Activisions New Anti-Cheat Program

Many people playing the Modern Warfare 2 beta are reporting that they are getting randomly banned for no reason. Their attempts to appeal the ban fall on deaf ears, and in some cases have caused bans on other COD games, because the Activision account itself is banned.

There was a similar incident that happened during the first Modern Warfare.

Question:

Is this the same problem happening all over again, or are the people banned just mad because the new Anti-Cheat program is doing a better job catching and removing cheaters?

False positives are a real issue with anti-cheat going back to its inception and still continue today. I don't think we have enough information about what's happening in the Modern Warfare 2 beta. I will say that people generally have negative reactions to kernel level anti-cheat, but if it works, I'm mostly okay with it. And I think there is some evidence that it works. Unless Riot is just lucky, Valorant does anecdotally feel more fair than other games.

I always take a wait and see approach with this stuff. We need more info.

I have games installed that have kernel level anti-cheat but I'm not happy about it. It gives far too much access to your system for it to be worth it. Surely if it were solely a benevolent anti-cheat system they could do something server side without touching my machine? Alas, I have friends nearby and friends far away, only one life to live, and I don't want to spend my evenings not enjoying time with people I know because I'm worried about what Activision and Ubisoft and whoever else are doing with the data on my computer.

As far as this question goes, I have no doubt that false positives happen but it's really tough or nearly impossible to tell how truthful those people complaining online are. Which ones are actually legit players that got banned on accident and which ones are sixteen year olds who can't buy another copy when the one they installed obvious cheats on gets banned? And is one of those categories much bigger than the other? If so which one?

I'd hope that Activision, of all publishers, would be able to figure out some method of double-checking those claimed false positives. If a certain player gets a bunch of positive flags on cheating, why not go look at his stats? Is he always doing incredibly well? Is he ever put up against someone who gives him a good fight? Is he lining up shots on people who are around corners? Are these actions consistently and frequently happening? Certainly you could catch most cheaters just by having some system track stats like these on a server somewhere?

The issue with this, is there were and are players that are damn good at COD, so good they often got accused of cheating when they were really just that skilled, because you have a bunch of whiny try-hards who take the game way too seriously. Not to mention, some will report another player for cheating out of spite. What seems to be going on, however, is that the new anti-cheat is either banning people who were banned for cheating in other COD games, so the perma-ban carried over from their Activision account, or the person had some background program not related to the game running that triggered the false-positive. And of course some of the people complaining could just be liars. I wanted to play the beta on PC for those extra frames with my monitor, but I'll just play it on the PS5 and my television to be on the safe side. I recommend others do the same, at least for the moment.

The only problem is not having an appeal process, any totalitarian system like that sucks. No way any software is infallible.

I bet some people are (despite warning from modders) running stuff like DlsstoFsr2.0 and reshade as well. And cheaters wil always find a way.

personally I would go the way of shadow ban, have the cheaters only play cheaters and let people enjoy the game how they want. *shrugs*