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

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.

Cronus users. Well, Cronus users and those using any similar hardware that's designed to cheat and give you an unfair advantage. It's a constant cat and mouse game keeping cheats at bay as it is, and these things aren't exclusive to PC.

It's extremely annoying, and Activision is going after the companies that make them and the people using them. This follows the deployment of a detection tool to pick up on use of these devices, initially in Warzone and Modern Warfare 2. Now, they're going further than that.

"Despite detections and our public stance against third-party hardware used to cheat in our games (and others throughout the industry), the makers of these devices continue to issue updates to try to circumvent our security systems.

In response, we have delivered cease and desist demands to several companies that create and sell these products and will take them to court if necessary. We have already seen compliance from some of the companies we’ve contacted; however, we will continue to pursue other device makers in the market, globally, as well as people that create scripts to manipulate Call of Duty game code.

These devices and scripts used to cheat in our games are not welcome. Call of Duty does not endorse the use of these products.

Any account that utilizes these devices on PC or console for the purpose of cheating will be permanently banned."

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.

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.