Activision Deploys AI to Combat Cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, Banning 19,000 Players

Activision gets serious: it has banned more than 19,000 players from Call of Duty competitive play - Softonic

For this, they had to use not only AI but also something very clever: the conditions themselves to enter ranked Call of Duty has always had a problem with cheaters. All online games do. But due to the game's popularity, it has always been particularly visible and prominent in Call of Duty. This is something Activision has taken very seriously. They are now demonstrating it with very specific figures: they have banned 19,000 players in one week. Why? Because that is the number of players who were cheating in the newly opened ranked queues. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 opened its ranked queue, or competitive play, on November 20th. To access it, you must have previously won 50 online matches. This serves as a filter: you need to have a commitment to the game and a certain level of skill to play with those who want to compete. But none of that has been enough to prevent thousands of people from trying to cheat in the game during the first week. Nor has Activision managed to stop them from continuing to do so. As mentioned on their Twitter account, around 19,000 players have been banned since they opened the ranked queue. This has been thanks to the sweeps they conduct every hour, looking for potential cheaters, using AI to identify those players who are cheating. How is this possible? Thanks to the 50 online matches required to access ranked. This gives them a match history that, along with tools to monitor past matches, makes it easy for them to identify cheaters. That, combined with tools that allow them to identify players using VPNs to jump between servers and players who intentionally do not play the game to gain more experience, is allowing them to efficiently sweep cheaters from the game. Or at least it seems so. These massive bans in the past have been at the expense of some innocent players. Especially those who have special needs, such as the disabled. That's why it will be necessary to see if it doesn't end up causing the same problems. But at least for now, Activision is doing a good job of keeping Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 free of any cheaters.

Call of Duty's Ricochet team promises hourly cheater sweeps

The game still posts monumental amounts of cheaters, with 19,000 banned from Ranked Play since it debuted a week ago... One of the biggest issues that Call of Duty as a series faces in the modern day is the overwhelming number of cheaters. We've seen for years that Activision and its Call of Duty studios have been fighting an unstoppable wave of hackers and whatnot, to the point that countless accounts have been banned over the past few years. One of the initiatives launched to combat cheaters is Ricochet, an anti-cheat platform that spots hackers and then neutralises and bans them. It has been quite effective, but it still requires lots of help from the team behind the software, something Activision now promises is still very much a focus of theirs in a new social post. We're told that in an effort to limit the flow of cheaters, Team Ricochet is ramping up how its AI systems enforce its rules and that the team is also making hourly sweeps to remove cheaters from Ranked Play and its leaderboards. In fact, they've been so aggressive with Ranked action that since the mode debuted a week ago in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on November 21, over 19,000 cheaters have been banned. This just highlights the cheating issue that modern Call of Duty faces, and no doubt ignites a fire in the console playerbase that are still very vocal about being able to turn off crossplay with PC to prevent landing in lobbies ruined by hackers.

Activision uses AI to ban nearly 20,000 Black Ops 6 cheaters

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. What just happened? Black Ops 6 debuted to widespread acclaim in October, but like many other multiplayer online shooters, it quickly became plagued by cheaters, spoiling the experience for legitimate players. In response to persistent complaints, Activision has banned thousands of accounts found guilty of cheating in Ranked Play. Activision has banned over 19,000 accounts for cheating since the launch of Ranked Play on November 21. The company revealed it is leveraging AI to detect cheaters and performing "hourly sweeps" to remove them from the Ranked Play mode and leaderboard. Additionally, the company is enhancing its AI systems with code optimizations to improve its anti-cheating measures. Prior to the release of Black Ops 6, Activision disclosed plans to use AI to differentiate cheaters from highly skilled "God-tier" players. The company emphasized that while cheat developers may help users improve their gameplay, they cannot alter behavioral patterns. "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," the company had said. The mass suspensions come in response to a community backlash after swarms of cheaters overran Ranked Play shortly after its launch. The situation escalated to the point where prominent Call of Duty content creators publicly criticized the issue, pressuring the developers to address it. In response, the team acknowledged the problem and promised updates to the Ricochet anti-cheat system to tackle the issue. Initially, a data outage in Ricochet reduced the effectiveness of the AI systems, hampering the publisher's ability to detect and ban cheaters. However, the issue has since been resolved, and the AI systems are now reportedly performing as intended. According to Activision, these systems are more effective than ever, identifying and isolating cheaters based on player behavior and gameplay patterns. That said, some players claim they have been unfairly banned despite not engaging in any illegal activity. It remains unclear whether these reports are genuine or if legitimate players are indeed being mistakenly flagged by the AI. Meanwhile, many console gamers are calling for an option to disable crossplay, arguing that PC players using a keyboard and mouse have an inherent advantage in shooting games. Whether the developers will introduce a crossplay toggle remains to be seen.

