As Activision gears up for the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, the company is stepping up its long-running battle against cheat makers.
Today, August 14, Activision announced an update to Ricochet, the company’s anti-cheat product for the Call of Duty series, alongside the rollout of the Modern Warfare 4 beta on August 21. Activision also announced that it had expanded the Ricochet team in recent months, bringing on new experts to strengthen enforcement and build new detection systems, with plans to hire more anti-cheat developers in the near future.
With today’s update, Ricochet has become integral to the player experience in the upcoming Call of Duty title. Gamers participating in next week’s Modern Warfare 4 beta will not be able to play online unless they enable Trusted Platform Module (TPM) 2.0 and Secure Boot, two key tools in the Ricochet system.
“These Windows security features help establish a trusted foundation for Ricochet, especially for Warzone players, and make system-level tampering more difficult, helping protect the integrity of the beta from day one,” said an official article posted on the Call of Duty X account.
Activision’s messaging around Ricochet and Modern Warfare 4 is part of a broader push by the company to raise awareness about the effects of in-game cheating. Going public with its anti-cheat strategy is a balancing act for Activision, which wants to raise the alarm about the impact of cheating without giving away technical details about its approach that could help cheat-makers adapt to survive. In an interview with GamesBeat, Activision senior director of game security David Andrews described cheating as a systemic, industry-wide issue, that every major publisher has to address.
“Activision actually has a pretty long track record of trying to talk publicly about anti-cheat. Certainly, other companies in the industry don’t, or when they do, it tends to be very couched and vague and nebulous,” Andrews said.
It can be difficult to quantify the economic impact of cheating in games like Call of Duty, per Andrews. He said Activision had found that players who encountered cheaters exhibited higher churn rates than other players, as well as a likelihood to become cheaters themselves over time.
“Obviously, none of that creates a very healthy experience for that player, and it will obviously have knock-on effects in terms of business impact,” Andrews said.
As the release of Modern Warfare 4 grows closer, Activision is stepping up its messaging around anti-cheat in part to combat what it believes is a gulf in perception between the efficacy of the company’s anti-cheat efforts and gamers’ prevailing assumptions about the prevalence of cheating activity, according to Andrews.
“We see really healthy, low match infection rates across the board, and we have since the beta and launch of Black Ops 7; all that momentum has really continued,” he said. “But there are hot spots, right? There are gaps, and we want to be open about that — there’s no real silver bullet when it comes to anti-cheat.”
Activision’s fight against cheating in Call of Duty and other titles is more than just a messaging war. Last week, the company announced 70,000 new hardware bans intended to prevent Call of Duty cheaters from circumventing bans by creating new accounts. Activision has also committed to providing weekly updates — such as today’s — informing fans of the latest developments in Call of Duty anti-cheat through the end of the first season of Modern Warfare 4.
“There’s a constant desire by the person behind a cheating account to get back into the game. Once we detect them and we ban their accounts, they want to get back in as quickly as they can,” Andrews said. “It’s a big challenge to make sure that it’s as frictionful for a cheater as possible, and that they can’t get back in. Hardware bans really help us do that.”