#TeamRICOCHET reveals anti-cheat updates, Black Ops 6 launch plans
On October 25, Call of Duty®: Black Ops 6 launches and RICOCHET Anti-Cheat will be live on Day One, bringing with it new technology and upgrades to protect your experience.
When it first launched, RICOCHET Anti-Cheat committed to providing players with clear and transparent communication on our methods to protect the Call of Duty community from cheaters. Our technology and methods of detection have evolved so much, but the “how” and “when” we talk to the community simply needs to be more frequent and in line with our evolution.
The RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team has heard your feedback, and this progress report was written to provide a meaningful update on the issue of cheating as well as outline the foundation for the year to come beginning with the launch of Black Ops 6 and what lies beyond.
Over the last year, we have been investing in numerous core systems focused on decreasing the time gap between when cheating occurs and when our systems are able to act. By building on this foundation, we will be able to evolve more quickly and respond more rapidly (more on how fast we are trying to be later).
What Does #TeamRICOCHET Do?
Cheating in Call of Duty encompasses various actions that provide players with unfair advantages, primarily through the use of illicit software. Here's a breakdown of what constitutes cheating and how it impacts the gaming environment:
What is Cheating in Call of Duty?
- Unfair Advantages: Cheating is defined as any action that allows a player to gain an unfair advantage over others. This includes:
- Wall Hacks: Allowing players to see through walls or obstacles.
- Aimbots: Software that enables perfect aim or shooting accuracy.
- Account Sharing: Collaborating with others to unlock gear or content that hasn't been earned.
- Unauthorized Software: Using hacks or mods to access items without purchase or achievement.
- Not Just Glitches: It's essential to differentiate cheating from the abuse of in-game glitches, which might exploit unintentional game mechanics without the use of external software.
How Do People Cheat?
Cheaters typically employ sophisticated software solutions to manipulate gameplay in various ways:
- Information Revelation: Cheaters may gain access to information that should be hidden, like enemy positions.
- Automated Actions: Some cheats allow players to perform actions at speeds or accuracies beyond normal human capabilities, creating an unlevel playing field.
The Organizations Behind Cheating
- Illegal Groups: The entities that create cheats are often organized, with a profit motive, leveraging their knowledge to exploit vulnerabilities in game code.
- Advanced Techniques: Unlike amateur hackers, these groups meticulously analyze game data, creating complex cheats that can evade detection.
How Do We Combat Cheating?
To counteract cheating, developers and security teams utilize several methods:
- #TeamRICOCHET: A dedicated anti-cheat team employing a kernel-level driver on PC to monitor and prevent cheating in real time.
- Detection Mechanisms:
- Server-side and Client-side Detection: Monitoring both the server and the player's client for suspicious behavior.
- Machine Learning: Analyzing player data for anomalies and irregular patterns during matches.
- Replay Investigation Tool: Reviewing past games to identify cheating behavior through collected match data.
- Third-party Hardware Detection: Identifying unauthorized hardware that may assist in cheating.
How Are We Protecting Black Ops 6?
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.
What’s Ahead
While #TeamRICOCHET continues to develop and deploy client and server-side anti-cheat systems, we’re looking at what comes next. Fighting cheats today – on the client where illicit programs are activated – is a little like battling on a bad guy’s home turf: it is their machine and their code.
Kernel-Level Drivers on PC have enhanced anti-cheat’s reach, but cheaters are already offering cheats that go beyond the kernel, even going as far to utilize special PC hardware that is designed entirely for attacking games and enabling cheating.
What our team has been working on for the future is a suite of tools that use AI to find and fight cheaters.
Today, cheaters can run and hide but a trail exists. What if that trail disappears? That is what the team has been working on. Cheat developers can’t hide player behavior. How people play – the legit, the phony, the good, and the bad – gives us information and we use that to build ways to pick those bad folks out of a lineup.
We already have data from cheaters but to help build out profiles for those God-tier players we examine the data from the Call of Duty League – where every match is recorded, and every stat is preserved.
There’s more in progress around what we’re doing with AI beyond behavioral models and as work continues, we’ll share what we can.
Our Commitment
Cheating is a frustrating issue across the industry. But our goal is to get bad actors out of our game as fast as possible. Our NorthStar is within one hour.
We’ve had a lot of wins over the years – taking down several cheat developers completely, shutting out third-party hardware, flinging cheaters toward the ground at Mach-speed – but we know those wins don’t make you feel any better when you get beamed by a cheater from across the map.
We can’t tell you cheaters will disappear forever because of the tech we’re preparing for launch. But everyone at #TeamRICOCHET will use every tool we can to keep fighting to deliver a fair and fun experience for you! And if the right tool doesn’t exist, we’ll make it ourselves. Anti-cheat is a constant effort, and we are always working to stop and thwart the efforts of cheaters. It’s an effort we’re deeply committed to, through and through.
Keep an eye out for updates in future Progress Reports and across social media, particularly the @CODUpdates X social account for real-time issues.
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