Ricochet's Season 3 Crackdown Has Warzone Players Split

Season 3 of Black Ops 7 and Warzone dropped a bigger change than most players expected — and it has nothing to do with guns or maps.

Team Ricochet rolled out a fresh wave of anti-cheat updates alongside Season 3, and the community has been going back and forth about it on Reddit ever since. The headline additions? Expanded detections aimed at Cronus Zen and XIM Matrix users, mandatory SMS 2FA for new free-to-play PC accounts, and stricter TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot enforcement that will eventually lock players out of playlists if they don't comply.

For the casual crowd, most of this is invisible. But on r/CODWarzone and r/BlackOps7, reactions have been all over the place the past two weeks — some players are celebrating the Cronus crackdown, others are worried about false positives on legit controller setups.

Cronus users getting swept, but not everyone's convinced

According to Activision's own Season 3 Ricochet blog, the new detections focus on how inputs behave during gameplay rather than just what device is plugged in. That means machine-perfect recoil control and inhuman aim patterns are what's getting flagged — not the hardware itself.

That distinction matters. Plenty of Reddit threads have popped up showing banned Cronus users over the last couple weeks, and the general vibe from the legit player base has been "finally." Ranked Play has been borderline unplayable in higher ELO thanks to input-modding devices, and Activision claims this wave is already putting a dent in it.

The SMS 2FA requirement is where things get spicier. New free-to-play PC accounts now have to verify with a phone number, and Activision has confirmed this will roll out to existing accounts over the coming weeks. Smurfs and cheat-account farmers should have a much harder time getting back in after a ban — but some players aren't thrilled about handing over their number just to load into Warzone.

Bottom line: if you're running a clean setup, you shouldn't notice much besides a one-time 2FA prompt. If you've been riding a Cronus or XIM into ranked lobbies, this might be the season that ends the ride.