Complaints about Call of Duty cheating have ramped up recently with the launch of ranked play in Black Ops 6, and Activision has responded to outline the steps it’s taken to fight back.
In a tweet, Activision said that Team Ricochet, its anti-cheat unit set up to try to reduce the prevalence of cheating in Call of Duty, is doing “hourly sweeps” to remove cheaters from ranked play mode and the leaderboard.
Ranked, Black Ops 6’s most competitive Multiplayer mode, kicked off on November 21 and sent fans diving straight in to give it a shot. Unfortunately the reaction so far has been largely negative, and that’s because of the apparent prevalence of cheaters who are ruining the integrity of the mode. And yes, as has become Call of Duty tradition, console players are turning off crossplay in a bid to avoid PC cheaters.
Activision said it’s made over 19,000 ranked play bans since the mode launched, and that it was continuing to ramp up its AI systems with code optimizations to accelerate enforcements. “Thanks for your patience as our team continues to fight against cheaters,” Activision added.
The tweet was met with a healthy dose of scepticism from players, including high-profile Call of Duty content creators and pros. 100 Thieves founder Nadeshot, for example, called Activision’s tweet “complete propaganda.”
“… I have played the same cheaters since day one and not a single one has even a scratch on ‘em,” he tweeted. “How could there possibly be 19K accounts banned when the most egregious abusers are giving us the middle finger on the leaderboard? Are we crazy? What is going on?”
Cheating is not unique to Call of Duty of course, but it has become a significant reputational issue for Activision ever since the free-to-download battle royale Warzone exploded in popularity back in 2020. The mega publisher has spent millions of dollars developing its anti-cheat technology as well as pursuing cheat makers in the courts, with a number of recent high-profile successes.
In October, ahead of the launch of Black Ops 6, Activision said that it aimed to kick cheaters out of the game within one hour of them being in their first match. Black Ops 6 launched with an updated version of Ricochet's kernel-level driver (this also applies to Warzone), with new machine-learning behavioral systems focused on speed of detection and the analysis of gameplay to combat aim bots in place. Upgrades were set to launch alongside ranked play.
"The people behind cheats are organized, illegal groups that pick apart every piece of data within our games to look for some way to make cheating possible," Activision said at the time. "These bad guys are not just some script kiddies poking around with code they found online. They are a collective who profit from exploiting the hard work of game developers across the industry.
"But cheat developers are flawed (clearly – they have to pretend to be good at video games). Every time they cheat, they leave breadcrumbs behind. We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and get them out of the game."
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
