The most important thing we and you care about is that you don’t lose another match because of a cheater. A lot has been put into it BlackOps6 to improve security, but this is the goal we focus on: we want to catch and remove cheaters within an hour of being in their first match.

This statistic is called “Time for action”, and we will monitor our progress internally and develop technology to reduce this number.

During the BlackOps6 Beta, our team was live testing much of the new technology to achieve this goal. Weekend one was a stumbling block. In the past, we have used data from console players during Beta Weekend One to train and test our systems. Simply put, even though we love our PC gaming friends, it’s nice to have a weekend to test systems without the risk of cheaters. Because we had to protect the game without those stress tests, our new technology was so eager to catch cheaters that it started to get a little heated. When we recognized these errors, we immediately made adjustments to course-correct in service of our new one Time for action milestone.

Cheaters were able to complete about ten multiplayer matches during Weekend One before being removed. After adapting our systems and deploying new detection methods for Weekend Two, we halved that time to five matches. That timing achieved our Time to Action goal. In fact, 25% of all bans in Weekend Two occurred during the first match a cheater ever played.

But removing someone after they’ve cheated isn’t perfect, so we’re ramping up detection to try to stop more cheaters before they’re loaded into a game. During the beta, we stopped over 12,000 confirmed cheat accounts before they ever saw the inside of a match.

BlackOps6 on Day One launches with a variety of updated anti-cheat technology. To name a few:

• An updated version of the kernel level driver. Note: All features in the October 25 update will protect any title that uses the driver, including Call of Duty®: Warzone™.
• All measures including Damage Shield, Disarm, Splat, Hallucination and others will be live.
• New machine-learning behavioral systems focused on detection speed.
• New machine learning detection models to analyze gameplay and combat target bots.
• Upgrades when Rated Play launches, including ongoing investigations to determine if leaderboard placements are accurate. More on Rated Play updates in a future blog around the mode’s launch.
• For Call of Duty: Warzone In particular, we have implemented new measures to stop cheaters. Stay tuned for a future report where you’ll learn more about these new tricks.

We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and get them out of the game. That is our commitment to the community.

What awaits us?