Less than 1% of Black Ops 7 beta cheaters got into a match, Activision says

I can't lie, I was a touch nervous in the opening hours of the Black Ops 7 beta. It didn't take long at all for evidence to emerge of cheaters tearing up lobbies. Call of Duty's anti-cheat efforts have suffered from some infamous dips in recent times - could a hacker-infested debut for Black Ops 7 be the next? Well, my initial concerns have now turned into hopeful optimism. Anecdotally, I haven't encountered a single player I legitimately suspect of cheating in the dozen hours I've played so far, and now, Activision has released some stats showing that its Ricochet anti-cheat has been doing the business in the BO7 beta. It claims that bad actors were being caught "faster than ever," and that only 1% of those using cheats ever made it into a match before being detected and dealt with.

Maybe I was a touch reactive when the Black Ops 7 beta first dropped, but some suspicious kill cams and actual screen capture of cheaters running aim bots and wall hacks did make me incredibly nervous. It seems though that these social media clips were of very isolated incidents. In a new post, Activision shares some of its usual spiel about cracking down on cheat vendors and making CoD more secure from hackers than ever. But it also provides some really encouraging stats based on the new PC game's beta so far.

It claims that the Ricochet team "hit the ground running during the Black Ops 7 Early Access Beta. Cheaters were expected. But our upgraded systems caught them faster than ever, powered by strengthened TPM 2.0 checks and automated systems helping to eliminate a large number of attempts to cheat. Those who did manage to slip through didn't last long. Most never made it into a match."

Apparently "97% of cheaters were stopped within 30 minutes of their first sign-in," and as mentioned, less than 1% of cheaters managed to load into a map and affect other players' experience. The few that did slip into a match were "removed within minutes." Activision says that the accounts featuring in some of the viral cheating clips from the last few days were already banned by the time the footage was circulating on social media.

Now, to slightly temper my own excitement at these numbers. This is of course based off of the instances of cheating that Ricochet managed to actually intercept - we don't know how many have slipped through the net entirely, but I can't imagine that to be a ridiculously high number. It would also be handy to get actual numbers of cheaters, rather than percentages, to illustrate just how many bad actors it was keeping out of the beta. That '97%' could refer to a thousand players, it could refer to a million, we just don't know.

However, to see Ricochet (and the newly enforced additions of Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 for PC players) working so swiftly certainly promising. It's rare I use words like 'optimistic' and 'encouraging' when discussing CoD's anti-cheat, but here I am.

With yet more upgrades to Ricochet slated to arrive on the Black Ops 7 release date, I'm really hoping we get one of the most drama-free CoD games in recent memory. With the Battlefield 6 release date set for later this week, we'll be getting two massive FPS games releasing within a few weeks of each other - there are other exciting shooters like Embark's extraction shooter, Arc Raiders, too - so Black Ops 7 faces stiff competition. A cheating epidemic would be really bad news.

Have you given the beta a spin yet? Whether its multiplayer, Zombies, or both, come on over to the PCGamesN Discord server to let us know what you're loving and loathing.