Many Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 beta players claim that they’ve been banned despite doing nothing wrong, and the developers have confirmed that there are issues with their “proactive” ban strategy in the beta.
Getting cheaters out of Call of Duty has been an ongoing battle, with their Ricochet anti-cheat system being created solely to try and weed these people out and keep them from ruining matches. And, to be clear, there are cheaters in the BO6 beta that the system has detected and banned.
However, the process of correctly identifying and banning suspicious players is a difficult one to refine. With how many people there are playing CoD at any given time, monitoring everyone by hand is impossible. It has to be done with automation and through reports instead.
So, the Black Ops 6 beta is testing a more “proactive” strategy with Ricochet, one that aims to get cheaters out of matches fast and ban wrongful players with more accuracy. But, players claimed they were caught in the crossfire. This prompted a response from the devs where they confirmed they’re experimenting with Ricochet.
“During the Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Beta, we are testing features and monitoring telemetry. TeamRICOCHET is being proactive with detections during the Beta to stamp out illicit and compromised accounts across all platforms. The tuning for these detections are also in test during the Beta.
“The team will continue to make adjustments to reduce issues players have been experiencing while maintaining our commitment to remove cheaters,” their statement reads.
While there surely are players who were banned as a result of actually cheating, creators and even pro players have been banned on stream while they were playing the game.
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Shotzzy got banned when he was popping off in a match on stream, with him getting booted before he could finish out his match.
What’s more, these bans doled out in the Black Ops 6 beta apply to other Call of Duty games as well, meaning that the 30 day temp ban will lock them out of the second beta, and a month worth of MW3 multiplayer matches or Warzone games.
“Yeah keep testing and giving players 30 day bans, even banning your own pros. We better get unbanned,” claimed one player.
“Thanks for the update man maybe you can MONITOR THE TELEMETRY OF MY 30 DAY FALSE BAN AND REVERSE IT?” said another in retort.
What’s more, Shotzzy’s ban got almost instantly reverted, proving that it was falsely administered. His stream barely saw an interruption outside of him quickly restarting the game and hopping back in, whereas many other players reporting the same issue are stuck with the ban and have to wait the full 30 days.
It isn’t clear whether or not these bans are a result of players getting spam reported or being flagged by Ricochet for performing well in-game, but it is clear Black Ops 6’s implementation of anti-cheat has some issues to iron out.