Activision has addressed Call of Duty community complaints about cheating in Black Ops 6 and Warzone, and confirmed plans to let console Ranked players disable crossplay with PC players.
Cheating has become the hottest topic among hardcore Call of Duty fans following the release of Ranked Play in Black Ops 6 and Warzone with the launch of Season 1 last year. The apparent prevalence of cheaters is considered by some to be ruining competitive multiplayer, and Activision had come under fire for failing to address the problem.
Last month, 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 at the time.
Now, in a new blog post, Activision outlined its plan to tackle cheating in Call of Duty in 2025, revealing it had issued over 136,000 Ranked Play account bans since the mode launched. Season 2, which begins soon, includes new and improved client and server-side detections and systems as well as a major kernel-level driver update, Activision said. The company promised “a multitude of new tech” for Season 3 and beyond, including a brand-new system to authenticate legit players and target cheaters. It didn’t want to go into detail on that now, however, so as not to give cheat developers “a peek behind the curtain.”
In the shorter term, with the launch of Season 2, Activision will enable the ability to disable crossplay for console players who want to compete only against other console players in Black Ops 6 and Warzone Ranked Play. It is believed that the majority of cheating in video games is on the PC side, and indeed Call of Duty players on console have for years now disabled crossplay as a matter of course for standard Multiplayer. Now, Ranked players will get the chance, too.
“We'll be monitoring closely and will consider further changes to prioritize the integrity of the ecosystem, and we’ll have more details to share as we get closer to the launch of this feature,” Activision said.
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 wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
