Team Ricochet is combating cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with 'hourly sweeps' and 'AI systems' but even with over 19,000 bans, players aren't seeing the results

GamesFPSCall of DutyCall of Duty: Black Ops 6Team Ricochet is combating cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 with ‘hourly sweeps’ and ‘AI systems’ but even with over 19,000 bans, players aren’t seeing the resultsWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Activision Blizzard)

black ops 6 season 1

Giving up freedoms and privacy for a mirage of promised safety is very 1990s-coded. So, with this in mind, it seems like an apt moment to talk about Ricochet’s continued struggles with the 1991 period pieceCall of Duty: Black Ops 6.

Players have a pretty rocky relationship withActivision’s anticheat software—mostly thanks to its kernel-mode driver, which gives the publisher the ability to access any bit of memory on your PC. ButCall of Duty players were too tired of cheaters to protest against itwhen it was first released.

Since then, Activision has had lofty expectations of Ricochet, but it’s never really been able to live up to them. In the first few weeks of Black Ops 6, Activision promised Ricochet would be able to"catch and remove cheaters within one hour of them being in their first match”. This aim hasn’t been achieved yet, but Ricochet has still improved somewhat.Activision reportedit has “stood up strongly against cheaters,” with its behavioural mode categorising over 4.4 million data points per hour at its peak to then analyse for anomalies and possible cheating.

Team Ricochet also recently gave playersan updateconcerning the ongoing work to combat cheating in ranked play. “AI systems continue to ramp up with code optimisations to accelerate enforcements. Over 19,000 ranked play bans since the mode launched. Hourly sweeps to remove cheaters from the ranked play mode and leaderboard. Thanks for your patience as our team continues to fight against cheaters.”

Regulating Call of Duty cheaters is a tough business to be in—they’re pretty persistent—but it does feel like Ricochet is barely keeping up. Every few months, we hear ofa new ban wave with leaderboards getting purged, and despite this, it never feels like cheater populations are on the decline—but I could also just be incredibly unlucky.

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