Are you a Call of Duty cheater? Watch out – AI is coming for you, as Activision boasts of 19,000 bans from ranked play with Black Ops 6

• Call of Duty has ramped up AI with code optimizations to catch cheaters
• Since ranked play launched a week ago, 19,000 bans have been enacted
• But cheating still remains a thorny problem with Black Ops 6

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 has been out for a month, and multiplayer is, of course, where cheaters are doing their best to ruin everyone else’s fun – but Activision is doing its best to catch them with an increasing emphasis on using AI.

Call of Duty games use an in-house anti-cheat (at the kernel level) called Ricochet, and on X, the developer has outlined the latest achievements in terms of taking out cheaters.

Apparently, Ricochet has facilitated the ban of over 19,000 cheaters in ranked play since that mode launched (a week ago).

As you can see from the post on X, there are “hourly sweeps” to eject cheaters from the ranked play mode (and leaderboard), and we’re told that AI systems are being ramped up with “code optimizations” to better achieve this goal.

Analysis: The war on cheats

Fewer cheaters is good news for everyone, of course – except the offenders themselves, naturally. However, as someone replying to the above post on X points out, all cheaters do after they are banned is create another account. Or, we should clarify, persistent or dedicated cheaters do this.

So, should Activision just give up and not bother? Obviously not, and some more casual cheaters might be put off by a ban (or repeated bans, certainly). But what about the more hardcore cheats out there? The workarounds to obtain a new account (including buying a hacked one) aren’t expensive or that difficult to do, sadly.

While AI is likely to very much help to police cheating, especially as these systems get honed more and more, it’ll have to be doing so in a really timely manner to start…