Activision has rolled out one of the industry’s largest anti-cheat offensives in its massive Call of Duty franchise. Because of this, countless players are still recovering from the recent wave of account bans. The enforcement action specifically targets the users of the most popular cheat provider ArtificialAiming. They go in depth on other cheating tools and what makes their users tick. The gaming giant’s commitment to fair play has resulted in some particularly intense blowback from the community. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those who still use cheats are especially incensed over this commitment.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai, a Senior Writer at TechCrunch, has reported very thoroughly on this war between gaming companies and cheat providers. Read the other installments of this series by Chris Tilly – The video game cheat industry is booming. The war on video game cheats is getting more sophisticated. In the past, Franceschi-Bicchierai has explored the lucrative business of cheat makers, like ArtificialAiming. The owner and founder of this company supposedly earned over $77 million dollars creating cheats despite these cheats becoming increasingly detectable in recent years.
As Franceschi-Bicchierai reported here, Activision just recently banned a large number of players. This prosecution is one of several recent successful egregious operations of multi-cheat vendors. The company said that their recent enforcement initiatives had succeeded in shutting down operations of several cheat vendors. Their vendors pushed back, so they pulled the vendors’ tools and banished their users. Our commitment to the safety of our community is steadfast. We will catch cheaters, cheat creators and all other threats to a fair playing environment.
The increase in anti-cheat measures Anti-cheat systems have increasingly used several gaming companies have doubled down on security protocols. As Franceschi-Bicchierai detailed here, advanced anti-cheat systems have recently been deployed to operate at the kernel level. These systems provide game companies unambiguous transparency into essentially every action taking place on a computer a player uses. This enables them to more easily identify cheating software.
The gaming community’s response has been lukewarm at best. Players often get vocal on forums when they find their accounts were lost as a cost of enforcement actions taken by the platforms. An ArtificialAiming user shared their dismay after losing two accounts, stating, “Lost both my main accounts today, one was almost 4 years old with mastery camos and all… think I am done with [Call of Duty]…. risk we all took.”
In fact, others in the cheating community have even expressed their willingness to keep cheating at all costs. One user remarked, “It seems like there is not a single day where anti-cheaters are out there trying to rustle our jimmies. Well the fact that there still are hundreds of thousands of cheaters out there and a lot of them coming from ArtificialAiming means that we’re not defeated yet.”
Franceschi-Bicchierai’s superb, continuing coverage does an excellent job of unpacking this thorny situation. It’s a provocative reminder of the ever-present struggle between integrity and the siren song of shortcuts in more equitable gaming spaces. With the ongoing arms race between anti-cheat measures and cheat developers, players are left to deal with an ever more hostile landscape.