Call of Duty anti-cheat system makes legitimate players invisible to cheaters

In a new blog post, the developers behind Call of Duty’s Ricochet anti-cheat system have outlined a new “cover-up” measure that makes legitimate players invisible to cheaters. It actually makes it impossible for cheaters to be competitive during a fight, no matter what illegal software they may be using.

“Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters,” the blog post states. “However, legitimate players can see cheaters affected by disguise … and can hand out penalties in the game.” The new cloaking feature is offered along with a previous anti-cheat measure called Damage Shield, which means a cheater’s bullets will not do any harm to other players.

Although Team Ricochet only describes the disguise feature now, it appears to have been available in some form in Call of Duty: Warzone since at least mid-February, when a video of the anti-cheating measure was posted on Twitter.

Call of Duty’s developers have banned tens of thousands of scammers in recent months, but its blog post suggests that allowing scammers to continue playing in this compromised state means they can “[collect] data that is critical to identifying cheating behavior. “It also encourages players to continue to report cheaters manually so that it can improve its cheating recognition features.

Ricochet’s core-level anti-cheat driver running locally on PCs has previously been available for War zonebut launched now Vanguardaccording to the blog post. Eurogamer notes that the anti-cheat system also has a server-side component that has long been available to both Call of Duty game.

In the blog post, Team Ricochet confirms that it has banned 54,000 additional accounts since its last major update (in which it banned 90,000 accounts). Excluded players will be deleted from leaderboards, it says.