Activision’s anti-cheat team, RICOCHET, posted that the Black Ops 7 open beta saw “nearly 99%” of matches free of cheaters and a median detection time of under three games. That looks like good progress on paper, but some players say they still met cheaters during the beta, and questions remain about the underlying sample size and scope of the stat.
Cheating has been one of the most significant quality-of-life problems for Call of Duty players, especially in ranked and competitive modes. Faster detections and cleaner matches would directly improve the experience for most players, but headline percentages can hide the occasional high-impact incidents that get clipped and shared online.
We’ve crunched the numbers for Black Ops 7 Beta, and RICOCHET Anti-Cheat achieved the strongest Beta results in Call of Duty history.
Each day, our cheat detections got faster and your matches got cleaner.
By the end:
- Nearly 99% of matches were cheater-free
- The median detection time for cheaters was three matches.
RICOCHET’s update was shared on social channels, highlighting a series of steady improvements during the beta window. Still, clips of cheaters continued to appear online, and many players reported encountering malicious actors in their sessions. That contrast is at the heart of the skepticism: a high overall percentage is encouraging, but it doesn’t remove the sting of a single ruined match.
The statistic doesn’t include a public breakdown of how many matches were sampled or where the cheater incidents were concentrated. Is the remaining 1 percent a few thousand matches or a much larger pool? Without transparency on sample size and regional distribution, it’s hard to judge how meaningful the metric is for any individual player. Team RICOCHET also noted that detections sped up during the beta. Faster enforcement is important because it reduces how long a cheater can affect match integrity, but cheat developers keep evolving their tools, so this is likely to be an ongoing arms race rather than a final fix.
Some players hope that competing releases and big launches will spread the attention of cheat authors across multiple titles, which could reduce the intensity of cheating in any single game. Others argue the only true solution is continuous detection improvements and active enforcement.
Have you seen cheaters in the Black Ops 7 beta? Tell us what happened on X, Bluesky, or on our YouTube channel. We read your reports and will follow up if RICOCHET publishes more data.
