Activision released a report on its anti-toxicity tools for Call of Duty, including the upcoming launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 coming on October 25.
The report is part of the Call of Duty team’s string of reports on multiplayer play aimed at sharing knowledge with the industry on fostering a positive and welcoming community for all players. Part of these ongoing initiatives involve the development and use of technology to help the teams combat disruptive behavior, in accordance with the Call of Duty Code of Conduct.
As one of the biggest games in the world (more than 425 million Call of Duty games sold as of October 2023), it’s important for Call of Duty to set the example of transparency in helping to fight the entire industry’s common foe of toxic player behavior.
In the progress report, Activision’s Disruptive Behavior team shares the latest results and upgrades made to Call of Duty’s anti-toxicity tools, which will reinforce the ongoing work toward deploying anti-toxicity systems for the launch of the new game.
Voice & Text Moderation in Black Ops 6 at launch
Voice and text moderation systems designed to combat toxic behavior already deployed in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III will launch with Black Ops 6 on day one on October 25. This includes the global availability (excluding Asia) of Call of Duty’s AI-powered voice moderation system in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Call of Duty will also expand voice moderation support to French and German for Black Ops 6 at launch.
Text-based moderation of in-game text chat and usernames in twenty languages will be deployed for Black Ops 6 on day one.
The Disruptive Behavior team knows that hype and passion is part of Call of Duty’s DNA. Voice and text-based moderation tools in Call of Duty don’t target the competitive spirit – rather, it enforces against behavior identified in the Call of Duty franchise Code of Conduct, targeting harassment and derogatory language.
Similar to Modern Warfare III, the Call of Duty Code of Conduct will be visible during the initial in-game flow when players first launch core multiplayer modes in Black Ops 6, asking players to acknowledge the Code of Conduct pillars.
Over 45 million text messages blocked in 20 languages
Since Modern Warfare (2019), Call of Duty has collaborated with Community Sift to support text-based moderation. In August, the text moderation expanded from 14 to 20 languages.
Call of Duty’s text moderation is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Turkish, Dutch, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Finnish, and Romanian.
Call of Duty has implemented a new analysis system for username reports to enhance efficiency and accuracy, surfacing critical reports to the moderation team for investigation and action.
The Disruptive Behavior team has also been emphasizing proactive measures for text moderation activity, reducing exposure to disruptive behavior for the community. The system also analyzes text chat traffic in near real-time, resulting in the blocking of over 45 million text-based messages in violation of the Call of Duty Code of Conduct since November 2023.
Exposure to voice toxicity dropped 43%
Call of Duty’s proactive voice moderation strategy, powered by Modulate’s ToxMod, has helped reduce exposure to disruptive voice chat for millions of players since its global launch (excluding Asia) last year.
Since rolling out an improved voice chat enforcement in June 2024, Call of Duty has seen a combined 67% reduction in repeat offenders of voice-chat based offenses in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone. In July 2024, 80% of players that were issued a voice chat enforcement since launch did not re-offend. Exposure to disruptive voice chat continues to fall, dropping by 43% since January 2024.
At launch, Black Ops 6 will expand its voice moderation to French and German, in addition to English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Collaborating to battle disruptive behavior
The Disruptive Behavior team aims to reduce the community’s exposure to disruptive behavior as well as enhancing moderation effectiveness across all types of social interactions in Call of Duty. These improvements include improved messaging to players, Code of Conduct updates, and enhancements to the enforcement strategies.
As part of this work, Call of Duty has been working with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) since 2022 which has resulted in research paper publication and improvements to the disruptive behavior approach which include reduced time to moderation enforcement as a result of Caltech’s research contribution.
The team has also worked closely with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and their Product Innovation student cohort. This collaboration began in 2022 and continues to this day, with results of developed research providing the team with insights to better identify and combat disruptive behavior.
Additionally, the team is actively engaged in research surrounding disruptive behavior and prosocial activities in gaming. The knowledge gained from these research initiatives are valuable input to be fed back into the game as part of Call of Duty’s overall strategy to combat disruptive behavior.
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