Are you a Call of Duty cheater? Watch out - AI is coming for you, as Activision boasts of 19,000 bans from ranked play with Black Ops 6

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a month, and multiplayer is, of course, where cheaters are doing their best to ruin everyone else's fun - but Activision is doing its best to catch them with an increasing emphasis on using AI. Call of Duty games use an in-house anti-cheat (at the kernel level) called Ricochet, and on X, the developer has outlined the latest achievements in terms of taking out cheaters. Apparently, Ricochet has facilitated the ban of over 19,000 cheaters in ranked play since that mode launched (a week ago). As you can see from the post on X, there are "hourly sweeps" to eject cheaters from the ranked play mode (and leaderboard), and we're told that AI systems are being ramped up with "code optimizations" to better achieve this goal. Fewer cheaters is good news for everyone, of course - except the offenders themselves, naturally. However, as someone replying to the above post on X points out, all cheaters do after they are banned is create another account. Or, we should clarify, persistent or dedicated cheaters do this. So, should Activision just give up and not bother? Obviously not, and some more casual cheaters might be put off by a ban (or repeated bans, certainly). But what about the more hardcore cheats out there? The workarounds to obtain a new account (including buying a hacked one) aren't expensive or that difficult to do, sadly. While AI is likely to very much help to police cheating, especially as these systems get honed more and more, it'll have to be doing so in a really timely manner to start putting proper roadblocks in the way of those who want to break the rules in Black Ops 6 (or other games). Meanwhile, the arguments continue as to the best way to deal with determined Call of Duty cheaters, including forcing two-factor authentication for accounts to at least help combat the number of accounts getting stolen - but there are thorny issues whichever way you look at this.

Team Ricochet is combating cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with 'hourly sweeps' and 'AI systems' but even with over 19,000 bans, players aren't seeing the results

Giving up freedoms and privacy for a mirage of promised safety is very 1990s-coded. So, with this in mind, it seems like an apt moment to talk about Ricochet's continued struggles with the 1991 period piece Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Players have a pretty rocky relationship with Activision's anticheat software -- mostly thanks to its kernel-mode driver, which gives the publisher the ability to access any bit of memory on your PC. But Call of Duty players were too tired of cheaters to protest against it when it was first released. Since then, Activision has had lofty expectations of Ricochet, but it's never really been able to live up to them. In the first few weeks of Black Ops 6, Activision promised Ricochet would be able to "catch and remove cheaters within one hour of them being in their first match". This aim hasn't been achieved yet, but Ricochet has still improved somewhat. Activision reported it has "stood up strongly against cheaters," with its behavioural mode categorising over 4.4 million data points per hour at its peak to then analyse for anomalies and possible cheating. Team Ricochet also recently gave players an update concerning the ongoing work to combat cheating in ranked play. "AI systems continue to ramp up with code optimisations to accelerate enforcements. Over 19,000 ranked play bans since the mode launched. Hourly sweeps to remove cheaters from the ranked play mode and leaderboard. Thanks for your patience as our team continues to fight against cheaters." This work is all better than nothing, but three years into Ricochet's life, some players are asking for more. "But shadowbans still exist," a player replies. "Only normal players suffer from this. Hackers simply create a new account." Shadowbans are only temporary but are still frustrating for people falsely accused of cheating -- usually by players who just enjoy messing others around -- because it'll put them in a limited matchmaking pool with other suspected cheaters or just bar them from any matches altogether. Regulating Call of Duty cheaters is a tough business to be in -- they're pretty persistent -- but it does feel like Ricochet is barely keeping up. Every few months, we hear of a new ban wave with leaderboards getting purged, and despite this, it never feels like cheater populations are on the decline -- but I could also just be incredibly unlucky. Even with all of these problems, Ricochet has proven to be capable of some truly funny antics. One old punishment saw Ricochet deploy psychological warfare by plaguing hackers with hallucinations. These decoy characters could only be detected by cheaters and served to "disorient cheaters in a variety of ways." Honestly, I can almost live with getting jumped by hackers in almost every match if Ricochet carries on with these kinds of mind games, it seems like a pretty even and funny tradeoff.