Lo, when we perform the great ritual to open the Call of Duty Black Ops 7 beta, the cheaters will come. That’s what Activision said a few days ago, more or less. Hark, friends and foes enveloped in tactical gear and the occasional goofy crossover skin, it’s now a few days later and the cheatening is upon us. It arrived with the beta going live, just as prophesised.
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Cue posts like the one above, from helpless souls caught in the frothing swirl of the cheatening maelstrom. And cue responses from Activision’s powerful anti-cheat druids, writing of these foretold ritual side-effects things like: “This clip was from earlier today. The account was already banned.”
The bearded warders against the likes of wallhacks and aimbotting have even broken out a powerful magical artefact, the hammer emoji of reassurance, in their responses to clips like this, a number of which went viral on the tweeter last night. Reddit, as a far as I can tell, looks relatively free of such clippage or anger about cheating, which is a sign of the end times if I’ve ever seen one.
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It’s at this point that Activision would want us all to take solace in their prediction from this blog post a few days ago, AKA the prophecy I paraphrased earlier. “Cheaters will try to test the limits during the Beta,” it read. “That’s exactly what we want because #TeamRICOCHET is here, watching, learning, and removing them as they appear. Any account permanently banned for cheating during the Beta will be banned across all Call of Duty titles, from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare to future releases.”
Obviously, this isn’t an affliction unique to Call of Duty. As James eloquently outlined when Battlefield 6’s beta was similarly afflicted by cheating, despite both it and Blops 7 seeing studios take the extra step of making it mandatory for PC players to enable secure boot in an effort to curb tech-savvy tricksters. The debate is whether continuing to take more and more measures like that in an effort to whack whatever persistent cheating moles keep popping up or slipping through the array of defenses already assembled is worth any inconvenience caused to those playing fairly as a result.
It’s a delicate balance to strike, and where you stand on the issue may well depend on just how many cheaters you’ve happened to run into in online games over the years and the situations in which those encounters happened. In Black Ops 7’s case, there’s also arguably a little bit of irony in Activion’s strong stance, due to the ability to temporarily see and shoot foes through several layers of wall, a bit like some cheats allow you to do permanently, actually being in the game as a killstreak reward.
Anyway, I await Black Ops 7’s full release on November 14th, at which point I prophesise that the cheating chatter will emerge once more. That’s provided the round of cheat chatter prompted by Battlefield 6’s arrival on October 10th has actually managed to dissipate by mid-November.
