Call of Duty’s Player Trust & Positive Play team has published its September 2026 progress report, covering harmful voice behavior in Black Ops 7 and Call of Duty: Warzone. Comparing the first 6 months following Black Ops 7’s release with similar periods for Black Ops 6 and Warzone, the report says fewer players were exposed to disruptive interactions.
Across those comparison windows, Call of Duty reports approximately 40% fewer players exposed to harmful voice interactions. It also reports an approximately 50% reduction in players responsible for disruptive voice interactions and an approximately 16% reduction in repeat offenders. Those figures describe a comparison between the periods selected by the team, rather than a universal rate for every match or player.
The report was published on September 28, 2026 on the official Call of Duty website.
The official Call of Duty reportPositive Play measures cooperation as well as misconduct
Call of Duty uses Positive Play for actions or interactions that benefit other players or the wider community. The examples in the report include supportive communication, reviving or buying back a teammate, thanking someone after a revive or buyback, sharing resources or loot, and using voice or text chat to report enemies, points of interest, or harmful interactions.
That expands the scope of the initiative beyond sanctioning disruptive players.
Call of DutyIn Warzone, a case study cited by the report says approximately 22% of players encountered at least one supportive voice interaction, while approximately 6% initiated one. Among matches containing prosocial voice interactions, approximately 66% also included a cooperative action, such as reviving or thanking another player.
The figures describe an association, not proof that supportive communication causes cooperation. They do show why the team is tracking both sides of the interaction: reducing harmful voice behavior addresses a problem, while measuring helpful exchanges provides another way to assess the quality of a match.
In some Warzone modes, the report also cites an analysis associating a thank-you from a random teammate with players continuing to play together in the following match. The finding is limited to the modes studied and does not establish that the thank-you itself caused players to continue as a group.
The competitive framework is meant to stay intact
The team presents Positive Play as a complement to efforts against disruptive behavior, not as a change to what makes Call of Duty competitive. For players, the stated shift is therefore about how in-match interactions are moderated and evaluated, while the competitive character described by the team remains the same.
The comparison also has limits. The report page does not specify raw player counts, regions, platforms, or sample size, so its percentages cannot be used to compare territories or devices. They remain the publisher’s reported results for the selected Black Ops 7, Black Ops 6, and Warzone windows.
Moderation and data analysis remain the next steps
Call of Duty says the work will continue through improvements to moderation systems, evaluation of positive interactions, and data-driven analysis to guide future investments.
The report’s direction is clear: reduce disruptive voice behavior and recognize cooperation more precisely without changing the competitive framework the team wants to preserve. The scale of the reported improvement is notable, but the missing sample details leave the results best understood as a publisher-reported trend rather than a complete measure of every Call of Duty match.
