You’ll be able to turn cross-play off on consoles in Black Ops 6 and Warzone Ranked Play sometime in Season 2

Ahead of the launch of Season 2 for Black Ops 6 and Warzone, Treyarch has been offering some updates on many of the topics currently hot amongst the community. Among them is the evergreen discussion on the viability of cross-play in ranked matches.

The developer also addressed many other contentious topics, including the apparent rise of cheating across the two games, as well as the moderation team’s decision to silence players who don’t believe they were abusive in their language on voice comms.

In a community update, Treyarch revealed that it’s working on several changes to improve the experience of playing Black Ops 6 and Warzone in Season 2. The post addresses several growing grievances the community has had for a while now.

Getting down to it, the developer confirmed that players will soon be able to toggle cross-play off on consoles, but only in Ranked Play. This goes for both Black Ops 6, as well as Warzone. The feature is currently in testing, and will arrive sometime during Season 2.

Ranked players will also be happy to know that Vote to Forfeit is coming back, letting you end a losing match early rather than have to sit through it. A forfeited match counts as a normal loss, but won’t result in SR penalties. The even bigger news is that join-in-progress is coming to Ranked Play, which should get your teammate who keeps disconnecting back in quickly.

The post also addresses the player sentiment that there’s an apparent increase in cheating. According to the post, there are several contributing factors at work, which don’t all come back to simple aimbotting or other blatant cheats.

In particular, the developer touched on the degrading quality of matches, which causes a lot of rubber-banding and cases of severe packet loss that both contribute to a poor gameplay experience. Eventually, this could also lead to server disconnects.

There are indeed some players who seem to be common in crashed lobbies. While it doesn’t sound like the team has a permanent solution yet, Demonware developers have been working to identify the root cause of these targeted crashes, and upgrade server infrastructure and code to combat them. It’s also worth noting that some regions suffer from this more than others, depending on how large the player pool is and how wide server capacity is.

A particularly touchy subject since midway through the first season has been a growing concern that voice chat moderation is a little too eager to take action against players for simply taunting or trash talking other players. At least, that’s the story those players tell.

Treyarch, however, believes the system is working as intended to stop harassment and hate speech, but those unsatisfied with the team’s moderation decisions will be happy to learn that the moderation team hosts several regural tuning session to examine the process and make sure everyone is on the same page regarding what constitutes inappropriate language.

Finally, the blog post stressed that mass-reporting does not result in the player getting reported being banned. Some cheat makers sell tools that essentially let you mass-report a single player, but Treyarch says those are useless, as mass reports are always flagged as suspicious and show up on the system as a single report. The team is able to identify actual multiple reports against one player, and there are systems in place to detect when certain groups of cheaters play together and raises red flags so the team can investigate.

The post is fairly comprehensive, and you can read it at the link above. Season 2 kicks off Tuesday, January 28.