Miss knowing what Activision has been doing with Call of Duty (CoD) cheaters? The saga has just received an update: now, one of the novelties is that cheaters who manage, for some reason, to circumvent the game’s security, however, lose their weapons — yes, they simply disappear.
This is one of the new strategies that is part of the efforts of the Ricochet development team, anti-cheat software from developer Raven Software, to prevent cheaters from being able to play CoD and disrupt gamers who are actually playing.
The team behind the system released a company blog post stating that “since we launched Ricochet last year, we’ve seen significant drops in cheaters breaking into our games” but also “some unfortunate increases” – something experts nevertheless consider to be expected and “a frustrating reality in game security” .
Image: publicity/Activision
As in the world of cybercrime, where security companies repeatedly need to update their software to deal with new threats that cybercriminals develop, the Ricochet team also needs to actively move to discover new holes and plug them.
“As we take steps to ensure our systems can identify and react to known bad behavior, we expect cheaters will continue to create new bad behavior – some we can anticipate and some against which we will need to develop new systems.”
In addition to constantly updating the software, Activision, which is the publisher of the game, has also filed a lawsuit against EngineOwning, a company that specializes in selling software to create methods of cheating when playing Call of Duty, and subpoenaed 15 other technology companies. – including Twitter, Reddit, Google, Paypal, Discord and Coinbase – in order to get help trying to fight and mitigate cheaters.
Between December 2021, when the system went live, until May of this year, Raven banned 500,000 cheaters from Warzone and Vanguard. With the previous update, released in April, it added another 180,000 bans between the two titles combined.
Ricochet: What other features have come to CoD?
In addition to the issue of making weapons disappear, the team behind the game also brought some other “tricks” to make life difficult for cheaters, among them:
- Damage Shield: causes the shots fired by a cheater to not do as much damage to the player hit by the bullets.
- Cloaking: if a cheater is identified, he will be punished by the disappearance of all opponents he hits. Basically, players hit by the cheater will become invisible to him, which makes him not see opponents and, consequently, becomes an easy target for players who are actually playing.
