Call of Duty's anticheat team are going after Cronus users, and they intend to win

A render of the new Nuketown map in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 showing an operator jumping through the air sideways while aiming.
It's time for another Call of Duty anticheat report, and this time round they're coming for your Cronus. (Image credit: Activision)

Call of Duty's Season 03 for Black Ops 6 and Warzone is into its final stages, and today we've got the regular anticheat report from Team Ricochet.

There's a lot to dive into, but I want to get right to the biggest point, or at least, I think it is.

Maybe a day will one day come where we can all play Call of Duty fairly. (Image credit: Windows Central)

The Cronus (and similar products) itself isn't necessarily a bad piece of hardware. It has legitimate use cases, which you could even cross over into being good for accessibility. One of its core features is allowing you to use any controller you like with your PC/console.

The issue is that it's more famous for helping people cheat, particularly in competitive games. Applying "no recoil" scripts, for example, or those that can be used to give you ridiculously sticky aim. It's laughably pathetic, frankly.

From a developer perspective, these scripts and devices are manipulating game code, which is no bueno. Not in the same way as, say, a game that supports mods allows folks to make add-ons to change the game. This is straight up manipulating code that isn't theirs to mess with, all in the name of cheating at a video game.

I've given Ricochet my fair share of stick for being pretty hopeless since Black Ops 6 launched, but I tip my hat to them on this crusade. And I don't want to hear anyone defending using a Cronus in this way. It's cheating, period.

I have to seriously question the mentality of cheating in a competitive video game. What's the actual point? (Image credit: Windows Central)

With that out of the way, there are also other updates of note.

  • Since the start of Season 03, another five cheat developers have been shutdown.
  • On average, new accounts that have been created by previously banned cheaters are being shutdown within four matches when they cheat.
  • Over 10,000 accounts have been protected by the new Account Linking policy.
  • The automatic replay investigation tool is "zeroed in" on Ranked Play, and the recent upgrades have enabled potential cheaters, especially wall hacks, to be escalated faster for human review.

Credit where it's due, while Ricochet is far from perfect, the team behind it is working extremely hard to clean up Call of Duty.

Unfortunately, cheaters are a determined bunch, and it will forever be a big merry-go-round of absolute nonsense. But by making it harder for them to succeed, maybe, one day, they might start to give up.

When you're in a clean, competitive match, Call of Duty is a lot of fun. That's the experience the vast majority of us want to have.

Richard Devine
Managing Editor - Tech, Reviews

Richard Devine is a Managing Editor at Windows Central with over a decade of experience. A former Project Manager and long-term tech addict, he joined Mobile Nations in 2011 and has been found on Android Central and iMore as well as Windows Central. Currently, you'll find him steering the site's coverage of all manner of PC hardware and reviews. Find him on Mastodon at mstdn.social/@richdevine

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