In a recent blog post, Call of Duty’s TeamRICOCHET shared its plans for cheat mitigation efforts ahead of the launch of Season 3 for Black Ops 6 and Warzone— including plans to utilize machine learning as part of its anti-cheat efforts.
Cheating and Call of Duty go together like peas and carrots. Still, Activision and its TeamRICOCHET department have spent years fine-tuning a kernel-level anti-cheat tool for the popular first-person shooter franchise.
By the end of Modern Warfare 3’s final season, RICOCHET anti-cheat seemed to be in a stable position. However, with the launch of Season 1 for Black Ops 6 and the subsequent integration of Black Ops 6 and Warzone, a data outage led to multiple cracks in the game’s cheat mitigation tools.
Those fissures would only grow as the game progressed. Eventually, the Call of Duty team was in a position where it had no choice but to delay content intended for Season 2 to work on the state of the game before adding to it any further.
Activision has buckled down on cheat providers, sending cease and desist letters that have resulted in more than 20 different cheat distributors shuttering their services since the launch of Black Ops 6. Along with the recent threats of legal action against cheat providers, TeamRICOCHET has also unveiled new plans for anti-cheat measures coming in Season 3 and beyond.
Bolstering security for Season 3
Call of Duty’s anti-cheat team faces a unique challenge. The game’s community, including players who may frequently be exposed to the disruptive behavior of cheaters, want to know that the team has a functioning anti-cheat in place. However, the developers feel obliged to keep cheat mitigation tactics close to the chest in order to prevent cheat distributors from circumventing those tools.
During Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3‘s post-launch support, Sledgehammer Games took an incredibly unique stance on transparency with RICOCHET anti-cheat, frequently detailing new mitigation tactics so that players who would share captured footage of strange in-game behaviors would out themselves as having cheated.
Modern Warfare 3’s SPLAT mechanic was one of the best-known cases of this, with players who were cheating taking to social media to complain that their parachutes would fail in Call of Duty: Warzone, causing them to fall to their untimely demise.
Treyarch has opted to remain more mum on what type of mitigation efforts (if any) are currently deployed for Warzone and Black Ops 6, but the team did share that more than 228,000 cheaters have been banned from the two games since November 2024. Team RICOCHET also declared that of those bans, 23% of the cheaters were caught by RICOCHET tactics before even deploying into their first match.
The developers have committed to additional system updates in Season 3, including new aim bot detections and the use of machine learning to analyze game replays. Suspected cheating detected by the AI algorithm would then go on to be validated by humans before enforcement actions are carried out.
The use of machine learning and AI to detect disruptive players isn’t new to Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. Activision rolled out a partnership with Modulate to utilize AI and machine learning algorithms to monitor disruptive chat at the launch of Modern Warfare 3 in 2023. The system was carried on into the launch of Black Ops 6 in 2024 and continues to still be in use today.
Shadowbans and spam reports
Of course, when it comes to the topic of anti-cheat and disruptive player enforcement, the topic of so-called “shadowbans” is bound to rear its ugly head. “Shadowbans” is a community-coined term for Limited Matchmaking—a disruptive player enforcement tool used by the Call of Duty team to mitigate cheating efforts.
Limited Matchmaking is activated when anti-cheat tools detect suspicious activity from a player. The suspicious player is then placed in a pool separate from standard matchmaking, which allows the system to continue to collect data on what cheats (if any) the player may be using.
According to Team RICOCHET, Limited Matchmaking can be tripped when a player’s account behavior undergoes a major change or a brand-new account racks up what the team calls “improbable stats.” Being in a party with a player who is suspected of suspicious gameplay is also a way to find yourself in limited matchmaking, even if you are not suspected of using cheats.
Despite having tools like AI algorithms, Call of Duty’s enforcement team ultimately relies heavily on player reports to sleuth out suspicious players. This leads to community wide speculation that more players than would seem logical are trapped in limited matchmaking as a result of spam reports by disgruntled teams of sore losers.
Team RICOCHET has reported, however, that less than 0.15% of the entire population of Black Ops 6 and Warzone are trapped within a “shadowban” at any given time. However, the team has deployed new measures to help speed up the player review process so that innocent bystanders caught up in limited matchmaking are released back into a standard pool in a timely manner.
The team has also doubled down on its statements that spam reports from sore losers are not landing players in a perpetually shadowbanned state. Spam reports have been against Call of Duty’s terms of service for the past few years, and the team remains adamant that the action does nothing to result in enforcement against a player.
Detecting suspicious players is an important element of anti-cheat enforcement, however, so with Season 3 Call of Duty players can look forward to the roll-out of the new Death Recap Widget and bolstered KillCams.
New information will now be included in death recap widgets, which should eliminate some of the mystery of what led to a player losing a gunfight. The following information will be displayed in the recap with its Season 3 launch:
- List of attackers who dealt damage with their username, weapon, damage, and hits
- Affected by Live Ping: If the enemy had you pinged via line-of-sight
- Affected by UAV: If the enemy had you pinged on the minimap via UAV, UAV Tower, or Advanced UAV
- Affected by Unsuppressed Weapon: When firing your weapon revealed your location on the minimap to nearby enemies
As season 3 progresses, additional information about effects from gameplay elements like equipment, skill streaks, active contracts, perks, and more will also be added to the death recap widget and kill cams. This makes it easier to confirm your suspicions before you hit the report button.
Adjusting Ranked Play for Season 3
Call of Duty’s Season 2 efforts to mitigate cheating in Ranked playlists across Black Ops 6 and Warzone alike were little more than a bandage on an axe wound. The developers, at the behest of the community, added the ability for players to opt out of cross-play between consoles and PC on Ranked playlists.
While statistically PC players are more likely to be the culprits behind unfair behavior, the decision to segregate the platforms still did little to help with cheating. Instead, the option likely just threw the PC players who were not cheaters (and console players who were partied up with them) into what felt like endless limited matchmaking lobbies.
While consoles can continue to opt out of cross-play in Season 3, Team RICOCHET seems to be taking steps to make disruptive encounters a less frustrating experience. Ranked play progress can be affected when a match is lost to a cheater, causing players to lose the Skill Rating they ponied up as an entry fee to the match.
To combat this, Treyarch is introducing retroactive Skill Rating adjustments. When a cheating player is detected and banned, anyone they have recently encountered and defeated in a Ranked Play match will receive a refund of SR lost in those matches. At this time, retroactive Skill Rating adjustments will administer SR refunds for matches within the two weeks prior to enforcement against the disruptive player.
Call of Duty’s developers are also taking a “birds of a feather” approach to cheat mitigation. If you routinely play with a squad member who has a fondness for cheat tools, you may notice reductions in your Skill Rating, as well, as any wins secured with cheating players can be retroactively stripped from your account.
To square it all out, Treyarch will scrub the Ranked play leaderboards prior to the start of Season 3 to ensure a fresh start with Season 3 on April 3.
