As part of its ongoing war against cheaters, the team behind Call of Duty’s server-side and kernel-level anti-cheat solution has announced it’s implemented a new mitigation technique, known as Cloaking, that will prevent cheaters from seeing opponents during a match.
As explained in new blog post highlighting the latest developments for Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat solution, Cloaking follows a similar philosophy to its previous Damage Shield initiative in that it’s designed to “give legitimate players a leg up on cheaters.”
While Damage Shield effectively turned on God Mode for all legitimate players when a cheater was detected in a match, Cloaking aims its focus squarely at the cheater, making it impossible for them to see opponents, bullets, and even sounds. “Legitimate players, however,” the post explains, “can see cheaters impacted by cloaking (generally, they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, ‘Who is shooting me?!’) and can dole out in-game punishment.”
Elsewhere in the update, the Ricochet team revealed it’s now banned an additional 54,000 accounts since its previous figure of 90,000 bans was announced. It also clarifies that all banned players will be deleted from leaderboards.
Ricochet’s server-side anti-cheat backend has been available for Call of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone for some time now. However, up until now, only Warzone has made use of the system’s kernel-level driver. That changes today when an upgraded version of the kernel-level driver launches globally for Vanguard.
According to the Ricochet team, these changes will then be applied to Warzone, but only “after a period of examining how these updates are functioning” in order to “minimize any issues players may encounter.”
Activision Blizzard’s latest attempts at cracking down on Call of Duty cheaters comes at a difficult time for both the publisher and the franchise. Activision Blizzard remains mired in controversy following last year’s shocking allegations around its workplace culture – which was described as a “breeding ground for harassment and discrimination against women” in a State of California lawsuit filing last July – while Call of Duty was recently revealed to be haemorrhaging players, having lost a third of its previously confirmed 150m monthly active players in the last year.
