Call of Duty's Anti-Cheat Campaign — Full Breakdown & Transcript

[00:00] This afternoon, I received a doozy of an email. It had an unskippable subject, something to the effect of official Call of Duty account posted IRL kill cam of cheater.

[00:12] And I took it literally. I thought I was going to open that email and find out that Activision had posted like an ISIS video of them beheading a cheater or something, just publicly executing someone on livestream.

[00:27] So I clicked it, and what it was, was they posted footage of a cheat seller being served a cease and desist order. And I guess it's being called an IRL kill cam, just as like a little goof there.

[00:44] I still want to yap about it, but boy howdy, I tell you what, I went into this story under very different pretense. So Call of Duty's Twitter account posted this. Ricochet anti-cheat doesn't end when your match does.

[00:56] Cheat makers operate around the world, so do we. We're taking the fight directly to cheat sellers. Last weekend during the closed beta, we went to Ohio to take down Elo Carry. That's not an isolated case.

[01:08] And then they posted footage of the serving of the paperwork. Dude rolled up and served that freaky fast delivery of cease and desist paperwork right into Goober's grubby paws.

[01:20] time now is 9 50 a.m um saturday august 22nd i just arrived at the uh

[01:34] residence we're trying to serve this so he's in his car getting ready to trick or treat here and he's giving us a little breakdown

[01:48] kind of announcing it a little intro here to catch us up to speed with the lore. I saw some of the responses to this calling it staged or fake or just propaganda. I don't think it's fake.

[02:01] This would be a pretty ridiculous thing to try and squeeze out from your buttcheeks here with a staged video of a cease and desist order. It would just be very peculiar to try some shit like that. But I do recognize that him announcing everything,

[02:16] I am approaching this residence with intent to get funky with a cease and desist, that kind of thing. That can, I suppose, come across a little phony. And obviously the whole reason they're doing this is to try and scare off other cheat makers

[02:31] and talking about ricochet or anti-cheat measures that are in place. Whereas Call of Duty for the longest time, for so, so long now, has just been in the shitter when it comes to their handling of cheaters.

[02:43] it has been ravaged just absolutely eviscerated by cheaters It one of the main complaints about Call of Duty So now coming forward with this it seems like they trying to show the community how seriously they taking it now and some people just don buy it because they been burned so often for so long

[03:01] with how lax they've been with combating cheaters previously.

[03:18] So they served the paperwork there

[03:45] douchebag even hits him with the please explain what is cease and desist? Actology doesn't fucking know. You're a cheat provider. You're a cheat seller. You obviously know what a cease and desist is. Even if you're not in the business of making or selling cheats,

[03:59] you know what cease and desist paperwork is. If you've fucking heard of Pokemon, you've probably also heard of cease and desist because so much of that keeps happening there. Like, you know what it is, man. I don't even know why he's trying to play dumb like that.

[04:11] But yeah, I also saw some people saying, like, no, it's definitely fake. Why did he answer the door so quickly? Brother, there's a cut there. He obviously didn't instant answer the door frame one. There was a cut there, probably waited a little bit, and then he answered the door.

[04:25] So I am of the belief that it is legitimate, though I'm not convinced that all of a sudden Activision's got their shit together with combating cheaters and ricochets, going to be all sunshine and rainbows,

[04:38] it's going to basically be this extinction event for cheats, it's not going to happen any longer, and if it does happen, they're going to fine them and serve them paperwork or take them to court.

[04:50] I just don't buy it. Bungie is actually a company that historically has been probably the hardest on cheaters, like when it came to Destiny 2. They even had, like, huge settlement with cheat providers before,

[05:03] and even that wasn't enough to deter others from doing it. Cheating still was prevalent in Destiny 2. So, even though the idea here is obviously to showcase, We're taking it seriously and even showcasing this publicly to try and, like, be a deterrent from other cheat makers to kind of put the fear of God in them.

[05:19] I don't know how effective that's going to be or how often they're going to be able to make these cease and desist, you know, paperwork drop-offs to the cheat providers directly. But I will say, at least it's a step in the right direction.

[05:31] I mean, they need to do something. They need to beef up their anti-cheat because theirs is, I believe, based on everything I've seen, one of the worst in the industry. and they do need to take this more seriously It is something that very clearly out of control in the Call of Duty community So I think it at least recognizing the issue and finally putting more of an emphasis on doing something about it which is good

[05:55] I also saw some people put off that they went this far. Why? I mean, for so long now they've just sat on their hands. Now they're actually doing something that's good. And they should keep doing that.

