Call of Duty Elite, Activision’s new Call of Duty social platform, will help Infinity Ward combat cheating in the upcoming Modern Warfare 3 with the help of a 24/7 “live ops team”.
Speaking to NowGamer, Activision’s Noah Heller described how Elite’s stats tracking can flag you up, automagically, and how boosting is lame but OK as long as it’s not in a Elite competition. Yeah, really!
“Another thing Call of Duty: Elite is helpful for is cheating. When you have the data, you can analyse… like hey, every time I get in a match, that guy is killing the same four people over and over. When we run competitions, we can make it fairer. We can crack open the data and understand what’s going [on]. If you see someone you suspect of cheating and you analyse the data, it’s like there you go, they all stand in a line and he shoots a bullet through all of them. so it’s really valuable for us.”“In terms of the competition, invalidating the terms of service, we might ban you, we might invalidate your results. If someone gets 100 headshots in an hour… you know? We have a 24/7 live ops team, they’re multilingual, we’ve got folks in Europe, folks in the States. we’ve learnt a lot by talking to the Blizzard guys. What we do is we’ll be running a lot of competitions, we’ll be looking at the leaderboards. We do a lot of cheat detection.”
Call of Duty Elite competitions include things such as most flag captures on Friday night, grenade kills in an hour, and the like with prizes including iPads, Oakley merchandise and more.
“We’ve got constant detection that’s going on. We are always looking at people in competitions. If something looks awry, we will we will jump into that game to see if something is up”“They can join as a physical player, that’s usually what we’ll do. we also look at their last games. Heat maps instantly show up when something is off,” said Heller. “You know, some people just want to level each other up [boost] and you know what? People can do that. It’s kinda lame. But as long as you’re not interfering with something, we don’t want to go crazy about it. But with competitions, we want people to feel that competition is fair.”
So, boosting in Modern Warfare 3 is not a big deal as long as it’s not in a Elite competition. Really? If it’s “kinda lame”, Activision, why not do something about it?
One wonders what Infinity Ward’s stance is on this.
