For the first time in a long time, give or take a month, you can play Call of Duty: Warzone without too much risk of bumping into cheaters. Things got pretty bad for a while there, but Activision and Infinity Ward's response was decisive - and delightfully ruthless.
At the height of the game's cheating related issues, the developers enabled additional security features and made reporting hackers easier. They also rolled out a much more advanced anti-cheat system, as well as a double whammy of creative countermeasures.
What we imagine proved to be the actual ultimate solution to stemming the tide of hackers ended up being a relatively simple one - make two-factor authentication a requirement.
Players must now link an active phone number to their Warzone account in order to play. Getting a new number isn't as easy as a new email address, especially with more and more countries introducing laws that make burner phones impossible to acquire.
Even during the problematic weeks, Warzone had effective cheat-detection. 70,000 cheaters got banned back in April and the number has definitely increased since. However, since you can play the game for free, the cheaters just made another sock account and kept at it. Now, making a new account means using up another phone number, and most people don't have dozens of those kicking around.
