Activision initially launched its Ricochet anti-cheat initiatives in 2021 to combat cheaters in Call of Duty titles. While the company has highlighted Ricochet’s achievements, the team responsible for the program is admitting that there were some issues with it during Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 1.
In a post on Call of Duty’s official site, the Ricochet team acknowledged, “We didn’t succeed with the integration of Ricochet Anti-Cheat at the start of Season 1—especially concerning Ranked Play. We recognize that the allure of recognition and prestige from Ranked Play leaderboards makes it an appealing target for cheaters. Therefore, our teams have been particularly concentrated on reversing the situation to provide the competitive environment our players desire.”
To achieve this goal, the team indicated that account bans are actively being enforced on an hourly basis, and investigations into cheaters have accelerated significantly to include thorough manual reviews of clips from matches in addition to the existing AI systems already in place to identify cheaters and hackers through the Replay tool. They also mentioned that cheaters would be swiftly removed from leaderboards due to better synchronization with ongoing investigations.
There have been complications with Ricochet in which legitimate Call of Duty accounts were erroneously banned, most of which have since been reinstated. Black Ops 6’s Ranked mode experienced issues with cheaters upon its release, which Activision attributed to an outage that “was found to reduce Ricochet’s effectiveness of the AI systems utilized for cheat detection.”
The post concluded with a request for Call of Duty players to report cheaters when they encounter them. Additionally, the team noted that significant updates to Ricochet are planned for release during Black Ops 6 Seasons 2 and 3.
Recently, Activision released a new patch for Black Ops 6 to tackle other issues within the game. Players have also discovered a game-ending Easter egg in Black Ops 6’s Nuketown. Furthermore, Treyarch hinted at a collaboration between Black Ops 6.