Activision made some changes to the way player profiles work this week, and fans are not happy about it.

Profiles are now set to private by default across both Warzone and Call of Duty Black Ops Cold War. Previously, all profiles were public making it easy to see the stats of any player you come across in Warzone or Cold War. Now though, this change makes it so all of that information is hidden.

We’ve all been there, killed by a player in Warzone who’s gameplay looks a little bit sus, but you can’t for sure say whether they outplayed you legitimately or if they’re using third party software to give them an advantage. Any easy way to find out whether a player is a cheater was to look up their stats on a stat tracking website like COD.Tracker. This would give you the information on their K/D or W/L ratio. A player who is cheating would have higher than normal win rates and K/D.

With profiles, and subsequent statistics now hidden from public view, tracking websites like the aforementioned can no longer pull the information they need.

This is great news for hackers, who can now no longer have their profile information looked up by people they’ve killed in game. I for one have used these sites to find out if I was killed by a hacker numerous times, the clip below shows a player who killed me in Warzone, we spectated him and watched him get some very suspicious kills, later in the game, when he realised he was being watched by five people, his ‘skill’ level seemed to dramatically decrease with him being killed easily by a player who snuck up on him.

The good news, is that players who want to show of their stats can change their profile settings to allow them to be shown publicly again and here is how:

First, head over to the official Call of Duty website.

Simply login to your account that you use for Call of Duty on any platform, it doesn’t matter whether you play on Xbox, PlayStation, or PC, you can change the public information for any platform.

Then click on your profile name in the top right corner.

Click the account linking tab in the drop down menu and it will give you an overview of your linked accounts.

Change the option for ‘Searchable’ and ‘Data Visible’ to All.

This will once again make all of your statistics searchable and public allowing the tracking websites to show your information. Although it may take a while before the changes take place.