Activision’s anti-cheat team has published an update on Call of Duty and Ricochet, claiming that with Black Ops 6 “we’ve made real progress.” Over the month of August “over 55,000 cheaters were disrupted by Call of Duty’s mitigations” and the Ricochet team even allow themselves a bit of a chuckle about how doltish some of these cheaters can be:
“Some players have noticed these tools in action, like weapons disappearing and cars exploding when certain players enter. They then promptly tell on themselves across social media, asking ‘Why did this happen?'”
For the uninitiated, Ricochet has some fun elements to how it works. Many cheaters are just banned on detection, but a lucky few get to play on while Ricochet nerfs their ability “to do any damage with weapons and vehicles”, tracks them, learns about their behaviour, and then permabans them from all Activision games.
The post goes on to detail some of the areas that Activision has recently been targeting, including permabans on accounts that were used to boost others, and regular leaderboard purges in Black Ops 6 and Warzone.
The Ricochet team also addresses player grumbles about its use of remote attestation, “a process that verifies critical PC security settings directly with Microsoft”, over client or local attestation. This can mean that PCs running out-of-date firmware fail authorisation, with some recent problems around older AMD cards.
But while Activision acknowledges these and points towards solutions, it’s not going to be changing its reliance on remote attestation, which “places the verification step with an external, trusted authority, making it exponentially harder for tampered machines to pass as legitimate.” It will, however, be improving the in-game communication around this element “to better inform players of their PC’s status” if it’s failing the check. You can somewhat understand why: as the Ricochet team has previously shared, nearly all CoD cheaters are on PC.
Communication is also going to be improved around Ricochet’s limited matchmaking feature, whereby suspicious activity sees accounts moved into a separate matchmaking pool. One downside of this is that an entire party of players can be pulled into the pool because of one player without knowing: players will now get an in-game notification when this happens, or when they join a party that’s in the limited matchmaking pool.
Come Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which releases November 14, “PC players will be required to enable both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0” before playing, and some new Ricochet systems will be tested over the game’s beta access period. Then Team Ricochet puts on its best Arnie voice and says “The full force of our protections will be reserved for launch, when all systems come online together.”
The post ends by acknowledging “there’s no one-and-done solution to solving the challenge of cheating … What matters, and where we’ve seen real improvement, is how quickly we adapt. In Black Ops 6, detections are faster, mitigations are stronger, and enforcement is cutting deeper into the networks that try to harm fair play. With Black Ops 7, hardware protections like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will add another layer of defense.”
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