Activision detailed the ongoing anti-cheat work ahead of the start of Season 3 in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone, confirming everything that Call of Duty players assumed was true.
Mega’s publishers not only pursue multi-million dollar anti-cheat technology and court cheat makers. Many famous successes these days. At the beginning of March, Phantom Overlay announced it is shutting downfans have responded to the distrust of such a well-known mandatory cheat provider falling on the roadside. And last week, Passthecontroller reported on four cheat providers that were closed before next week. It was hoped that Verdansk would return to Warzone.
In a new blog post, Activision said its plan was to “take offensives and disrupt the fraud market,” with more than 20 cheat makers and dozens of cheat resellers shut down as part of it.
Team Ricochet, part of Call of Duty’s anti-cheat-only Activision, has issued over 228,000 bans since the release of Black Ops 6. Activision claimed it removed 23% of the con artists before playing the first match.
“These are strong wins for the game, but there’s always something you can do to improve both speed and efficiency,” Activision says.
Season 3 brings a new anti-cheat system, but Activision says it doesn’t want to provide details on “security reasons.”
“Some of the current systems have also received major updates this season, including AIM bot detection and machine learning systems that analyze game replays and identify suspicious gameplay for manual enforcement,” Activision continued.
The company has since continued to address inaccurate player reports in gameplay when killing players may have Intel benefits, such as when using perks like Recon Scouts or have the benefits of Spycam Live Ping.
“For example, over 60% of fraudster reports received on Warzone are against console players,” Activision explained. “While console fraud is possible, our data shows that there is a very small population of fraudsters that have been consistently detected compared to PCs. This means that this massive fraudster report is inaccurate, even if Killcams may seem like players are cheating.”
As a result, Activision is updating Killcam. “It helps to split the firefight and increase the accuracy of player reports.”
Here is the current and new summary details for the Killcam widget:
• A list of attackers who dealt damage with username, weapon, damage, hits
•Affected by live ping: If the enemy pings you through your gaze
•Available by UAV: If the enemy pings you with a minimap via UAV, UAV Tower, or Advanced UAV
•Affected by unsuppressed weapons: When you fire your weapon, your location reveals your location to nearby enemies.
Over the upcoming season, this widget will get more updates to call out more gameplay elements, including equipment, killstreaks, field upgrades, contracts, perks, and more, allowing players to report with more accuracy and confidence.
Importantly, Activision makes changes to ranked plays. In Season 3, the new system reverses the impact banned con artists have had on ranked Play SR systems.
Retrospective SR adjustments.
•If ranked Play Cheaters are banned, anyone who has recently lost a ranked play will receive an SR refund for those matches (we will look into the last two weeks of the match to start, but we will continue to monitor whether this timing needs to be adjusted)
•Players that we detect playing with con artists may have SRs to remove those wins
This process will be a live Black Ops 6 rank play live shortly after the release of Season 03, with a similar system arriving at Warzone with ranked plays live. Activision will run leaderboard scrubs before Season 02 ends to remove accounts that have illegally acquired SRs such as Boosting.
The apparent prevalence of scammers is believed to have ruined competitive multiplayer, and Activision was under attack for failing to address the issue. Things got really bad, and with the release of Season 2 Disable cross-play with PC players for Activision Ranked Players.
Of course, fraud is not specific to Call of Duty, but since the release of the free download Road Royale Worsonne in 2020, it has been more of a problem for Activision. Hope among players will be with Verdansk living in Warzone on April 3rd along with Season 3.
Wesley is the UK news editor at Passthecontroller. Find him on @wyp100’s Twitter. You can contact Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
