As with any live service competitive shooter, the developers for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 have their work cut out for them trying to deal with the seemingly never-ending supply of cheaters who keep popping up. So far, a grand total of 136,000 cheaters have been banned.
"Instances of cheating in Call of Duty, particularly in Ranked Play across both MP and Warzone, are frustrating and severely impact the experience for our community," a Call of Duty blog post says. "We’re here to tell you what’s being done about it today and our plan for support throughout 2025."
Apart from the 136,000 ranked play account bans since the mode launched a few months ago, significant updates have also been made to detection models and cross-examination tools: "When a cheater is banned, our system will detect other accounts it had regularly partied with and raise flags for the investigation to combat boosting and other cheater behavior."
A new detection and warning system has also been put in place for malicious reporting. This is when a player reports others for no valid reason—it's likely that they lost a game and are just looking for someone to take their frustrations out on.
"It’s important to clarify that when a user spams the report button in-game multiple times against a user, or someone uses an illegal cheat tool to spam 10,000 reports, our system does not consider more than one single report from a player versus another," the blog post says. "(Despite what cheat developers are telling players when they try to sell their illegal software)."
Instead of banning accounts of players who make false reports or are cheating, some parts of the Call of Duty community believe that the punishment should be far harsher. Some players call for IP bans to ensure that the guilty party cannot just simply make another account and carry on with their antisocial behaviour. But, while this does seem like an ideal solution for cheaters, Activision has reiterated that it's impossible to safely implement and, therefore, not a viable solution.
"We have seen community questions about detection methods, like IP-based banning," the blog post says. "We do not utilize IP-based bans for anti-cheat because they tend to take action against entire groups within a range that isn’t problematic. For example, a college campus or internet café would be swept up in an IP-based ban wave when only a single machine was targeted."
Even though IP bans are unlikely in 2025, Activision has some other new ideas to combat cheaters. Season 2 will introduce "new and improved client and server-side detections and systems," a major kernel-level driver update that will improve driver security and reinforce the encryption process, and a new tampering detection system.
A brand-new system to authenticate legit players and target cheaters will be introduced in Season 3 and beyond. More information about this will be revealed closer to the launch date, but for now, Activision is keeping its cards close to its chest so it doesn't "give cheat developers a peek behind the curtain."
Like always, it seems as if the fight against cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is an uphill battle, but even still, all of these new features seem complicated and helpful enough so that it'll keep the game as fair as possible, at least for the first few months before cheaters can figure out loopholes and ways around it.
