If you love playing Call of Duty games, don’t upgrade to Windows 11 yet

If you love playing online games like Activision’s Call of Duty series, you might want to wait until the official version of Windows 11 is out to upgrade. Reports are showing up on Reddit of players being shadowbanned, which puts you into matchmaking with other players deemed to be cheating.

Yes, that’s right, using a pre-release version of Windows can get you banned from online games, especially if that game uses some sort of anti-cheat program for validation.

That includes the CoD series, the Battlefield series, PUBG, Rainbow Six: Siege, and really anything using programs like BattlEye to provide anti-cheat services. Microsoft also had problems upgrading Windows to some versions of Insider builds because of BattlEye, so it’s an ongoing situation between the operating system creators and the anti-cheat companies.

Microsoft has a pretty good working relationship with the anti-cheat program makers, and they’re usually quick to update when a new Insider build comes along. That said, it seems that the only way to stay off the Call of Duty blocklist is to not participate in the Windows Insider program, which seeds early builds of Windows to testers so they can try out the upcoming features before they’re released to the public.

If online gaming is a big part of your PC use, don’t enroll in the Windows Insider program on your main PC, it’s not worth the headache if anti-cheat flags your account.

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