For years, players of Call of Duty have believed that there are shadowbans. Now, Activision has shared official information for the first time.
What are shadowbans? In Call of Duty, there has been a theory for years that suspicious players can receive a so-called shadowban. This occurs when the game thinks you might be using cheats.
A shadowban, however, is different from a regular ban. After a shadowban, you can still play Black Ops 6 – but only against other players who also have a shadowban.
In shadowban lobbies, you mainly encounter cheaters and players who were mistakenly banned for cheating – at least that was the community’s theory for years.
Shadowbans are not confirmation that someone is cheating
What does Call of Duty say about it? In a new blog post, Call of Duty explained that the shadowban system indeed exists. The developers call it “limited matchmaking” and it restricts your matchmaking when suspicious activities are detected.
Through limited matchmaking, accounts can still play online matches without disturbing players in normal matchmaking while Activision collects evidence for potentially following actions.
Furthermore, it is stated that a player with restricted matchmaking is not considered a confirmed cheater. This is merely a sign that alarms are going off at Activision, and they will investigate the respective account more closely. Overall, the limited matchmaking consists of only 0.15% of all players.
What gets you into limited matchmaking? Activision lists several examples that can lead to your account being considered suspicious. These include:
- a significant change in account behavior
- when a new account achieves unlikely statistics
Additionally, according to Activision, you can get into limited matchmaking because of a friend. If a player in your party has restricted matchmaking, the entire party will be forced to play in shadowban lobbies.
Spam reports, meaning repeatedly reporting a player, do not increase the likelihood of a (shadow) ban, according to the blog post. On the contrary, it even reduces trust in future reports regarding that account.
What exactly Activision interprets as “a significant change in account behavior” was not elaborated on by the developers in the blog post. Based on player reports from the past, this could be a significant performance boost.
Shortly after the release of Black Ops 6, there were increasing reports within the community that players received a shadowban when they played “normally” after the camo grind and relied on good weapons. Previously, they played with relatively bad weapons in order to unlock certain camouflage. With the good weapons, they of course made significantly more kills and could then be considered suspicious.
The German YouTuber Cem Gülken, also known as Haptic/HapticRush, was likely banned because of such a performance boost. He let a good friend who plays significantly better play on his account and shortly after was caught in limited matchmaking: German YouTuber gets banned in CoD: Black Ops 6, says his buddy is to blame
