Recently, Activision’s Team Ricochet released an announcement outlining new anti-cheating updates for Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone. Within the post, Activision revealed the kernel-level anti-cheat security drive has been already globally updated and will roll out new anti-cheating mechanic and updates to leaderboards. This update to Call of Duty reflects Activision’s rigid no-cheating policy as seen when Activision banned 90,000 cheating players a month ago.
Activision’s latest effort to curb cheating players revolves around a new mechanic: Cloaking. With the new update, cheating players will not be able to see other players, so much so that “characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters.” Despite cheaters being unable to see other players, non-cheating players will still be able to see “cloaked” players and “dole out in-game punishment.” With this update, Activision is glad legitimate players receive “a leg up on cheaters.”
Not only did Activision roll out a new anti-cheating mechanic, but also a promise to update leaderboards. Due to global criticism that Call of Duty leaderboards still contained banned accounts and cheaters, Activision will now update the leaderboards alongside bans. Now, due to the help of internal development partners, “any security enforcement that results in a ban to a player will be reflected in the leaderboard for each title.” Therefore, if a player is found to be cheating, their spot on the leaderboard will be deleted. If this policy applies to previously banned players remains unspecified.
Even with this new update, Activision promises to keep punishing cheaters and discovering new ways to prevent cheating in Call of Duty. Since the announcement of the banning of 90,000 players, Activision claims to have also banned an additional 54,000 accounts. According to Activision, the banning of players occurs “daily and in waves”. Additionally, Activision stated,
Of course, we understand that for every advancement we make in anti-cheat, cheaters are working to circumvent those updates. For this reason, we encourage players to continue to use in-game reporting tools. If you see a cheater in the wild, report it. This information is invaluable to make new updates in the fight against unfair play.