With the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’s open beta, countless FPS fans have dove eagerly into the fast-paced arcade shooter ahead of its full launch on the 25th October. Cheaters have been plaguing the experience as they tend to do, but Activision claim they’re being quickly dealt with.
In a post on X, the official Call of Duty updates account released a lengthy statement on the cheater problem. According to this post, 97 percent of Black Ops 7 beta cheaters are being banned within 30-minutes. Not only that, they claim fewer than 1 percent of cheating attempts reached a match, and those who did were removed within minutes.
Here’s the Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 gameplay trailer. Watch on YouTube
This post also spotlights cheat providers themselves, claiming that many of them are now labeling their cheats as “unusable”. The post also goes on to claim that over 40 cheat developers have been shut down since the launch of Black Ops 6. The post also calls for players to stay diligent by reporting others they believe are using cheats in matches, to help keep the cheating problem at bay.
As Call of Duty fans will know, the back and forth battle between Activision and Call of Duty cheaters has been a long and arduous one. Activision’s proprietary Ricochet anti-cheat software is constantly tweaked and updated, but every now and again cheating software is updated to account for the latest version of Ricochet and the cheating problem rears its ugly head again.
It’s not just Call of Duty either. Battlefield 6 had its own cheating problem during the open beta. Both games require Secure Boot to be enabled on your PC to run, which has proven to be a step too far for some players (or their hardware).
It seems, if Activision is right about these impressive looking stats, that right now is a moment where the company has the upper hand in the war against cheating. Whether this remains true by the time Black Ops 7 launches later this month remains to be seen, but let’s hope things stay largely cheater free for the foreseeable future.