If you’re a Call of Duty: Warzone fan, you may be familiar with Nadia Amine, one of the fastest rising streamers of Activision-Blizzard’s battle royale. Even if you’re tangentially interested in Call of Duty and never watched one of her streams, a YouTube or TikTok algorithm has probably still fed you the cheating allegations against her.
Amine, an obviously skilled Warzone player to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time with the game, has been so relentlessly hounded by these accusations, that she is currently streaming Warzone from a “clean PC” set up by the YouTube and TikTok channel Full Squad Gaming, to prove she’s not cheating. This has truly become a spectacle, with more than 50,000 people watching the stream live on TikTok alone, across both the Full Squad Gaming feed and the feed on Amine’s own account.
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Predictably, she is playing really well. When I last peeped the stream she had 18 kills on a Rebirth Resurgence match, which is a lot! In her Twitch chat, however, some people were not yet convinced that she’s legit.
To understand just how much of a content mill “Nadia is cheating” has become for Call of Duty content creators, simply search for the term on TikTok or YouTube to see the dozens of videos and millions of views they have generated.
Here’s a typical example of a TikTok video from BadBoy Beaman that’s been viewed 2.6 million times and accuses her of using an “aimbot set for the torso.”
An “aimbot” is a common type of cheat that uses software to automatically and perfectly aim for the cheater rather than manually move their mouse. This type of cheat has existed for decades across almost all competitive first-person shooters, and as Motherboard has reported, was unusually common in Warzone specifically before the game introduced its new anti-cheat software, Ricochet.
In this video, BadBoy Beaman is alleging that Amine is using an aimbot that’s configured to automatically aim for the torso (most cheaters set aimbots for the head because headshots drop opponents faster), but there’s nothing in the video that supports that claim at all aside from the fact that Amine is hitting a lot of her shots, but not all of them.
Another video from the TikTok account viralwarzone, which has been viewed 3 million times, accuses Amine of cheating because she keeps looking away from the screen while playing. The insinuation here is that Amine is “wallhacking” with a second monitor.
Wallhacking is a cheat that lets the cheater see their opponents through walls, and in theory, a streamer could run the game on two monitors, with one monitor showing a normal game to the audience, and one off camera monitor running the wallhack. In reality, Amine, like many other streamers, is probably owning her opponents while also reading her Twitch chat, or looking at the in-game radar, which reveals an opponent’s team member’s location after each kill.
There are endless videos and accusations, and no actual evidence, but what you can see in every single one of these Amine videos is that she is absolutely ripping people up.
I’ve played Warzone, regrettably, for hundreds of hours and have a slightly above kill / death ratio of 1.17. I’m not a pro by any means, but I know enough about the game and video game cheats to know that there’s stuff that Amine does in these videos that no cheat on Earth can help you do.
In the BadBoy Beaman video, for example, you can see that in almost every firefight isn’t just hitting her shots, she’s almost always doing it while jumping and strafing, which makes her harder to hit. I know this is a smart way to play because I get killed like this all the time, and the reason I don’t do it often myself is that it’s hard to aim well, move to the side, and repeatedly jump at the same time. That’s just skill and muscle memory.
You can also see her making a lot smart calls. She plays aggressively and pushes into the house where her opponents are, but she does it while using a stim, which regenerates health and makes her move faster. When the fight starts to not go her way, she does the right thing by backing off and hitting the stim again. These are not things cheats can do for you, only a deep understanding of the game.
There are a few reasons why these accusations will not go away despite a total lack of evidence. One is that, for a long time, cheating in Warzone was so common, it was hard to find a game without a cheater ruining the game for everyone, so every Warzone players knows, or thinks they know, what a cheater looks like. There are undeniable examples, but a lot of the time a cheater just looks like someone who’s very good at aiming, which Amine certainly is.
Another reason is that…there’s simply something in the air with cheating right. In chess, in fishing, in poker—across the board people are either being caught cheating or accused of cheating in a very public and spectacular fashion.
Finally, of course, is the simple fact that Amine is a 22-year-old woman who is extremely good at a video game that has one of the most toxic communities online. Many of the videos are not just calling out a cheater, they’re explicitly calling out a “female streamer.” It’s good that Amine is currently streaming in a way that proves that she’s very good at the game, but it’s hard to imagine that she would need to do this if she wasn’t a woman.
“I don’t care what people think about me,” she said during her stream today. “But I literally can’t read the chat and see the nice things you say because of all the hate.”
