Here’s how Call of Duty will fight cheaters in Season 3 and beyond.
Call of Duty‘s battle against cheaters continues, and ahead of Season 3‘s launch for Black Ops 6 and Warzone, Activision has released a blog detailing the new efforts to combat those unsavory players. Here are all the big changes announced for Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat and the fight against hackers.
Activision confirmed the previous report that several Call of Duty cheat providers have been shut down. The publisher says that “over 20 cheat makers and dozens of cheat resellers” have been terminated since the launch of Black Ops 6, and that these shutdown efforts will continue.
“For the anti-cheat team, the focus remains on our commitment to taking down cheat makers, banning bad actors, and ensuring a great player experience,” Activision says.
The publisher announced that the Ricochet team has issued over 228,000 bans since Black Ops 6 was released, citing that 23% of the cheaters were removed before they played their first match.
One of the new changes is the updated UI for Season 3. Activision says that a large portion of player-reported incidents are inaccurate and often console players. The report suggests that some of the inaccuracy might come from kills by players who used in-game intel like a Recon Scout perk or live ping. So, Season 3 will give players more detail on the KillCams to allow them to see if their opponent was using various game elements at the time of the kill.
Details in the KillCam widget will include:
- List of attackers who dealt damage with their username, weapon, damage, and hits
- Affected by Live Ping: If the enemy had you pinged via line-of-sight
- Affected by UAV: If the enemy had you pinged on the minimap via UAV, UAV Tower, or
- Advanced UAV
- Affected by unsuppressed weapon: When firing your weapon revealed your location on
- the minimap to nearby enemies
Season 3 will work to further improve the Ranked Play experience, which has previously been a hotspot for cheaters. The team will introduce a new system shortly after the launch of Season 3 that will help counter the impact a banned cheater had on the Ranked Play system with retroactive SR adjustments.
These actions include:
- When a Ranked Play cheater is banned, anyone they’ve recently defeated in Ranked Play will receive a SR Refund for those matches (to start, we will examine the last two weeks of matches but will continue to monitor if this timing needs to be adjusted)
- Players who we detect playing with cheaters may have SR for those wins taken away
A leaderboard scrub will also be performed before the end of Season 2 to remove any cheaters who gained SR illegitimately.
Additionally, Season 3 is bringing updates to the team’s aimbot detections and the machine-learning system that analyzes game replays to identify suspicious gameplay for manual enforcement.
Changes are also coming to the account linking process in Season 3. Any account that links to a new platform may be required to complete a new security challenge to verify they are in control of the account. Failure to complete the challenge will block gameplay on that platform.
Activision also warned players against actions that could get them in trouble. This includes intentionally “teaming” to work with other squads to either grief other teams or account boost, as this is against the Call of Duty Code of Conduct and Security and Enforcement Policy. Activision recently warned players about account buying and selling, as any account that has been knowingly sold will be permanently banned.
Lastly, players can expect several new layers to Call of Duty’s anti-cheat efforts with Season 3, but to avoid giving away all the details too early, Activision says it will release an updated report on these new anti-cheat efforts closer to the Season 3 Reloaded update.
The publisher has recently hyped up the return of Warzone’s Verdansk map, such as releasing an OG Verdansk trailer and bringing back nostalgic weapons and operators. Hopefully, these new anti-cheat efforts will be enough to hold the cheaters back and not ruin all the nostalgic fun.
For more news, make sure to check out the highlights for Season 3 of Black Ops 6, which showcase the new Shattered Veil Zombies map, several multiplayer maps, and Jay and Silent Bob operator bundles. Warzone’s Season 3 content is showcased here, including the classic features and vehicles returning with Verdansk.
