Infinity Ward has promised to address the issues with cheaters in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2.
Evidence of cheating can be found all over the internet. Cheaters are doing things such as aimbots and seeing enemies through walls. Some hackers are even selling their cheats, advertising them on Tiktok.
Now, Call of Duty has its own dedicated anti-cheat software, called Ricochet. As is now standard for the industry, it includes a kernel level driver, but also includes systems like Damage Shield and cloaking. It should be noted some users believe that Infinity Ward did not yet activate Ricochet when the beta period started. It can be interpreted that this statement is an indication that they will start activating the system moving forward. It may even be possible that this was all deliberate for Infinity Ward to start observing how cheaters were making their way into the game, and this was intended to prepare them for the game’s full release.
Ricochet’s kernel level driver has to be given access to all resources in a user’s computer. This exceeds what video games need to be able to run on a computer. However, Activision and other video game companies have gone forward with kernel level drivers to combat the sophisticated hacks employed by video game cheats today. Given the severe security risk taken by using these drivers, Activision has made it a point to make it clear that these kernel drivers only run when you are playing a Call of Duty game that has it.
Now, Damage Shield is a mitigation system that works alongside the kernel driver. When Ricochet identifies a cheating player, it disables the cheater’s ability to deal critical damage. This makes the cheater vulnerable to other players, and while the cheater loses Ricochet tracks data on the cheater.
Cheaters will hate the Cloaking system even more. Cheaters who get hit by the cloaking system will suddenly find other players, their bullets, and sounds disabled. However, they will be visible to legitimate players, making them easy pickings.
Cheating is a genuinely serious problem that plagues the Call of Duty franchise in game after game. A little over a week after Activision banned 90,000 players, a Call of Duty streamer who goes by the codename Kenji accidentally revealed that he was using cheats himself. While it may seem harsh and perhaps also scary to be deliberately suspending and threatening to permaban thousands of your own players, for a game as big as Call of Duty, these actions are necessary to protect the even larger proportion of legitimate players who will never use such cheats, and subsequently are at a considerable disadvantage. Many console players already expressed their intent to disable crossplay to avoid these cheaters, but hopefully that will no longer be necessary at its official launch.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will release for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on both Steam and Battle.net on October 28, 2022.
