Activision originally rolled out its Ricochet anti-cheating measures in 2021 to cut down on cheaters in Call of Duty games. While the company has touted Ricochet’s successes, the team behind the program is acknowledging that there have been some problems with it during Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Season 1.
In a post on Call of Duty’s official site, the Ricochet team said, “We did not hit the mark for the integration of Ricochet Anti-Cheat at the launch of Season 1–particularly for Ranked Play. We understand the promise of glory and notoriety from Ranked Play leaderboards makes Ranked Play an attractive target for cheaters. For this reason, our teams have been especially focused on turning the tide to deliver the competitive arena our players seek.”
To that end, the team wrote that account bans are now happening hourly and investigations into cheaters have been ramped up to include more manual reviews of clips from matches in addition to the AI systems already in place to detect cheaters and hackers via the Replay tool. They also stated that cheaters will be removed from leaderboards faster thanks to greater synchronization with the investigations.
There have been issues with Ricochet where legitimate Call of Duty accounts were mistakenly banned, most of which were restored. Black Ops 6’s Ranked mode was littered with cheaters upon launch, which Activision blamed on an outage that “was identified as lowering Ricochet’s efficiency of the AI systems used for cheat detection.”
The post concluded with a request that Call of Duty players report cheaters as they encounter them. Additionally, the team noted that there are major updates to Ricochet that will be launching during Black Ops 6 Seasons 2 and 3.
Activision recently dropped a new patch for Black Ops 6 to address other issues in the game. Players also recently discovered a game-ending Easter egg in Black Ops 6’s Nuketown. Additionally, Treyarch teased a collaboration between Black Ops 6 and Netflix’s Squid Game.