Activision continues to demonstrate how serious they are about dealing with Call of Duty cheaters.
As shared by Charlie Intel on Twitter, Activision’s Team Ricochet gave this statement:
“#TeamRICOCHET identified and banned over 27,000 accounts over the weekend through a series of upgraded detection systems. The team is progressing on a new set of security updates and anticipates more ban waves to come.”
Charlie Intel also revealed several streamers received bans, but those streamers claimed the bans were false. Activision’s policy is not to confirm specific bans, but they also have a dispute process in place, for any banned players to bring their cases to resolution.
Cheating is a perennial issue for Call of Duty games, but regardless of what some fans may claim online, Activision has demonstrated that RICOCHET has been an effective anti-cheat system so far. This is, of course, a perennially changing situation, as RICOCHET keeps chasing after the latest anti-cheats, including their anti-circumvention tools. But if the cheaters sometimes get a lead on RICOCHET, they do catch up more rapidly than other developers, and the consequences hit hard and fast.
It’s interesting to look back at Call of Duty Modern Warfare III’s beta, and our report on how cheaters managed to pull of a coup. See, this hack happened only on PlayStation 4, meaning the hackers were also able to circumvent Sony’s protections on top of Activision’s.
And then, two months ago, Activision banned 6,000 accounts, but obviously they had done even more catching up the cheaters today. It probably also did not help the cheaters that they were themselves attacked by hackers who stole their personal data, including their crypto. But we imagine those gamers aren’t as concerned about not getting to play Call of Duty anymore, as much as they are about losing potentially thousands or even millions of dollars.
Ultimately, of course, as long as millions of people are playing Call of Duty, there will also always be a high demand for cheaters. But one wonders what cheaters really see if they play Activision’s games and aren’t satisfied with what the game has by default.
Perhaps the one debatable case for this could be for disabled players, and Activision has demonstrated they are willing to make changes for those players, that non-disabled players will also benefit from. But let’s be honest here; there’s a ton of money in Call of Duty cheats that are intended to give players an unfair advantage to other players, and it’s those kinds of cheats that RICOCHET was created to deal with.
