It’s common knowledge among gamers that Call of Duty has long struggled to deal with toxic players in its community. Some may remember Warzone’s since removed Plunder endgame chat as an example of the community’s worst excesses.
Activision has been working to curtail some of the toxicity, including banning thousands of players and introducing new automated systems. The Call of Duty staff released a progress report on Wednesday detailing recent activity.
Activation’s most dramatic action was banning more than 350,000 player accounts over the last year. The bans affected all current Call of Duty games, including Call of Duty: Warzone, Black Ops Cold War, Modern Warfare, and Call of Duty Mobile. Players received bans for using racist usernames or engaging in toxic behavior in-game. According to the Call of Duty staff, they identified violators through a combination of player-submitted reports and a careful review of Call of Duty’s player name database.
Additionally, the report details proactive steps Activision took to prevent future toxic behavior in Call of Duty games. This included rolling out new in-game filters to block users from creating offensive usernames, clan tags, or profiles. The Call of Duty team has also developed new text chat filters and implemented filters across 11 different languages.
The report also indicated that developers would continue working to curtail toxic behavior in the fanbase. They plan to improve player reporting and moderation capacities and address harmful behavior in voice chat. The report does not indicate precisely what steps Activision intends to take in achieving those goals. However, the team explained its hope to give players more tools to manage their experiences while enforcing policy on those who ruin it for others.
The team also addressed areas where it plans to focus its efforts moving forward. The first will, of course, be allocating more resources to help Activision detect policy violators. This includes the introduction of additional monitoring and backend features. The team will additionally work on bringing its database system up to new standards. Activision also affirmed its commitment to creating fair and consistent enforcement policy and engaging more directly with the Call of Duty community.
Responses to the report have so far not been as positive as Activision likely hoped. Some Twitter users complained that the company’s initiatives were too little, too late. Others denied there had ever been a problem, to begin with. There were also a sizable number of fans demanding to know when Activision would resolve Call of Duty: Warzone’s cheating and security issues.