How Call Of Duty’s Anti-Cheat Aims To Take Out Cheaters In Black Ops 6

With Black Ops 6 arriving next week, Activision has detailed the plans for how Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat software will protect the game from cheaters. This includes plans for the Black Ops 6 launch and beyond.

Activision says the goal for Black Ops 6 is to catch and remove cheaters within one hour of them being in their first match. From there, the publisher says it’s monitoring the progress internally and building technology to drive this number even further down.

Ricochet was active during the Black Ops 6 beta, and Activision says cheaters were able to complete around 10 multiplayer matches during weekend one before being removed.

“After tweaking our systems and deploying new detection methods for weekend two, we cut that time in half to five matches. That timing achieved our Time to Action goal. In fact, 25% of all weekend-two bans happened during the first match a cheater ever played,” the publisher says.

Additionally, Black Ops 6 will launch with the following upgraded protections:

• An updated version of the kernel-level driver
• All mitigations, including Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, Hallucination, and others will be live
• New machine-learning behavioral systems, focused on speed of detection
• New machine-learning detection models to analyze gameplay to combat aim bots
• Upgrades when Ranked Play launches, which include continuous examinations to determine if leaderboard placements are accurate

Activision revealed that new Warzone-specific anti-cheat features are also active, and players can expect a future blog post to discuss those methods.

For future advancements to Call of Duty’s anti-cheat, Activision says the Ricochet team has been working on a suite of tools that uses AI to find and fight cheaters. The publisher says it already has data from cheaters, but now it’s using data from the pro players in the Call of Duty League to learn more on the behavioral side.

“Cheat developers can’t hide player behavior,” the publisher says. “How people play — the legit, the phony, the good, and the bad — gives us information and we use that to build ways to pick those bad folks out of a lineup.”

Activision also reminds players that anti-cheat is a constant effort. “We are always working to stop and thwart the efforts of cheaters. It’s an effort we’re deeply committed to, through and through.”

Of course, this new report on Ricochet comes just a day after Activision confirmed that players found a workaround in a Ricochet detection system that allowed them to target legitimate players in Warzone and Modern Warfare 3, resulting in false bans that have since been reversed.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 releases on October 25 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC. Those planning on playing Black Ops 6 on PC can find all the PC-specific features and hardware requirements here.