Highlights
- Activision has banned over 14,000 cheaters from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone, showing its commitment to improving the gaming experience.
- The Ricochet anti-cheat system has been updated with features like replay investigations and hallucinations to catch and deter cheaters.
- While there is a risk of valid players getting banned, Activision continues to refine the system as it prepares for the Season 5 update.
Activision has announced that it removed over 14,000 cheaters from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone in the developer’s latest round of ban waves. Cheaters have been one of the biggest issues in many modern live-service games, particularly when it comes to Activision’s Call of Duty titles. Now, with the studio looking to build and fine-tune its Ricochet anti-cheat system to mitigate the problem, recent updates suggest its efforts may be heading in the right direction.
It’s no secret that Activision has been ramping up internal anti-cheat mechanisms to improve the gaming experience across the company’s slew of live-service games. Some of its latest efforts have translated into interesting implementations around the Ricochet system with one update to Call of Duty prompting players to go invisible for cheaters. An earlier addition to its Ricochet system saw a damage shield being added to players where cheaters will be unable to deal critical damage should the anti-cheat detect any such activity. Of course, regular tweaks to the system meant that more fraudulent players were likely to get caught more frequently.
In a new update, Activision has stated that it banned over 14,000 accounts from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone for cheating and hacking in the games. While it’s not as massive as the time Activision banned 90,000 cheaters from Call of Duty: Warzone, it’s worth noting that its updated Ricochet system detected the 14,000 cheaters within a 24-hour period. As Activision preps for the big Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone Season 5 update, it’s possible that similar ban waves may happen in the coming few days.
The bans are barely a surprise considering how the developer added some notable features to the Ricochet anti-cheat system in the past few months alone. For instance, it added a “Replay Investigation” tool which essentially enables the team to identify and study cheating behavior across all multiplayer modes in its games. More recently, a Call of Duty update added “hallucinations” to its anit-cheat which meant that ghost players would appear in-game, but only visible for detected cheaters.
It remains to be seen how effective these implementations will be in the long run as there’s always the risk of valid players getting banned unceremoniously. Of course, Activision will likely be looking to polish things up further as the studio hypes up its upcoming Season 5 content drop which will see the likes of Nicki Minaj along with Snoop Dogg and 21 Savage Call of Duty skins as part of the release.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone are available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
