Activision has revealed that they banned 6,000 cheaters in Call of Duty. The hilarious part was, that the cheaters only have themselves to blame for it.
In the latest Call of Duty Blog, Activision shared this little message about it:
“The RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team has been tracking a spike in cheating reports within the community. We are currently in test for additional security updates; however, the following updates have just been deployed:
Disabled game code for limited-time perks (Ex. super speed)
As part of ongoing security updates, a single telemetry system was taken offline for upgrades over the weekend. This action resulted in cheat developers claiming RICOCHET Anti-Cheat was offline. It was not. As a result of monitoring activity over the weekend and the purposeful reactivation of this upgraded system, #TeamRICOCHET was able to identify and ban over 6000 accounts for cheating and hacking from February 16 – February 20.
Our team continues to work on security updates for issues across various modes in Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare III.”
So, apparently, cheaters were looking too closely at the recent news that Activision took one of their telemetry systems offline to upgrade it. The cheaters got too confident, so they decided to go logging in and try to cheat their way through the game.
Unfortunately for them, Call of Duty’s RICOCHET anti-cheat system caught them anyway, and now we have a staggering number of cheaters getting caught and banned in only four days of playtime.
We don’t know if there were any cheaters that gave RICOCHET the slip, but they would definitely not be admitting to any of it now. It’s certain that Activision has thrown millions on RICOCHET through the years, but for the sake of preserving the viability of their online games, it’s worth it.
Anti-cheat is a unique issue for online video games. Some gamers feel these systems are as intrusive as DRM systems like Denuvo, some deliberately call them DRM outright. But anti-cheat is a necessary evil, particularly for online multiplayer games, because game design can’t do anything about people deliberately gaming the systems.
As Steam Deck owners know, anti-cheat makes it impossible to play games like Call of Duty on their platform. While it’s great that Valve managed to build a successful DRM-free platform, they will have to actively work with developers on anti-cheat compatibility, to get those online games on their platform. Without these systems, gameplay for Steam Deck owners would be fundamentally broken on their platform.
