Activision Admits Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Anti-Cheat ‘Did Not Hit the Mark’ at the Launch of Season 1

Activision has outlined the steps it’s taken to combat cheating in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 after Ranked Mode came under fire by fans.

Ranked, Black Ops 6’s most competitive Multiplayer mode, began November 21 but reaction so far has been largely negative. This is 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.

In a new blog post, Activision’s Team Ricochet, the division responsible for its Call of Duty anti-cheat tech, admitted not enough had been done to prevent cheating with the launch of Season 1.

“After a series of updates our systems are in a better place today across all modes; however, we did not hit the mark for the integration of Ricochet Anti-Cheat at the launch of Season 01 — particularly for Ranked Play,” Activision said.

“We understand the promise of glory and notoriety from Ranked Play leaderboards makes Ranked Play an attractive target for cheaters. For this reason, our teams have been especially focused on turning the tide to deliver the competitive arena our players seek.”

Activision said account bans are now happening hourly due to increased “velocity” from several Ricochet Anti-Cheat systems, in addition to the over 19,000 accounts it’s removed recently.

Cleanup of the Ranked leaderboards, which has suffered greatly from cheaters, is now faster, Activision said. And Activision has “significantly expanded” its Replay Investigation render farm (the machines used to generate clips for examination.) The company said it’s also ramped up the group dedicated to manually reviewing clips based on a priority order that favors detections.

“In the last several weeks, the Replay tool updates have been highly effective at validating detections and reports, providing further training for AI systems for the anti-cheat team, and removing cheaters,” Activision added.

Activision also promised more updates to come for its Ricochet Anti-Cheat systems, including its kernel-level driver and brand-new server-side protections. These are set to launch during Season 2 and 3. In the meantime, Activision encouraged players to enable 2FA on their account, and report cheaters in-game.

“The things you work so hard to earn (Ranked Play status, camos, etc.) are attractive targets to cheaters who want nice things but don’t like to put in the work,” Activision said.

“The Ricochet Anti-Cheat team will be continuing its work to fight cheaters throughout the remainder of the month. While we have made progress, we know more needs to be done and we’re eager to share details of our planned major updates coming in the new year.”

Most Activision anti-cheat updates are met with a healthy dose of scepticism from hardcore fans, and this latest one is no different. Cheating is not unique to Call of Duty of course, but it has become a significant reputation 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 applied to Warzone), with new machine-learning behavioral systems focused on speed of detection and the analysis of gameplay to combat aim bots in place.

“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 [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].