“Instances of cheating are frustrating and severely impact the experience for our community.”
Image credit: Activision
Another 136,000 ranked play accounts have been banned for cheating across both Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone.
In a detailed update shared on social media, developer Treyarch said it recognised cheaters “are frustrating and severely impact the experience for our community” but insisted it was addressing the issue, and will continue to do so “throughout 2025”.
Part of these efforts include “new layers of security and protections”, as well as updated detection models for behavioural systems like aim botting, and “other data points”, including “account trust and hardware identifiers to target serial cheaters”.
Players can also expect new detection and warning systems for spam reporting and enhanced cross-examination tools to reduce the time it takes to review reports.
Ahead of Season 02’s launch, we’re here to discuss what the various dev teams and studios are doing right now to address what matters to our players today:
• Cheating and bans
• Ability to disable cross-play on consoles in Ranked
• Server issues
• Quality of life updates
•… https://t.co/O6traEfwwG— Treyarch (@Treyarch) January 17, 2025
From Season 2, players can expect to see new and improved client and server-side detections and systems, too, as well as “major” kernel-level driver updates that not only improve driver security, but also reinforce the encryption process and introduce a new tampering detection system.
Treyarch stressed that “malicious reporting is against the security and enforcement policy”, adding 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 – its system “does not consider more than one single report from a player versus another (despite what cheat developers are telling players when they try to sell their illegal software)”.
Interestingly, when a cheater is banned, the developer’s system will also “detect other accounts it had regularly partied up with and raise flags for investigation to combat boosting and other cheater behaviour”.
“We have seen community questions about detection methods, like IP-based banning,” the studio explained. “We do not utilise IP-based bans for anti-cheat because they tend to take action against entire groups within a range that aren’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.”
ICYMI, as Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 readies for the release of Season 2 on 28th January, developer Treyarch has shared initial details of Zombies mode’s next map, The Tomb – which plunges players deep beneath the earth, down into ancient catacombs.
