Console Players in Call of Duty Aren’t Cheating—They’re Just Outsmarting You with an ‘Intel Edge,’ According to Activision

Activision has detailed its ongoing anti-cheat work ahead of the launch of Season 3 in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone, and confirmed something pretty much all Call of Duty players had assumed to be true.

The mega publisher has spent millions of dollars developing its anti-cheat technology as well as pursuing cheat makers in the courts, with a number of recent high-profile successes. Earlier in March, Phantom Overlay announced it was shutting down, with fans reacting in disbelief that such a prominent Call of Duty cheat provider would fall by the wayside. And just last week, IGN reported on four cheat providers that were shut down ahead of next week’s hotly anticipated return of Verdansk to Warzone.

In a new blog post, Activision said its plan has been “to go on the offensive and disrupt the cheating marketplace,” and as part of that it had shut down over 20 cheat makers and dozens of cheat resellers.

Team RICOCHET, the part of Activision dedicated to anti-cheat in Call of Duty, has issued over 228,000 bans since Black Ops 6 was released. Activision claimed it removed 23% of cheaters before they even played their first match.

“These are strong wins for the game, but there’s always more we can do to get better in both speed and efficiency,” Activision said.

Season 3 brings with it new anti-cheat systems, although Activision said it didn’t want to give away details for “security reasons.”

“Several of our current systems are getting big updates this season, too, including our aim bot detections and the Machine Learning system that analyzes game replays to identify suspicious gameplay for manual enforcement,” Activision continued.

The company then went on to address inaccurate in-game player reports in situations where the killing player might have had an intel advantage, such as when using Perks like Recon Scout or when having the advantage of a Spy Cam live ping.

“Over 60% of received cheater reporting in Warzone have been against console players, for example,” Activision explained. “Console cheating is possible, but our data has consistently shown it represents an extremely low population of detected cheaters when compared to PC, which means that this large volume of cheater reports are inaccurate even if the KillCams may have made it seem like the player was cheating.”

As a result, Activision is updating the KillCam “to help demystify gunfights and increase the accuracy of player reports.”

Current and new recap details in the KillCam widget include:

• List of attackers who dealt damage with their username, weapon, damage, and hits

• Affected by Live Ping: If the enemy had you pinged via line-of-sight

• Affected by UAV: If the enemy had you pinged on the minimap via UAV, UAV Tower, or Advanced UAV

• Affected by Unsuppressed Weapon: When firing your weapon revealed your location on the minimap to nearby enemies

During the upcoming Season, this widget will get more updates to callout even more gameplay elements like equipment, killstreaks, field upgrades, contracts, perks, and more to help players report with greater accuracy and confidence, Activision said.

Crucially, Activision is also making changes to ranked play. In Season 3, a new system will reverse the impact a banned cheater had on the Ranked Play SR system:

Retroactive SR Adjustments.

• When a Ranked Play cheater is banned, anyone they’ve recently defeated in Ranked Play will receive a SR Refund for those matches (to start, we will examine the last two weeks of matches but will continue to monitor if this timing needs to be adjusted)

• Players who we detect playing with cheaters may have SR for those wins taken away

This process will be live for Black Ops 6 Ranked Play shortly after Season 03’s launch and a similar system will arrive for Warzone when Ranked Play is live. Activision will also perform a leaderboard scrub before Season 02 ends to remove any account that earned SR illegitimately, such as from boosting.

The apparent prevalence of cheaters is considered by some to be ruining competitive multiplayer, and Activision had come under fire for failing to address the problem. Things got so bad that with the release of Season 2, Activision let console Ranked players disable crossplay with PC players.

Cheating is not unique to Call of Duty, of course, but it has become more problematic for Activision since it released free-to-download battle royale Warzone back in 2020. The hope among players is when Verdansk goes live in Warzone on April 3 alongside Season 3, cheating won’t be quite as big a problem as it once was.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.