The number one thing both we and you care about is not losing another match to a cheater. A lot has been put into Black Ops 6 to upgrade security, but here is the goal we’re targeting: we want to catch and remove cheaters within one hour of them being in their first match.
This metric is called “Time to Action,” and we will be monitoring our progress internally and building technology to drive this number down.
During the Black Ops 6 Beta, our team was live testing a lot of its new tech to try and achieve this goal. Weekend One was a stumble. In the past, we’ve used data from console players during Beta Weekend One to train and test our systems. Put simply, even though we love our friends who game on PC, it’s nice to have a weekend to stress test systems without the risk of cheaters. Since we had to protect the game without those stress tests, our new technology was so eager to catch cheaters, that it came in a little hot. When we recognized those errors, we immediately made adjustments to correct course in service of our new Time to Action milestone.
Cheaters were able to complete around 10 multiplayer matches during Weekend One before being removed. After tweaking our systems and deploying new detection methods for Weekend Two, we cut that time in half to 5 matches. That timing achieved our Time to Action goal. In fact, 25% of all Weekend Two bans happened during the first match a cheater ever played.
But removing someone after they cheat isn’t perfect, so we are ramping up detections to try to stop even more cheaters before they load into a game. During the beta we stopped over 12,000 confirmed cheating accounts before they ever saw the inside of a match.
Black Ops 6 on Day One is going to launch with a variety of updated anti-cheat tech. To name a few:
- An updated version of the kernel-level driver. Note: All features in the October 25 update will protect any title that uses the driver, including Call of Duty®: Warzone™.
- All mitigations, including Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, Hallucination, and others will be live.
- New machine-learning behavioral systems, focused on speed of detection.
- New machine-learning detection models to analyze gameplay to combat aim bots.
- Upgrades when Ranked Play launches, which include continuous examinations to determine if leaderboard placements are accurate. More on Ranked Play updates in a future blog closer the mode’s launch.
- For Call of Duty: Warzone specifically, we’ve deployed new mitigations to interrupt cheaters. Stay tuned for a future report to learn about those new tricks.
We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and get them out of the game. That’s our commitment to the community.