CoD dev admits it ‘did not hit the mark’ on BO6 and Warzone anti-cheat, promises big updates

If you read any sort of post from Call of Duty on social media lately, you’re bound to see a deluge of comments from angry players begging for help with cheaters and hackers in games like Black Ops 6 and Warzone.

Despite CoD’s RICOCHET Anti-Cheat’s best efforts, cheaters remain ahead of the curve, ruining matches in Ranked Play for both BO6 and Warzone, which had its Ranked Battle Royale mode return as part of Season One Reloaded this month.

In yet another blog post from Team RICOCHET, the developers behind the anti-cheat are promising bigger and better, but were also apologetic for its failures, especially in the past few weeks surrounding CoD’s competitive ladder.

“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 One – particularly for Ranked Play,” the blog post reads. “We understand the promise of glory and notoriety from Ranked Play leaderboards makes Ranked Play an attractive target for cheaters. For this reason, our teams have been especially focused on turning the tide to deliver the competitive arena our players seek.”

Team RICOCHET says that account bans are now happening “hourly due to increased velocity from several RICOCHET Anti-Cheat systems,” including over 19,000 account bans recently. It has also begun the process of cleaning up leaderboards, and “significantly expanded” its Replay Investigation ender farm, which are the machines used to generate clips for examination.

Moving forward, RICOCHET says its focus is “ramping up speed of enforcement when cheaters do make it through our initial checks, which eliminates many bad actors before they make it into the game.”

“We use a series of systems that include human reviews, kernel driver detections to block memory tampering, client-side and server-side detections to flag suspicious behavior, and AI systems to get illicit accounts out of the game as quickly as possible,” the team said.

Regardless, the words in the blog posts are just words until there’s a noticeable change in ranked games, where players are routinely aimbotted or wallhacked against, leading to tirades on social media. It feels like it’s been a recurring issue in CoD for the past several years, and with “major updates” for RICOCHET planned including for its kernel-level driver and server-side protections coming in seasons two and three, the battle is ever-ongoing.

“The RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team will be continuing its work to fight cheaters throughout the remainder of the month,” the team said. “While we have made progress, we know more needs to be done and we’re eager to share details of our planned major updates coming in the new year.”