Multiplayer first-person shooters having cheaters is not an uncommon sight, but brand-new releases tend to have the most active concentration of them. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 multiplayer is currently battling a whole lot of these scripting individuals that are ruining the game for regular players. With the Ranked playlist now being live, players can"t simply leave matches with cheaters either.
Activision has noted the rise in complaints about cheaters in ranked play, and today, it released a response with some banning results. The company uses an in-house developed kernel-level anti-cheat solution named Ricochet for its Call of Duty experiences, which has been in use since 2021.
Per the latest update, over 19,000 accounts have been banned since the debut of Ranked play in Black Ops 6 on November 21. The social media post explains that "AI systems continue to ramp up with code optimizations to accelerate enforcement," helping the team catch more cheaters. The team added that "hourly sweeps to remove cheaters from the Ranked Play mode and leaderboard" are ongoing, too.
This is not the first time that Activision has mentioned the use of AI in cheater-detection methods. It said prior to Black Ops 6"s release that behavioral models are being used to separate "God-tier" players from the cheaters hiding from sight:
Today, cheaters can run and hide but a trail exists. What if that trail disappears? That is what the team has been working on. Cheat developers can’t hide player behavior. 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 plans to advance its detection tools enough to catch cheaters within 1 hour of them starting their first match. Aside from banning them, Activision is probably using other deterring tactics like its hallucinating tech, which it has previously revealed on these scripters, too.