Call of Duty devs admit Ricochet anticheat 'did not hit the mark for integration' at the start of Season 1, and want to do better

Call of Duty's Ricochet anticheat has been a bit of a pain for players for longer than just Black Ops 6's release, but after recently coming under fire for not doing enough in the face of cheaters and shadow bans Activision confirms it wants to do better.

"After a series of updates, our systems are in a better place today across all modes," Activision says in a blog post. "However, we did not hit the mark for the integration of Ricochet anticheat at the launch of Season 01—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."

Warzone, in particular, has seen regular waves of cheaters dominating the leaderboards. Apart from boosting, which is when a low-rank player teams up with someone better to help them climb ranks, some cheaters were even more creative by creating bot lobbies, which they could farm for kills and SR. The problem with this is there's no one in the games to report the cheater, so they can go unnoticed unless someone takes a proper look at their ranked history.

To get a better handle on nefarious activities like the above, Activision has put together some updates that players can expect to see for Ricochet. More account bans have been promised thanks to quicker enforcement response times, and this process has also been updated for faster synchronisation of leaderboard changes. Activision also announced it plans to expand the Replay Investigation render farm significantly—this is what it uses to generate clips for examination.

"We've also ramped up the group dedicated to manually review clips (based on a priority order that favors detections)," Activision says. "In the last several weeks, the Replay tool updates have been highly effective at validating detections and reports, providing further training for AI systems for the anti-cheat team, and removing cheaters." The next couple of seasons will also see new server-side protections alongside the kernel driver.

These promises do sound like they'll improve Ricochet even by just making the response times for reports a bit quicker, but it doesn't sound like they properly address some of the real issues players have with the anticheat, namely shadow bans. Complaints about innocent players being sent to the shadow realm always pop up every time Ricochet chimes in with any updates, so it's surprising that the team didn't address these annoyances head-on. But small improvements are still a step in the right direction, so let's hope the new version of Ricochet pulls itself together so players can start the new year off right.