In a recent blog article in which the creators of the game’s Ricochet Anti-cheat technology have revealed a novel “cloaking” measure that makes legitimate players unnoticeable to cheaters. It makes it difficult for cheaters to compete in a game regardless of what illegal software they are employing.
“Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to chapters,” the blog post says. “Legitimate players, however, can see cheaters impacted by cloaking… and can dole out in-game punishment.” The new feature of cloaking is available along with an anti-cheat measure known as Damage Shield which means that the bullets of cheaters won’t cause any harm to other players.
While Team Ricochet is only detailing the cloaking option at present, it is believed to have been in some form or another in Call of Duty: Warzone from at least the middle of February, when a YouTube video of the anti-cheat measures was shared on Twitter.
RICOCHET seems to have another trick up it’s sleeve to combat cheaters in #Warzone 👀
The anticheat appears to be making “legit” players completely invisible to confirmed cheaters as you can see in this video. pic.twitter.com/T5H53HL8Bs
— ModernWarzone (@ModernWarzone) February 19, 2022
Call of Duty’s creators have removed tens of thousands of cheaters over the past few months, yet the blog post on their website suggests that permitting cheaters to play in this condition implies that it can “[collect] data that’s essential to identify cheating behavior.” It also suggests players report manually cheaters to enhance its cheat detection features.
Ricochet’s anti-cheat kernel driver that is run locally on PCs has previously been available in Warzone however, it is currently available in Vanguard as per the blog article. Eurogamer notes that the anti-cheat software also includes a server-side component that has been in use for quite a while for each of the Call of Duty games.
In the blog article, Team Ricochet confirms it’s been banned from 54,000 more accounts since the last major update (in which it blocked 90% of accounts). Players who have been banned will be removed from leaderboards, according to the blog post.