[06:08] But here's the thing, though. a lot of the people that they're going to be getting in the U.S. are mainly resellers. They're not, I don't think, hitting the actual developers.

[06:20] And a lot of the big ones, I imagine, are overseas. So this isn't something that they're going to be able to do at like a big scale, getting like the big fish. At least I don't think so.

[06:32] So while it seems like they're actually doing, assuming all this is real, which I have no reason to think it's fake. I think it'd be a weird fucking thing to fake for PR, and that'd be a disaster for them if it turns out it's not real. But again, I think a lot of these operations and a lot of the actual cheat makers are not ones that are on U.S. soil.

[06:51] So they'd be hard to reach for Activision's lawyers here and the people serving them paperwork. So, you know, maybe it won't be the most effective thing ever, but at least it's something.

[07:05] Like, even just getting any amount of, like, the cheat sellers or resellers out there, I think, is a good thing. But it probably won't have the biggest effect at, like, stopping it altogether or anything like that,

[07:19] because I think most of the huge ones are not U.S.-based. Now, underneath that video, they do have a few more tweets. In our ongoing fight against cheat developers and sellers, we've disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations,

[07:33] served more than 80 cease and desist demands and shut down more than 30 vendors. And there's more to come, including litigation when necessary. We're prepared to take cheap developers and sellers to court to protect fair play.

[07:45] Build cheats, sell cheats, we will find you. And then they have a couple of images here. That first guy looks like those fucking frogs that were holding up the Phase 1 Epstein files at the big White House release of the Epstein files a while back.

[07:58] He's, like, posing with it. Like, it's some kind of graduation photo there. So they're claiming that they are actually taking huge steps here in shutting down numerous operations, serving lots of paperwork to a lot of cheat providers.

[08:11] And if that's all true, which I have no reason to believe that it's a blatant lie, that's good. And that is going in the right direction. And it's something that I think they should continue to put the pedal to the metal on.

[08:23] Again, this has been a huge issue for a while. But they also need to just beef up their anti-cheat as well. Like, their anti-cheat is clearly not up to snuff. It not at the par with the rest of the industry I would say So they should also be addressing that too working there as well And hopefully they are Hopefully they are I mean according to the rest of their tweets it seems like they are

[08:44] I didn't play the new beta, so I don't know how rife with cheats it was or anything like that, and I obviously don't have the crystal ball to see, you know, how effective it's going to be long term, but at least it seems like they're making it more of a priority this time around

[08:58] here. And I recognize that there's never going to be an anti-cheat that 100% gets rid of cheating, especially for a title to the size of Call of Duty, where it's just so lucrative for these worms to be making cheats and selling cheats. I do get that. But theirs has just been kind of in a laughably

[09:15] bad state. And again, I know they can never 100% stop it, just because of how quickly cheats develop. They're constantly evolving and constantly finding new ways to evade detection and all that.

[09:27] But still, I don't believe it's been, like, as big of an emphasis as it's needed to be historically for Activision. Now it seems that it is. So, I mean, that's progress at least. That's good.

[09:41] I'm going to say this work allows us to go after the people and businesses behind cheating products and disrupt the ecosystem that profits from them. It's another way we're working to make cheating harder, not just for the people using cheats, but for the people building and selling them. and then they even post like a Discord screenshot here from the Elo Carry team

[09:56] about how they're pausing sales. So it does seem like them actually going directly after the businesses is an effective strategy. Who would have thought? They also then deliver a little report from the most recent beta.

[10:09] Last weekend's Modern Warfare 4 early access beta was a great start. It cost millions of matches played. Infection rates were lower. Hardware bans were harder to evade and our time to action improved. We also deployed new detection throughout the weekend to make cheating harder.

[10:22] Week in two of the Modern Warfare beta. Open access starts later today. We're ready. Team Ricochet will be live adapting detections, monitoring live stream matches, and taking action throughout the weekend.

[10:35] We'll have more to share following the beta as we march toward launch in October. I didn't play the beta. I have no plans of playing the next beta either, so I don't know firsthand if this experience had less cheaters than normal or not.

[10:49] I'm led to believe that it did. so that's good at least and if they keep dropping footage of them serving seasons of this to cheat makers all power to them I guess

[11:01] it's pretty wacky I suppose to have that out there to embarrass the cheat makers that's cool anyway though I wanted to rap about it a little bit I don't think I've seen any other video game company do that

[11:16] this is pretty rare so I guess we'll see if that that fire continues to burn in their belly about finally taking strong action against cheaters in Call of Duty

[11:28] anyway though that's really about it