The “shadow ban” buzzword that’s been making the rounds around the Call of Duty community over the past few years has again been clarified by Activision in a new anti-cheat update today.
Previously, Activision said that players will sometimes be placed into “limited matchmaking,” which is an “immediate response” that triggers a separate pool for players whose accounts have been flagged for “suspicious activity,” which means the anti-cheat thinks those players may be cheating somehow.
For years, players have claimed they were “shadow banned,” or put into limited matchmaking, sometimes without knowing for sure. Now, Activision says CoD will now notify players when this is the case.
“Limited matchmaking can impact an entire party of players if one member of the team is flagged,” Activision said. “In-game, however, it’s difficult to determine what your account status is. That leads some players to assume that they are in Limited Matchmaking when they are simply brought into the pool based on their party.”
Starting in Black Ops 6’s Season Five Reloaded update, Activision says that “players will receive an in-game notification when their account is placed in the Limited Matchmaking pool,” and simultaneously also notify the other users within their party “when their experience may be impacted based on the party they have joined.”
“More than 75 percent of the limited matchmaking pool is made up of users who have been brought into the system through parties, so this notification is important to clarify account status,” Activision said. “As a reminder, being placed in Limited Matchmaking doesn’t signal that an account is a confirmed cheater. It means an alarm was raised that requires examination.”
This shadow ban update was part of a larger post by Activision detailing new info from Team RICOCHET Anti-Cheat about how things are faring in BO6 and Warzone, especially in the lead-up to Black Ops 7 in a few months.
“We also want to be clear: there’s no one-and-done solution to solving the challenge of cheating,” Activision said. “Every major game faces this issue, and cheaters are constantly looking for new ways to exploit systems. What matters, and where we’ve seen real improvement, is how quickly we adapt. In Black Ops 6, detections are faster, mitigations are stronger, and enforcement is cutting deeper into the networks that try to harm fair play. With Black Ops 7, hardware protections like Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will add another layer of defense.”
BO7 launches on Nov. 14, but its beta takes place in just a few weeks on Oct. 2.
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