Next week, Black Ops 6 is set to hit the gaming world, and Activision has shared how Ricochet, their anti-cheat tool, will safeguard the game from those pesky cheaters.
The mission for Black Ops 6 is simple: spot and boot out cheaters in less than an hour of their first game. Activision is watching closely and working on tech to cut down this time even more.
During the Black Ops 6 beta, Ricochet was already at work, and cheaters managed to sneak through about 10 games on the first weekend before getting banned.
“Tweaking our systems and rolling out fresh detection strategies during the second weekend helped us cut the time down to five games. This met our Time to Action target. Actually, 25% of bans during weekend two happened in the very first match cheaters played,” they shared.
When Black Ops 6 launches, it will come with these new defenses:
- A refreshed kernel-level driver
- Mitigations like Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, Hallucination, and others ready to go
- Advanced machine-learning behavioral systems to catch cheaters fast
- New machine-learning models to scan gameplay and tackle aim bots
- Enhancements for Ranked Play to ensure leaderboard accuracy
Activision also spilled the beans on Warzone-specific anti-cheat upgrades, promising more details in a future blog post.
Looking ahead, Activision’s Ricochet team is busy with AI tools to hunt down cheaters. They’re not only using data from cheaters but also gathering insights from pro players in the Call of Duty League to understand player behavior better.
“Cheat developers can’t hide player behavior,” they say. “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 wants us to know they’re always fighting against cheaters. “Stopping cheaters is something we’re totally dedicated to,” they emphasize.
Interestingly, this comes right after news that some players found a loophole in the Ricochet system, letting them wrongly ban innocent players in Warzone and Modern Warfare 3, though those bans have been fixed.
Black Ops 6 drops on October 25 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC. PC gamers can check out all the PC features and system requirements here.
