With the launch of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 just weeks away, Activision confirms new details on the game including how it plans to combat cheating and hacking. Unfortunately for the past few games, cheating quickly became a major issue, especially with the free to play Call of Duty: Warzone which saw a fair share of people using things like aimbots, wallhacks, and plenty more. There were some who even used hacks in order to use custom skins, which the community referred to as Hacker Skins.

These issues became so bad that Activision ultimately created and introduced its own anti-cheat tool called Ricochet. Originally implemented in December 2021, the system managed to clean up a large portion of hackers and by the end of December 2021, 50,000 players were being removed every day. While the system hasn't been quite perfect, Activision continues to tweak the service and with the approach of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 as well as Warzone 2.0, the company has big plans for stopping cheaters.

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As expected, Activision plans to have Ricochet active day and date with the launch of both Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 on October 28 and then again on November 16 for Warzone 2. In a blog post, Activision confirmed that the Ricochet team has been tweaking the system to offer more protection from cheating thanks to better detection capabilities, more mitigation techniques, as well as better and faster ways to ensure the tool continues to get updated often.

call of duty ricochet anti-cheat

In terms of the recent Modern Warfare 2 beta, Activision admitted that only a limited portion of Ricochet was active, with the full detection and mitigation systems not fully online at that point. Still, the system managed to ban over 60,000 accounts prior to the beta to block access, with an additional 20,000 bans issued during the session. Going further, 72% of players detected to be cheating were removed before even playing a single match.

Following the rough launch of Overwatch 2, which initially required players to enter a non-prepaid phone number to play, many began to wonder if Modern Warfare 2 would follow suit as another level of cheating protection. As it stands, Activision has confirmed that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will require SMS verification from a text-enabled phone number for the PC version on Battle.net or linked to a Steam account in order to play there. However, existing Warzone players who have previously verified their accounts won't be required to do so again in order to access Modern Warfare 2 or Warzone 2.0.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 releases on October 28 on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.

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Source: Call of Duty