Activision Blizzard and its associated studios are cracking down on rule-breaking behaviour in the Call of Duty ecosystem. In a recent post, the Activision team published a fresh overhaul of the ‘Call of Duty Security and Enforcement Policy’, revealing all the terms of something called ‘Limited Matchmaking’, which is a fancy term for ‘shadowbanning’ a user.
Owing to the broad definitions and umbrella policies revealed as part of the Limited Matchmaking mechanic, players have started worrying that they’ll be hit with a crushing shadowban at any given moment, with many users claiming (or suspecting) that they’re being branded with a shadowban for no solid reason.
What is Limited Matchmaking?
In the Call of Duty space, ‘Limited Matchmaking’ is a mechanic that puts wrongdoers in a virtual box, limiting their interactions with ‘legitimate’ players or suspending them from playing a Call of Duty game entirely. That’s what ‘shadowbanning’ is – it’s restricting a player’s ability to engage with a Call of Duty game instead of issuing a full ban.
In the post written up by Activision Blizzard, the definitions and terms of Limited Matchmaking were revealed in full. It was stressed that there are many ways in which a player can find themselves shadowbanned in Call of Duty:
- Extreme or Repeated Violations
- Spoofing
- Circumventing Security
- Cheating/Modding/Hacking
- Pirated Content
- Unsupported Peripheral Devices
- Boosting
- Glitching
- Offensive Behaviour
- Griefing
- Improperly Obtained DLC
- Reverse Engineering of Game Data
- Malicious Reporting
There are a few things that have players understandably worried now.
For instance, ‘malicious reporting’ could see a user shadowbanned, but the thresholds haven’t been defined. Could reporting three suspicious players back to back in a short window earn you a shadowban that’s tough to appeal? It has been said that shadowbans can be as short as forty-eight hours to as long as a few weeks.
How about ‘glitching’ – what’s the threshold there? If you accidentally fall under the map but remain alive and can fire your weapon at other players, will that earn you a shadowban?
It was written that punishments include a resetting of your account and progress, a forced username change, a ban from using in-game communications systems, all the way up to a permanent, irreversible ban.
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