Activision's catching tons of cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 red-handed—that is, if its official news account on X is to be believed. In a blog posted to the site today, Activision boasted some pretty impressive numbers, at least at first glance.
"Cheaters were expected. But our upgraded systems caught them faster than ever, powered by strengthened TPM 2.0 checks and automated systems, helping to eliminate a large number of attempts to cheat. Those who did manage to slip through didn’t last long. Most never made it into a match."
For context, "TPM 2.0 checks" refers to the fact that the new Call of Duty requires secure boot and TPM 2.0 to be played on PC—which isn't unique to the game itself. Battlefield 6 also requires secure boot, much to the chagrin of Linux gamers everywhere.
In fairness, gamers are reasonably concerned about giving a company kernel-level access to their machines, which, as our own hardware writer Jacob Ridley put it, "is like administrator [mode] on steroids". It also shuts out people without TPM on their processors (hence the aforementioned Linux upset).
The "automated systems" are referring to Ricochet, an anti-cheat system that uses AI—if these numbers are to be believed, this is one of those rare cases where deep-learning software is actually useful.
Mind, given Ricochet's rocky history, it's not clear how much is to be credited to our new AI overlord. It does prank hackers, though, sometimes, prompting them to self-report perceived bugs (like weapons vanishing and cars exploding) via social media when it's actually Ricochet pantsing them.
It also, er, was hacked back in 2024 and used by said hacker to ban swathes of Call of Duty Players. Which is less good.
Still, Activision says it's all going great: "In the first two days of Early Access Beta, RICOCHET Anti-Cheat has been working to protect the integrity of every match. 97% of cheaters were stopped within 30 minutes of their first sign-in, [and] fewer than 1% of cheating attempts reached a match, and those who did were removed within minutes."
That doesn't mean you shouldn't report hackers when they pop up, though. "While RICOCHET Anti-Cheat’s automated detections stop most cheaters before you see them, your reports still play a vital role. They help fuel our detection models, refine enforcement and improve coverage."
Activision then goes on to boast about how "Major cheat providers are now labelling their tools 'unusable' or 'detected'"—the blog post does not say where these quotes are coming from—and that "resellers are acknowledging they have no reliable products to offer for Black Ops 7."
The company then goes on to boast about how it's also taking the fight to cheat makers directly, which, to be fair, has absolutely been happening. "We’re not only disabling their cheats, but also their illegal businesses as well. We have now directly contributed to the closure of over 40 cheat developers and resellers since Black Ops 6 launched."
However, as people in comments on that X post are quick to point out, a little bit of statistical trickery is going on here. "97% of cheaters were stopped within 30 minutes" actually means 97% of cheaters Activision knows about, since you can't roll hackers who are still at-large into your statistics because… well, you don't know about them. It's possible Activision made a guesstimate, but it hasn't shown its working.
In other words, if there were 1,000 cheaters, and Activision caught 100 of them, and then it banned 97 out of that 100 in 30 minutes, it could repeat this same phrase while technically being correct. It's still early days, and until Activision comes out with some more robust numbers, it's hard to say for sure whether its promises of ultra-powerful anti-cheat will once again fall flat—but hey, at least the ones that don't get through the net are being shown the door right quick.
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