Last Friday, Team RICOCHET, an anti-cheating team collaboration working alongside game teams, posted an update for their new anti-cheating device: disarm. This new mitigation technique for Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone will now completely disarm players detected of cheating, including the character’s fists. Team RICOCHET predicts there will not be many clips of legitimate players being able to identify players hit with the disarm mechanic, but the team assures the cheater’s response is “always priceless.” Furthermore, it is Team RICOCHET’s goal for players to be unable to identify cheaters in order to not ruin legitimate players’ experiences.
This new anti-cheating mechanic comes only a couple months after Team RICOCHET implemented another anti-cheat technique: cloaking. With cloaking, cheating players are unable to see nor detect legitimate players; however, players that are not cheating can still see the cheaters and “dole out in-game punishment.” On top of cloaking, Team RICOCHET also implemented damage shield, an anti-cheat mechanic that allows cheaters to hit players, but at a much-reduced damage. While it appears counter-intuitive to allow cheaters to harm players, the point of the technique is that players can find the cheaters and, again, “dish out punishment.” With all three of these anti-cheating mechanics working in conjunction, Team RICOCHET hopes this will help deter players contemplating cheating as it makes the game unenjoyable and practically unplayable for them.
On top of the anti-cheating devices, Team RICOCHET asserts they issue daily bans, and “often in large waves.” In March, Activision started banning accounts en masse with the help with Team RICOCHET’s cheating-detection software, banning over 90,000 players. In April, at the announcement of cloaking, Team RICOCHET proclaimed they had banned an additional 54,000 accounts since the previous 90,000. Now, Team RICOCHET declares they have banned over 180,000 cheaters since the last update in April. In total, Activision is taking a huge leap in curbing cheaters as that is over 324,000 players banned on account of cheating.