Activision has released a report on anti-toxicity tools for Call of Duty, including the upcoming launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 on October 25th.
This report is part of the Call of Duty team’s series of reports on multiplayer play, designed to share knowledge with the industry about fostering a positive and welcoming community for all players. Some of these ongoing efforts include developing and using technology to help teams combat disruptive behavior in accordance with the Call of Duty Code of Conduct.
As one of the world’s biggest games (more than 425 million Call of Duty games sold as of October 2023), we believe that Call of Duty is fighting a common enemy across the industry: harmful player behavior. It is important to set an example of transparency in the fight. .
In a progress report, Activision’s Disruptive Behavior team shares the latest results and upgrades made to Call of Duty’s anti-toxicity tools, and highlights progress towards deploying the anti-toxicity system for the launch of the new game. Strengthen the work inside.
Audio and text moderation at Black Ops 6 launch
Already in place in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, the voice and text moderation system designed to combat harmful behavior will launch day one in Black Ops 6 on October 25th. This includes worldwide availability (excluding Asia) of Call of Duty’s AI-powered voice moderation system in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Call of Duty will expand voice moderation support in Black Ops 6 to French and German at launch.
Black Ops 6 will introduce text-based moderation for in-game text chat and usernames in 20 languages ​​on day one.
The Disruptive Behavior team knows that hype and passion are part of Call of Duty’s DNA. Call of Duty’s voice and text-based moderation tools enforce behaviors identified by competitiveness, rather than targeting competitiveness. Call of Duty Franchise Code of Conductis intended for harassing or derogatory language.
Similar to Modern Warfare III, when a player first launches the core multiplayer mode in Black Ops 6, the Call of Duty Code of Conduct is displayed during the initial in-game flow, acknowledging the Code of Conduct pillars to the player. You will be asked to do so.
Over 45 million text messages blocked in 20 languages
Since Modern Warfare (2019), Call of Duty has worked with Community Sift to support text-based moderation. In August, text moderation expanded from 14 to 20 languages.
Call of Duty text moderation is available in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Chinese (traditional and simplified), and Turkish. English, Dutch, Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Finnish, and Romanian.
Call of Duty has implemented a new analytics system for username reporting to increase efficiency and accuracy, and present important reports to our moderation team for investigation and action.
The Disruptive Behavior team has emphasized proactive measures against text moderation efforts to reduce community exposure to disruptive behavior. The system also analyzes text chat traffic in near real-time, resulting in the blocking of over 45 million text-based messages that violate the Call of Duty Code of Conduct since November 2023.
43% reduction in exposure to voice toxicity
call of duty Proactive voice moderation strategyPowered by Modulate’s ToxMod, this feature has helped millions of players reduce their exposure to confusing voice chat since its global release (excluding Asia) last year.
Since introducing voice chat enhancements in June 2024, Call of Duty has seen a combined 67% decrease in repeat offenders for voice chat-based crimes in Modern Warfare III and Call of Duty: Warzone. By July 2024, 80% of players who had voice chat enforcement since launch did not re-offend. Exposure to disruptive voice chat continues to decline, dropping by 43% since January 2024.
At launch, Black Ops 6 will expand voice moderation to English, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as French and German.
working together to combat destructive behavior
The Disruptive Behavior team aims to reduce our community’s exposure to disruptive behavior and increase the effectiveness of moderation in all types of social interactions in Call of Duty. These improvements include improved messaging to players, updated codes of conduct, and enhanced enforcement strategies.
As part of this effort, Call of Duty is collaborating with the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). From 2022 onwards the result, research paper Publication and improvement of disruptive behavior approaches, including reducing time to regulatory enforcement, as a result of Caltech research contributions.
The team has also worked closely with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and its Product Innovation student cohort. This collaboration began in 2022 and continues to this day, with the research results developed providing the team with insights to better identify and address disruptive behavior.
In addition, the team is actively engaged in research on destructive behavior and prosocial activities in games. The knowledge gained from these research initiatives is valuable input that is fed back into the game as part of Call of Duty’s overall strategy to combat disruptive behavior.
