS, Bulkhead was busy capping ping, talking tough on exploits, and arguing with its own player base about who's actually cheating.

Different games, different fixes, same headache. If you run a unit in either one, this week is worth a closer look.

Gray Zone Warfare went in swinging

The 293 number is small next to the 1,239 confirmed cheaters MADFINGER said it banned across the Update 0.4 cycle, as Console PC Gaming pointed out. But the timing is the story. The studio listed "New Anti-Cheat Measures" as a headline feature of Rogue Ops, and it had results to show on day one.

A lot of those bans came out of the Supporter Preview, which only people who'd bought the most expensive edition could join. That detail didn't go unnoticed. "Sheer irony of cheating during the 'Supporter Preview'," one player replied under the announcement. "The levels of scummery some people will sink to is unreal." Most of the other replies were some version of "well deserved," plus one player asking MADFINGER not to "ban me for having my controller plugged in like last time."

The report doesn't say what the cheats were or how they were caught. What it does say is that MADFINGER wants your reports, through the in-game system. Rogue Ops also closes the loop there, since you now get a notification when someone you reported has been suspended. And this morning's Hotfix 0.5.0.2 shut down an exploit that let ineligible characters claim the faction sign-up bonus, sometimes more than once.

WARDOGS is fighting on three fronts

Bulkhead's week has been louder. The 175 ms ping cap from October 21 was sold as a way to keep players away from "regions that are more prone to cheating," and the replies are still coming in. A Chinese player asked Bulkhead to start banning hardware IDs so cheaters can't just switch accounts: "Chinese players hate cheaters just as much!" Another player asked when the game would get "a powerful anti-cheat system instead of relying on region locks," since VPNs can get around ping limits anyway.

Then there's exploit abuse, which Bulkhead treats as its own category. The Season 2 patch notes warned that players "risk being permanently banned without warning if caught abusing repeatable unintended exploits," per Gamereactor. On the team's first Hot Zone podcast, devs said fewer than 400 players used the Season 2 driver exploit, according to a BoostPirate recap. It was a small group, but it still helped put tanks in 30 to 40% of matches.

The third front is trust. Studio lead Joe Brammer has been answering accusations of false bans directly. "Every time, they're cheaters," he wrote in a reply that passed 80,000 views. "Just we ban for things like recoil scripts, which a lot of games don't." Not everyone's convinced. One player shot back that Bulkhead "cant even reliably ban cheaters," and others say HOTAS flight sticks and even community server admins have been caught in the net. Bulkhead hasn't confirmed any of those cases.

Players haven't agreed on how bad it actually is, either. A 200-hour player said people are spamming cheat-site links in in-game chat. Another said they'd only run into two cheaters, both last season.

What this means if you run a unit

Studios can ban accounts. They can't vet your roster for you. Both games are asking players to report what they see, so the single most useful thing a unit can do is report properly: clip it, note the server and time, and send it through the official system instead of a Discord rant. In Gray Zone Warfare you'll even hear back if it sticks.

It's also a good week to be a little more careful with new recruits. Somebody with a fresh account, a suspiciously fast climb and no history anywhere else isn't automatically a cheater, but it's fair to play a few sessions together before handing them a slot on your best team. If one of your own members gets banned, take the studio's word seriously before you rally the troops to defend them. Brammer's point about recoil scripts is worth passing along, because plenty of players don't think of a macro as cheating until it costs them their account.

And if you're an admin on WARDOGS community servers, you're part of this now too. One player complained that some community servers are where cheaters "get away with it." A well-run server with active admins is one of the best recruiting tools a unit has right now.

If you're looking for a clean, organized group to play with, you can browse Gray Zone Warfare units on Milsim Units and WARDOGS units on Milsim Units.