Activision claims its Ricochet anti-cheat is more effective than ever, even poking fun at players who embarrass themselves online by asking “Why did this happen?” after their weapons disappear or cars explode.

The company’s anti-cheat division has shared a detailed update on how Call of Duty and Ricochet are performing. With Black Ops 6, the developers say they’ve made “real strides.” According to their August numbers, over 55,000 cheaters were neutralized through the game’s protective systems. And in a cheeky aside, the Ricochet team admitted they found it amusing when cheaters effectively revealed themselves in public forums by whining about strange in-game punishments.

“Some players have spotted these systems at work: guns vanish, vehicles blow up the moment certain users join. Then they put themselves on social media, asking, ‘Why did this happen?’” the team wrote.

Ricochet’s toolkit comes with multiple layers. Some offenders are banned outright on detection. Others are left in-game but rendered harmless: their weapons and vehicles lose impact, their activity is tracked, and eventually they’re permanently cut off from every Activision title. It’s a process both punitive and instructive, giving developers more insight into how cheaters operate.

The update also addressed other enforcement measures. Accounts used for boosting have been hit with bans, and Activision has been performing frequent leaderboard purges in Black Ops 6 and Warzone to preserve fair competition.

The developers acknowledged concerns surrounding “remote attestation”—a Microsoft-based verification process that checks PC security configurations. Outdated hardware, especially older AMD GPUs, has been causing issues for some players. Despite that, Activision has no plans to scrap the system, arguing that relying on an external authority makes it exponentially harder for modified setups to bypass security. They do, however, promise clearer in-game messaging to help players understand if their PC fails the check.

Another area getting refinements is Ricochet’s restricted matchmaking pool. If one flagged player is in a squad, the entire group can end up quarantined without knowing it. Moving forward, the game will notify players when this occurs or when they join such a party.

Looking ahead, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 launches November 14. On PC, Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will be mandatory. New Ricochet systems will be trialed during the beta, but the developers say the “full force” of the protections will go live at launch. Cue the Arnold Schwarzenegger impression: “We’ll be back.”

The statement ends with a frank admission: there’s no single fix for cheating. What matters is agility. As they put it, “In Black Ops 6, detections are faster, mitigations are stronger, and enforcement digs deeper into networks threatening fair play. With Black Ops 7, hardware-level requirements will give us another defensive layer.”

Source: PC Gamer