Umair
Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat has become something of a pantomime villain in recent months. During Season 1 of Black Ops 6, players were incredibly vocal after Ranked Play was swamped by hackers, and they were appearing in Warzone in their droves too. The Ricochet team promised that improvements and new features were coming, and now a new blog post shows a little bit of what it’s been working on. It also reveals that more than 200,000 cheating bans have been dished out since BO6 launched last year.
Despite having one of the biggest playerbases in the multiplayer game space, Call of Duty’s anti-cheat efforts have regularly come under fire. Ricochet has had spells where it’s been super effective against bad actors, even humiliating them at times – I remember when Warzone hackers were having their damage numbers turned down to zero after being detected. Those were the days… However, Call of Duty’s free battle royale and even the paid annual titles like Black Ops 6 have often had struggles with cheaters, with Ricochet often being slow to react or easy to circumvent.
During Season 1 of Black Ops 6, Activision conceded that Ricochet “did not hit the mark” after Ranked Play lobbies, especially, were plagued with hackers, disrupting the competitive experience that hardcore COD players enjoy.
In a new blog post, the Ricochet team highlights that it’s managed to detect and ban 228,000 cheaters across both Black Ops 6 and Warzone since BO6 dropped on October 25 last year. Apparently 23% of these cheaters were banned before getting to play a single match. However, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, and some new systems are coming for the start of Season 3 next week. While Ricochet can’t share specific details on these fresh features, it does say that enhancements will also arrive for aim bot detection and its machine learning system, which scans and analyzes gameplay to try and identify cheaters in action. A refund feature is also arriving for BO6 Ranked players, which will grant you back any skill rating you lost in matches that were impacted by a cheater over a two-week timeframe.
In order to combat false reports from players, which will take attention away from valid accusations of cheating, a new UI component is being added to killcams. Look, we’ve all been there. That guy seemed to know your every move and was ready and waiting for you to run around the corner. Or you get hit by a perfectly placed snipe from what feels like miles away. ‘He’s hacking!’ you cry in disbelief. I’m guilty of it too. But this new addition to the UI will be able to contextualize suspicious eliminations by telling you if you were affected by certain in-game mechanics, such as UAVs or Live Pings, that would make it easier for the opponent to kill you. This should hopefully reduce the amount of reactive, unwarranted cheating reports Ricochet receives.
Elsewhere, in a surprise move, the Ricochet team has for the first time properly acknowledged that ‘shadow ban’ lobbies exist. Known as Limited Matchmaking lobbies, they act essentially as a holding pen for players that have been flagged by Ricochet as potential cheaters. While the anti-cheat team investigates them, they will be separated from the main player pool and placed into these Limited Matchamking lobbies. If guilty, a ban is dished out. If innocent, they’ll go back into regular matchmaking.
“Accounts in Limited Matchmaking make up less than 0.15% of the entire player population in Black Ops 6 and Call of Duty Warzone, but partying up [with a shadow banned player] can expand the overall pool,” the blog post explains.
To check out everything in today’s Ricochet update, head to the full blog post here. And as a reminder, the Black Ops 6 Season 3 release date will be dropping a day earlier than previously scheduled on Wednesday, April 2. Verdansk’s return to Warzone will arrive the following day.
For more, check out some of the best FPS games and best free PC games you can play right now.
You can follow us on Google News for daily PC games news, reviews, and guides. We’ve also got a vibrant community Discord server, where you can chat about this story with members of the team and fellow readers.
