Activision Issues Plans To Tackle Cheating In Call Of Duty: Black Ops 6’s Ranked Play

Team RICOCHET, Activision’s dedicated unit behind Call of Duty’s anti-cheat system, issued a statement on X addressing the widespread issue of cheaters. The statement comes in the wake of the recent launch of Ranked Play in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, which has faced heavy criticism from both casual and professional players due to rampant cheating problems.

In the statement, the team says they have identified and fixed a data outage that was lowering their anti-cheat performance. Additionally, they’re working to make the system more aggressive, specifically in Ranked Play, while also focusing more on manual or semi-automated review processes like Replay Investigations. There’s more work “behind the scenes,” but the team reassures us that these actions are a top priority.

The Constant Failure Of Ricochet Called Into Question

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 was teasing the release of its Ranked Mode for weeks, but most players have voiced their concerns on platforms like X and Reddit regarding the mass cheating problem. The community has already uploaded clips of esports players like Nadeshot running into hackers in Ranked Play, while many others have publicly called out Activision for their lackluster reinforcement.

Call of Duty has had a cheating problem for years, with some declaring its anti-cheat, Ricochet, being “archaic” and “ten years behind any basic anti-cheat system.” Take a look at CS2, for instance, another first-person shooter where players rarely worry about hackers or cheating during a clutch or when inspecting their favorite butterfly knife skins because their anti-cheat is, at least, serviceable.

This was even a common issue in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3’s beta, which was released last year. To see this problem remain unfixed even a year later is incredibly disappointing, especially since this is happening in a competitive mode like Ranked. 

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is a first-person shooter title released in late October 2024 for PC and both current-gen and last-gen Xbox and PlayStation consoles. It was developed by Treyarch and Raven Software, the teams behind several prior Black Ops 6 and Modern Warfare titles, and published by Activision.