Activision admits CoD cheaters won’t ‘disappear forever,’ but end goal is banning them ‘within 1 hour’ using AI

A new pre-Black Ops 6 update for Call of Duty’s RICOCHET Anti-Cheat system showed how Activision wants to use AI to improve its ability to catch cheaters..

In the ongoing battle to better detect hackers from cheat developers who constantly try to find ways around safeguards that RICOCHET brings, Activision believes artificial intelligence (surprise, surprise) is a key tool in winning the war against cheating, according to a new blog post today.

“What our team has been working on for the future is a suite of tools that use AI to find and fight cheaters,” Activision said. “Today, cheaters can run and hide but a trail exists. What if that trail disappears? That is what the team has been working on.”

The company thinks that those who develop cheats “can’t hide player behavior,” iterating that “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.”

“We already have data from cheaters but to help build out profiles for those God-tier players we examine the data from the Call of Duty League – where every match is recorded, and every stat is preserved,” Activision said.

CoD’s publisher teased that there’s even more that’s “in progress around what we’re doing with AI beyond behavioral models and as work continues, we’ll share what we can.”

Some of what’s new for RICOCHET was already deployed during the Black Ops 6 beta. Activision said that cheaters were able to complete “around 10” games during weekend one of the beta before being banned, but after RICOCHET changes in weekend two, it was reduced to five matches. And 25 percent of all weekend two bans happened during a cheater’s first match.

While anti-cheat is always a work-in-progress, Activision says its “NorthStar” for RICOCHET is to ban cheaters “within one hour” using everything that RICOCHET, along with its AI component, has and will continue to learn.

“Cheating is a frustrating issue across the industry,” Activision said. “But our goal is to get bad actors out of our game as fast as possible.We’ve had a lot of wins over the years – taking down several cheat developers completely, shutting out third-party hardware, flinging cheaters toward the ground at Mach-speed – but we know those wins don’t make you feel any better when you get beamed by a cheater from across the map.”