Ahead of the launch of Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 2, Treyarch has provided some updates on a number of topics currently hot in the community. One of them is the long-standing discussion about the feasibility of cross-play in ranked play.
The developers also addressed a number of other controversial topics, including an apparent increase in cheating in both games and the moderation team's decision to silence players who didn't believe they were abusing language in voice communications.
iGamesNews
In a community update, Treyarch revealed that they are making some changes to improve the Black Ops 6 and Warzone Season 2 experience. The post addresses growing dissatisfaction in the community that has been growing for some time.
The developers confirmed that players will soon be able to turn off cross-play on consoles, but only in ranked games. This applies to Black Ops 6 and Warzone. The feature is currently in testing and will be rolled out sometime during the second quarter.
Ranked players will also be happy to know that the “Vote Abandon” feature is coming back, allowing you to end a losing match early rather than having to sit back and watch. Abandoned games count as normal failures but do not result in SR penalties. The bigger news is that Ranked Match is getting a work-in-progress feature that should allow for quick recovery for frequently disconnected teammates.
The post also expressed players' views that cheating has increased significantly. According to the article, there are several factors at play, and they're not all simple targeting or other blatant cheating.
In particular, the developers mentioned a drop in match quality, which results in a lot of rubber bands and severe packet loss, both of which lead to a poor gaming experience. Eventually, this may also cause the server to disconnect.
There are indeed some players who appear to be in crashed lobbies. While it sounds like the team doesn't have a permanent solution yet, Demonware developers have been working hard to identify the root cause of these target crashes and upgrade server infrastructure and code to address these issues. It's also worth noting that some regions are more susceptible to this than others, depending on how large the player pool is and how large the server capacity is.
A particularly sensitive topic since the middle of Season 1 has been the growing concern that voice chat moderation is too eager to take action against players who merely mock or trash talk other players. At least, that's the story those players tell.
However, Treyarch believes the system is working as intended to stop harassment and hate speech, but those unhappy with the team's moderation decisions will be happy to know that the moderation team held several regular adjustment meetings to review the process and ensure everyone are all on the same page about what constitutes inappropriate language.
Finally, the blog post emphasizes that mass reporting will not result in the reported player being banned. Some cheaters sell tools that essentially allow you to batch report individual players, but Treyarch says these tools are useless because batch reports are always marked as suspicious and show up on the system as a single report. The team can identify actual Multiple reports against a player and have systems in place to detect when certain cheating groups are playing together and raise a red flag so the team can investigate.
This article is quite comprehensive and you can read it via the link above. Season 2 begins on Tuesday, January 28th.
