Unofficial Call of Duty: Warzone apps stop working after Activision changes privacy settings

By Ali Jones
published

You'll need to change sharing settings back yourself

Warzone
(Image credit: Activision)

A change to profile settings within Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and Call of Duty: Warzone is preventing players from looking up their stats via third-party apps. According to Call of Duty tracker, changes to account settings made by Activision would have to be manually rolled back.

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In a tweet early this morning, Call of Duty Tracker told its followers that "we're aware of issues regarding an inaccurate 'Private Profile' error on Warzone and Black Ops Cold War profiles. This is due to an issue with the Activision services which we rely on." In an update shortly afterwards, the team said that "Activision states that all player profile privacy settings are not defaulted to 'Friends & External Tournaments,'" preventing third-parties from being able to access and analyse player statistics.

Fortunately, the fix is relatively simple. Players can simply log into the Call of Duty website, head to Account Preferences, and then to Account Linking. From there, you'll find the platform accounts that you've linked, but you'll want to ensure that the 'Searchable' and 'Data Visible' tabs are set to 'All' - if they're set to anything else, your data won't be retrievable by third-parties, and stat trackers won't work.

While it's not too tricky to fix, players aren't impressed. On Twitter, users LineStorm2 and Pathumx both suggested that Activision was limiting access to stats to prevent players gathering information about Cold War's much-maligned Skill-Based Matchmaking. At the same time, other tweets were implying that some high-profile players were able to use third-party tools to duck out of high-skill lobbies.

Earlier this month, another third-party app, Warzone Companion, was forced to change its methods after players found they could use it to avoid lobbies full of players with high K/D ratios in favour of those who were, theoretically, less good at the game.

If you're hoping to secure a win without using an app, check out our Call of Duty Warzone tips.

Ali Jones
Ali Jones
News Editor

I'm GamesRadar's news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I've run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam's latest indie hit.