Anti-Cheat Update: Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone Season 03
Season 03 is around the corner, bringing new content to Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 and a little-known map called Verdansk back to Call of Duty®: Warzone™. For the RICOCHET Anti-Cheat™ team, the focus remains on our commitment to taking down cheat makers, banning bad actors, and ensuring a great player experience. Our roadmap for anti-cheat extends beyond this season, but in the latest Progress Report we’ll focus on recent results and security-focused updates coming in Season 03.
Progress Report: Season 03 Agenda (Read on for details)
- Shutdowns and Action
- Season 03 Security
- Reporting and UI Updates
- Limited Matchmaking
- Ranked Play Update
- Taking on Teaming
- Account Linking Changes
- Community Questions
Shutdowns and Action
You may have heard that a few cheat developers and resellers are closing up shop. Since Black Ops 6 launched, our roadmap has been to go on the offensive and disrupt the cheating marketplace. In that time, over 20 cheat makers and dozens of cheat resellers are out of business due to these efforts. And we’re not slowing down.
Team RICOCHET has issued over 228,000 bans since Black Ops 6 was released. We removed 23% of cheaters before they played their first match. These are strong wins for the game, but there’s always more we can do to get better in both speed and efficiency.
Season 03 Security
As an additional layer to existing anti-cheat processes, we’re launching brand-new systems in Season 03. For security reasons, we can’t give away too many details; however, we will publish another RICOCHET Progress Report in the release window of Season 03 Reloaded to detail results from next week’s update.
Several of our current systems are getting big updates this season, too, including our aim bot detections and the Machine Learning system that analyzes game replays to identify suspicious gameplay for human-validated enforcement.
Reporting and UI Updates
Reports made by players in-game are important to our anti-cheat efforts. However, we've found that many of these reports have been inaccurate in situations where the killing player might have had an intel advantage – such as when using Perks like Recon Scout or when having the advantage of a Spy Cam live ping. Over 60% of received cheater reporting in Call of Duty: Warzone have been against console players, for example. Console cheating is possible, but our data has consistently shown it represents an extremely low population of detected cheaters when compared to PC, which means that this large volume of cheater reports are inaccurate even if the KillCams may have made it seem like the player was cheating.
To help resolve this, the team is making critical updates to the KillCam to help demystify gunfights and increase the accuracy of player reports. In Season 03, our studios are bringing a big update to the UI of KillCams to better recap the gameplay elements an attacker had active at the time of the engagement.
Current and new recap details in the KillCam widget include:
- 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
During the upcoming Season, this widget will get more updates to callout even more gameplay elements like equipment, killstreaks, field upgrades, contracts, perks, and more to help players report with greater accuracy and confidence.
Limited Matchmaking
We’ve seen questions about Call of Duty’s Limited Matchmaking (LMM) lobbies – referred to as “Shadowban lobbies” by players – so we wanted to provide some background on its purpose.
Limited Matchmaking is a necessary part of the system as an immediate reaction to the detection of suspicious activity. LMM allows accounts to continue to play matches online in a separate pool from standard matchmaking as our team examines and collects all evidence necessary for further action – if needed.
Being placed in Limited Matchmaking doesn’t signal someone is a confirmed cheater but an alarm was raised that requires examination. There are several ways an alarm could be tripped, including a major change in an account’s behavior or if a brand-new account is dropping improbable stats, to name a few.
Players invited to your party also impact the matchmaking pool you’re placed in. If one person in a party has their account in Limited Matchmaking, for example, the entire party will be forced to play in LMM lobbies. This is intentional so matchmaking adjustments can’t be circumvented during an account investigation.
Accounts in Limited Matchmaking make up less than 0.15% of the entire player population in Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone but partying up can expand the overall pool. Once a non-Limited Matchmaking account disconnects from a party impacted by LMM, they return to standard matchmaking.
A major update we launched in Season 02 was speeding up the account review process. If an account is removed from Limited Matchmaking after investigation, it doesn’t mean they can’t be examined again for suspicious activity, but this recent change was targeted to reduce the time accounts are in LMM.
This is the start of our communication around this topic, and we’ll discuss other planned updates in a future blog.
Ranked Play Update
Encountering a cheater in Ranked Play is not only a frustrating experience, but it often also results in a loss that costs you important Skill Rating (SR) – negatively impacting your Seasonal Rank progress. In Season 03, the team will be introducing a new system to help counter this frustration and reverse the impact a banned cheater had on the Ranked Play SR system: Retroactive SR Adjustments.
- When a Ranked Play cheater is banned, anyone they've recently defeated in Ranked Play will receive a SR Refund for those matches (to start, we will examine the last two weeks of matches but will continue to monitor if this timing needs to be adjusted)
- Players who we detect playing with cheaters may have SR for those wins taken away
This process will be live for Black Ops 6 Ranked Play shortly after Season 03's launch and a similar system will arrive for Call of Duty: Warzone when Ranked Play is live. We’ll also perform a leaderboard scrub before Season 02 ends to remove any account that earned SR illegitimately, such as from boosting.
Taking On Teaming
Intentionally working with opponents to grief other squads and/or to boost your account is “teaming” and it’s against the Call of Duty Code of Conduct and Security and Enforcement Policy. This isn’t a new tactic, but we’ve seen it happening more often in recent weeks.
Today, our team is issuing a Ranked Play-specific banwave to all accounts we’ve detected and verified were teaming during Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone seasons.
SR and leaderboard placements for those accounts will be wiped. Anyone detected teaming will be restricted from playing Ranked Play in Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty: Warzone.
Account Linking Changes
In a proactive effort to protect our players, we’re adjusting account linking shortly after the launch of Season 03. Any account that links to a new platform may be required to complete a new security challenge to verify they are in control of the account. Failure to complete the challenge will block gameplay on that platform. Players will see an in-game notification if this occurs, locking gameplay on the new platform until the authentication has been completed.
If you receive an email notification about a platform link or login attempt you did not initiate, visit CallofDuty.com to login and immediately unlink the account and update your password.
Securing your account by enabling 2FA is important, as is making sure you are not reusing passwords for your Activision ID that you would for other apps or websites. Reusing passwords on other apps or websites in connection with your email can open the door to your account being stolen or hijacked. Visit our best practices support page to learn how to better secure your account.
Community Questions
You’ve said spam reporting does not impact a player’s account status, is that true?
Whether it’s in-game or if a cheat developer creates a hack to submit 10,000 reports, spam reporting does nothing. Subsequent reports provide no additional information – you already told us someone seems fishy, submitting the same report again doesn’t add more detail. In fact, spamming reports – beyond Malicious Reporting being against our policy – reduces the trust we have in future reports from an account and may result in punitive measures.
What has been done following any false positives of anti-cheat enforcement?
Our team is always examining our systems for accuracy. If, over the course of these examinations, we discover an account action was not warranted it will be rolled back.
How often are leaderboards being purged of cheaters?
Anytime an account is banned from Call of Duty, their records on the leaderboards will be purged in response. These removals are generally immediate; however, there may be a delay based on timing alongside other updates.
We’ve detailed only some of the updates and upgrades coming next week, but there is much more to come in our roadmap, including new systems and the ongoing targeting of cheat developers and resellers. See you on Verdansk!
Keep an eye out for updates in future Progress Reports and across social media, particularly the @CODUpdates X social account for real-time issues.
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