A YouTuber spoke to a German cheat developer. This gave deep insights into the biggest problem with Call of Duty: Black Ops 6.
What kind of cheat developer is this? The Austrian YouTuber and Twitch streamer VinKub spoke to a German cheat developer in a video and asked him a few questions – especially about Call of Duty and the shooter’s anti-cheat system. V1nKub primarily shows Call of Duty on its channels, so the questions mainly concerned CoD.
At the beginning of the video, the cheat developer, whose voice has been obscured, explains that he has been a “very, very unknown cheat developer for 7 years now.” However, by “unknown” he means that he is not in the foreground.
He doesn’t have his own service on which he sells his cheats to hundreds or thousands of players and he doesn’t run his own community. Instead, he sells licenses of his cheats to various providers, i.e. websites, which then distribute them to the actual user.
He himself started developing cheats with Call of Duty because he was previously a CoD player himself. As he developed an interest in coding and technology, it seemed natural for him to start developing cheats for CoD. Now he also makes cheats for other games.
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Cheat developer gives insight into the fight against Activision
What does he say about Call of Duty’s anti-cheat? The developer initially states very clearly that it is not easy to bypass Ricochet. Nevertheless, he questioned the functionality of the system: “It is still a kernel-level anti-cheat like Riot Vanguard, like BattleEye and EasyAntiCheat, even if Ricochet is actually more appearance than reality.”
He then explains that Ricochet “doesn’t run consistently in the kernel,” unlike Riot Vanguard. In addition, he says, most cheats these days run in this kernel space and if you operate from there, you can bypass most anti-cheat systems – even Riot Vanguard.
With Ricochet, however, he is not at all sure what the system actually does. While Riot Vanguard might be one step behind the cheat, Ricochet, according to him, would be at least 3 steps behind: “That’s there […]but it doesn’t work at all.”
Cheat developers get bored because it’s too easy
During the course of the video, V1nKub asks whether the cheat developer could also imagine switching sides and working with Activision on the anti-cheat, for example. The cheat developer answered that with a resounding “yes,” but not for Activision.
He thinks the idea of working for a software developer or in cyber security in general is “very cool” and says he’s “a bit tired of developing cheats – especially in Call of Duty, where you don’t have such a huge one now challenge.”
After updating the anti-cheat, he doesn’t even have to publish an update himself, he says. “It gets boring when they don’t do anything.”
Spam reports do more than Ricochet, but lead to false bans
So-called spam reports (mass messages) have been a big problem in Call of Duty for a while now. Players are reported as cheaters several times by other players, which then leads to a so-called shadow ban. However, it can happen that legitimate players are also penalized by false spam reports.
What is a shadow ban? A shadow ban is different from a normal ban. After a shadow ban, you can still play Black Ops 6 – but only against other players who also have a shadow ban. Often a shadow ban is reversed after 7-14 days after verifying whether the player is a cheater or not.
What does he say about spam reports? The cheat developer actually calls Call of Duty’s report function CoD’s most effective tool against cheaters. For him, it feels like Ricochet consists only of these reports and he estimates that they lead to more bans of cheaters than the actual anti-cheat system. This doesn’t seem to include any mechanisms that detect cheaters in real time, he adds.
However, the cheat developer is also convinced that the reports will lead to bans of legitimate players. In order to check whether the bans were caused by spam reports or an error in his cheats, he created a new, so to speak, untainted account.
This account had less than an hour of playing time and played without cheats on a new PC under a new IP address. They reported this account at least 5 times in 3 rounds, which then led to a shadow ban.
You can watch the complete video from V1nkub with the interview of the cheat developer here:
Only 2 accounts were permanently banned in Black Ops 6
This is what he says about possible bans: In the video, the cheat developer also says that since the release, only 2 accounts with his cheats have been permanently banned – and that was in the initial phase when he was freshly developing the BO6 cheats. Shadow bans often occur, but after 7-14 days they are gone and you can play normally again.
In general, he says, it depends entirely on the player and the cheat used as to whether and how quickly a cheat user gets a shadow ban. There would be ways to get through easily without getting blocked.
Cheating is currently by far the biggest problem in Call of Duty. Just recently, a former Activision employee even spoke out on the topic and gave his assessment of why it’s currently worse than ever before: Former Call of Duty developer explains why Black Ops 6’s biggest problem is worse than ever before