Activision is tormenting Call of Duty cheaters in order to study them, stealing their weapons and turning their enemies invisible

pcgamer.com:

Call of Duty's Ricochet Anti-Cheat system doesn't always ban suspected Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 cheaters on sight. Sometimes, it keeps them around, but makes their efforts to cheat futile by applying «mitigations.» For example, a mitigation called Damage Shield «disables the cheater's ability to inflict critical damage on other players» so that, no matter how hard they try, they will never score a kill.

When we first heard about mitigations last year, the Ricochet team mentioned that there were others aside from Damage Shield, and today the developers shared three videos demonstrating Call of Duty cheating mitigations currently in use. Along with Damage Shield, suspected cheaters may be subjected to Disarm, which causes weapons to vanish, and Cloak, which turns enemies invisible.

Disarm, which you can see in the video embedded at the top of this article, is the funniest to me. In the demo, the player tries to switch from a sniper rifle to their sidearm, but instead they just put the rifle away and face their enemy with empty hands. It might look like a bug the first time, but after a few times I imagine it dawns on victims that they've been got.

As the subtlest of them, I think Damage Shield is the most diabolical. The video demonstration makes it obvious, but in a real match, you could go minutes wondering why you can't seem to land a killing shot. Cloak, which players reported experiencing last year, would be deeply irritating, but I imagine you'd catch on fairly quickly.

Here are the Damage Shield and Cloak demonstration videos:

The point of all this isn't just to mess with Call of Duty cheaters, the developers say. Keeping cheaters playing while mitigating their ability to ruin the game for other players allows