The number one thing you and I care about is not losing another game to a cheater. A lot of effort has been put into Black Ops 6 to upgrade security, but that’s our goal: we want to catch and remove cheaters within one hour of their first game.
This metric is called “time to work,” and we will monitor our progress internally and build technology to bring this number down.
During the Black Ops 6 beta, our team has been live testing a lot of its new technologies to try to achieve this goal. The first weekend was a flop. In the past, we used data from console players during Beta Weekend One to train and test our systems. Simply put, although we love our friends who play on PC, it’s nice to have a weekend to test the systems without the risk of cheaters. Since we had to protect the game without those stress tests, our new technology was so eager to catch cheaters, that it got a bit hot. When we realized these errors, we immediately made adjustments to get on track for our new “Work Time” teacher service.
Cheaters were able to complete about 10 multiplayer matches during the first weekend before being removed. After adjusting our systems and rolling out new scouting methods for the second weekend, we’ve halved this time to 5 matches. This timing met our “action time” goal. In fact, 25% of all bans in the second weekend occurred during the first match the cheater ever played.
But removing someone after they cheat isn’t ideal, so we’re ramping up our detection to try to stop more cheaters before they load into the game. During the beta, we stopped over 12,000 confirmed cheating accounts before they saw the essence of the match.
Black Ops 6 will launch on day one with a variety of updated anti-cheat technologies. For example but not limited to:
An updated version of the driver at the kernel level. Note: All features in the October 25 update will protect any game using the driver, including Call of Duty®: Warzone™. All mitigations will be activated, including Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, Hlucination, and others. New behavioral systems for machine learning, focused on speed of discovery. New machine learning detection models to analyze gameplay to fight targeted bots. Upgrades at the launch of Ranked Play, which includes ongoing testing to determine if leaderboard positions are accurate. More on Ranked Play updates in a future blog closer to the mode’s launch. For Call of Duty: Warzone specifically, we’ve rolled out new mitigations to boycott cheaters. Stay tuned for a future report to learn about these new tricks.
We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and take them out of the game. This is our commitment to society.
What is the future
