Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 has experienced a significant spike in cheaters, with the game’s crucial Ricochet anti-cheat apparently breaking down over the weekend. The developers have now released a statement saying that they have fixed the anti-cheat.

The developers released the statement today, July 30, via the official Call of Duty Updates account on X (formerly Twitter). "Ricochet Anti-Cheat fixed an issue with a detection system over the weekend," the statement read. The fix "resulted in a spike in cheater reports," as players finally had a tool they could use to detect potential cheaters. The developer also encouraged players to use the reporting system, and reiterated how it "remains committed to combating cheaters" and "ceasing cheat sellers."

As reported by Charlie Intel on July 28, Warzone saw an increase in the presence of cheaters following the release of the season five update across both regular and ranked games. It didn’t take long for the developer to respond, and it appears that the anti-cheat itself was the root cause, not an increase in cheaters that some linked to the game’s addition to PC Game Pass. The season five update also sparked speculation that the CoD developer had added bots to Warzone, which may have been related to the game’s poor anti-cheat rather than a gimmick on Activision’s part.

All first-person shooters are having problems with cheaters, as hack developers and vendors become more skilled and use more advanced technologies to create their cheating tools. From root-level access to the cheater’s PC to using AI for stealthy hacking, the anti-competitive faction is only going to get harder to combat. When our only line of defense, anti-cheat, fails, all hell breaks loose, so it’s good to see developers stepping in quickly to fix the problem.