Activision says it aims to catch and remove Call of Duty cheaters within an hour of their first game

Ahead of the release of Black Ops 6, Activision announced that it was using AI in the ongoing battle against Call of Duty cheaters and hopes to kick cheaters out of the game within an hour of their first match.

Call of Duty has had a cheating problem for years, with the free-to-download battle royale Warzone on the PC particularly suffering from it. Activision has poured millions of dollars into developing its anti-cheat technology and pursuing cheaters in court. A number of recent high-profile successes have put a stop to the trend.

But video game publishers face an uphill battle in the war against increasingly sophisticated cheat makers, which is why Activision has announced plans to use AI to help.

“Today’s fight against cheats – on the client where illegal programs are activated – is a little like fighting on a villain’s home turf: It’s his machine and his code,” Activision said in a blog post.

“Kernel-level drivers on PC have expanded the reach of anti-cheats, but scammers are already offering cheats that go beyond the kernel, even going so far as to use specialized PC hardware designed exclusively for attacking games and was developed to enable cheats.”

“What our team has been working on for the future is a set of tools that use AI to find and combat fraudsters.”

So what does this mean in practice? Activision said, “Impostors can run and hide, but there is a trail,” but what if that trail disappears? This is where AI-powered behavioral models come into play.

“Cheat developers cannot hide player behavior. How people play – real, fake, good and bad – gives us information and we use that to find ways to pick out those bad people from a lineup,” Activision explained.

“We already have data from cheaters, but to build profiles for these top players, we’re looking at data from the Call of Duty League – where every game is recorded and every stat is stored.

“Beyond behavioral models, further advances are underway in our work with AI, and as the work continues we will share what we can.”

As we approach the release of Black Ops 6 on October 25th, Activision has made an ambitious commitment to players: the goal is to ban cheaters from Call of Duty within an hour.

“There’s been a lot of investment in Black Ops 6 to improve security, but here’s the goal we’re aiming for: we want to catch and remove cheaters within an hour of their first game,” Activision said.

Activision calls this metric “time to action,” which (eventually) had a positive impact during the Black Ops 6 beta weekends. It found that cheaters could only complete five games before being banned from the game, with 25% of all bans occurring in the second weekend during the first game a cheater ever played.

Meanwhile, 12,000 confirmed fraudulent accounts were stopped before they “ever saw the inside of a game” in the beta, Activision said.

With this in mind, Black Ops 6 launches with an updated version of the kernel-level driver (this also applies to Warzone), with new machine learning behavioral systems focused on speed of detection and gameplay analysis in order to target on the spot -Fight bots. Upgrades are expected to roll out alongside ranked matches.

“The people behind cheats are organized, illegal groups that mine all the data in our games to look for a way to enable cheating,” Activision said. “These bad guys aren’t just a bunch of script kiddies poking around with code they found online. They are a collective that benefits from the hard work of game developers across the industry.”

But cheat developers have flaws (clearly – they have to pretend they’re good at video games). Every time they cheat, they leave breadcrumbs behind.

“We’re always looking for those breadcrumbs to find the bad actors and get them out of the game.”

We have received confirmation for further information Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 launches multiplayer maps, modes and operatorsAnd Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 preload and global launch times.

Wesley is the UK news editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.