Activision has revealed they will involve Call of Duty’s players with their anti-cheating efforts.
The official Call of Duty Twitter account posted this update:
“RICOCHET has entered the chat
Starting in Season 05, the kill feed will notify lobbies when #TeamRICOCHET and it’s systems have removed a problem player from the game.”
All the way back in 2021, Activision revealed Ricochet, their custom built anti cheating software for their Call of Duty games. While some fans were skeptical about Ricochet, Activision’s many Call of Duty studios have proven up to the task of updating Ricochet to address cheaters across their games.
Later that year, Activision revealed that they banned as much as 48,000 players, and Ricochet has proven even more effective since.
Most recently, Activision has started playing around with the cheaters themselves. As they have explained, when Ricochet finds cheaters, they don’t ban them immediately. Instead, they keep cheaters playing, but then change things around so that the cheaters lose their weapons, attack fake enemies, or get locked into smaller parts of the map.
The point of this action is for Activision to observe the cheaters playing themselves. Playing the long game, Activision is out observing how to detect cheaters again, and ultimately track down the cheating software themselves.
So, this new update adds another wrinkle to Activision’s anti cheating strategies. Right until now, cheaters get isolated and messed around with, to make them regret using cheats on their game. Maybe there are some hackers who find a perverse pleasure fighting with the developers in this way, but at least thus far we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.
Anyway, this new change adds a social dimension to what was previously a strategy that puts cheaters in isolation. You know that players will figure out who among them got kicked out of the lobby; they’re playing with them or against them, and they’ll absolutely know how they were playing and what they were doing.
Those players are going to know that their friends were cheaters. If they were all cheating, they would get a warning that they could get caught as well, or possibly were already caught.
It could be enough to discourage cheaters from cheating, or even playing, but Activision will probably be OK with that. Given how small a fraction of the total player base cheats, Activision wants to protect the experience for most of their legitimate players.
You can look forward to Activision’s latest update to this latest change to their system.
