Activision says its hardware bans in Call of Duty have been strengthened, and that 70,000 new system bans were issued in a single day. The publisher set out the change in a RICOCHET Anti-Cheat update reported by Destructoid, ahead of Modern Warfare 4's October 23 launch.
A hardware ban targets the machine rather than the account. Activision says banned systems are now fully locked out of playing Call of Duty, which is aimed at the most common way repeat cheaters return: making a fresh account after the old one is banned. The company describes that route as disrupted rather than closed.
Call of Duty is built for competition and fun. Winning should come down to mastery, teamwork, and creating moments, not downloading cheats.
Weekly updates through season one
Alongside the enforcement action, Activision has committed to publishing RICOCHET Anti-Cheat updates every week from now through Modern Warfare 4's first season. Each is set to cover new detections, enforcement actions, and the team's ongoing work. That cadence is the more unusual part of the announcement: anti-cheat reporting from the series has historically arrived in irregular bursts around launches.
The timing places the commitment across the shooter's most exposed window. Modern Warfare 4's beta opens in the coming weeks, and beta periods are a recurring stress point for the series' anti-cheat, with cheat providers testing detection against a build that is not yet final.
The measures apply across Call of Duty titles rather than to Modern Warfare 4 alone, covering games including Warzone and Black Ops 7. Activision has run enforcement waves of this kind before, and none has ended cheating in the series; what is new here is the hardware-level lockout being described as harder to circumvent, and a public schedule the publisher can be held to weekly.
How much that changes in practice depends on how durable the lockout proves. Activision has not said what a system ban keys on, and it describes the easiest return route as disrupted rather than eliminated — wording that leaves room for determined cheaters to work around it. The weekly updates are the part readers can check against: if detections and enforcement numbers keep appearing on schedule through season one, the commitment holds; if they thin out after launch, it will be visible.
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