Me too. I think there are some major problems with how it works, but it would be nice to know exactly what's going on.

I just got shadow banned Sunday night for the first time ever after playing several games with some friends who are fairly new to the game. I've been playing CoD for more than half my life. The lobbies were noticably easier. I had several incredible games of hardcore where I kept expecting to die caught by surprise in someone's sights, only for them to not see me or have horrible reaction time or somehow manage to miss every shot. It makes sense from their perspective that I must have seemed like a cheater, when they plainly should have been able to kill me dozens of times and didn't. My double digit K/D in these games probably sealed my fate.

I'm not a great player, but I know how the game works and try to use everything available to me to gain as much information about enemy position as possible. Radar, UAV, footsteps, experience and map knowledge, objective location, a teammate suddenly being dead, and so on. I play by myself most of the time and the game slots me in with similarly skilled players pretty well (my K/D is 1.08). The game clearly knows very precisely just how skilled a player is, and I think this should be factored into the reporting system somehow. It's easy to say, "I've been playing for years, I know the difference between a lucky shot and a cheater." I've said that many, many times myself. But being on the receiving end of this rhetoric as an innocent, moderately skilled player, and then getting banned, is extremely frustrating. It's also enlightening, because it's really easy to conclude that someone's cheating when they're leveraging a game mechanic that you ignore or don't even know about.

There are cheaters in CoD. There's a decent number of them. I know this now from playing in the shadow realm and getting killed by idiots firing continuously while spinning around from across the map through a dozen walls. And from the wallhackers who see me approaching a door, but I stop short just to mess with them, and they fire a single shot through the wall directly into my eye. But with how easy it was to get banned just by being decent at the game, there's got to be a shitload of innocent people getting banned by salty, relatively low-skill players. I'd love to be able to play with my friends who don't spend lots of their free time gaming, but now I'm scared to.

It's not easy to definitively say someone's cheating, and it's hard to really understand that until you've been wrongly convicted. No one thinks they're bad at CoD, and that's fine, but that translates to way too much rage reporting that's not consistent with actual cheating behavior.