Activision Updates Call of Duty Anti-Cheat Policy: Players Will Be Banned From Past And Future Games If Cheating Is Discovered

Call of Duty Vanguard famously fell on hard times even before launch, as hackers were able to bypass Activision’s highly publicized Ricochet anti-cheat system introduced after Warzone fell victim to hackers and scams. While Ricochet doesn’t have the strongest reputation, Activision, amid the company’s other pressing concerns, is focusing on improving security through anti-fraud measures.

The publisher recently updated its security and enforcement policy and detailed its efforts to deal with players found to be cheating. The new measures are specific to Call of Duty Vanguard, but the consequences of the violations will affect not only Vanguard players, but other Call of Duty games as well. Under the new measures, the permanent suspension will result in a ban not only on Vanguard, but on past, present, and future games in the franchise.

A permanent ban in Call of Duty Vanguard will result in a ban on the entire franchise.

Activision has been clear about the different types of violations and what action they will take, from “Pending Accounts”to “Perpetual Bans”. They are defined as follows:

Account Under Review: If a player is suspected of violating this policy, their account may be reviewed to determine if any violations have occurred.

• Accounts under review can be matched with other accounts under review in a similar manner.
• When the verification is complete, the account will either be returned to normal matchmaking or it may receive a temporary or permanent ban.

A misdemeanor is one in which no quantifiable damage was done to another player or the gaming community as a whole.

Provisional suspensions can last from 48 hours to two weeks or longer, depending on the severity of the violation.

Permanent suspensions are long-term and permanent and may apply to all of these games, as well as past, present, or future games in the Call of Duty franchise.

An extreme offense is one in which a player has caused damage to other players or organized large groups of players to set off additional offenses.

Vanguard will be offering free multiplayer from November 18 to 22.

Activision and the development team have also listed a number of activities that can result in bans or account verification:

1. Spoofing. Any attempt to hide, obfuscate or conceal your identity or the identities of your hardware devices may result in a permanent suspension.
2. Bypass Security
3. Using Unauthorized Software for Cheating/Modding/Hacking: F IRST Offenses: The user may be permanently banned from playing the online game, have stats, emblems and weapon adaptations reset and permanently banned from appearing in the rankings.
   • Console users who change their hardware or profile data can also be reported to the console manufacturers.
   • PC users on Battle.net will be reported to the Battle.net Monitoring Group.
4. Pirated content
5. Using unsupported devices and applications

A full list of events can be found on the official Activision blog, the link to which is here.