The cheating fight in competitive Call of Duty just opened a new front. Activision says Black Ops 7 Season 5 expands Ricochet's hardware-ban capabilities, aimed squarely at the Ranked lobbies where the most determined cheaters operate. In the same statement the team said Ricochet has banned more than 293,000 accounts so far this year through June. GamesRadar carried the message; there is no detailed official Ricochet Season 5 write-up to read alongside it yet.
Reported. This comes from an Activision anti-cheat statement relayed by GamesRadar, not a detailed official Ricochet Season 5 post. The more than 293,000 bans is the studio's own year to date count through June, not independently audited, and the hardware-ban expansion is described in broad terms. Treat it as a real signal of enforcement direction, not a granular spec.
Why Hardcore SnD cares
In a one-life mode, a single cheater does not just pad a scoreboard, they decide rounds. Ranked is where higher-skill Search players spend their time, and by Activision's own read it is exactly where the sneakier exploiting concentrated: players only switching tools on for specific moments, which is harder to catch. Pointing hardware bans at that lane is aimed at the games competitive players actually care about.
- Ranked integrity: The stated target is the high-skill lobby, not the casual crowd, so the payoff lands where Search players grind and where a cheater does the most damage.
- Repeat offenders: A hardware ban is meant to cost more than an account ban. If it holds, a caught cheater cannot just make a fresh account and drop back in the next night.
- Reports are a sliver: Activision puts public clips at about 0.11 percent of enforcement, with the rest from detection, investigation, and in-game reports. Clip-and-report helps, but it is not what carries the load.
- MW4 preview: Ricochet is the franchise anti-cheat the next Call of Duty runs on too, so read this as the posture heading into the MW4 beta in August and launch in October.
What is not confirmed
The specifics. Activision has not posted a detailed Season 5 Ricochet report spelling out what the expanded hardware ban actually detects, how wide it reaches, or how false positives are handled. The bans total is the studio's own year to date count through June, not an independently audited number, and even the reporting is loose on it: GamesRadar's headline says over 263,000 while the statement it quotes says more than 293,000. And nothing here is about Modern Warfare 4 directly; the MW4 read is ours, based on Ricochet being the shared franchise system.
What would verify it
An official Ricochet Season 5 post on callofduty.com laying out the enforcement detail, an independent read showing Ranked cheating rates actually falling, or the same hardware-ban language turning up in the MW4 beta anti-cheat notes. Any of those would move this from a reported direction into something you can count on.
Hardware bans raise the price of cheating. They do not end it.