Call of Duty goes Final Destination on cheaters by pancaking them straight into the map
Call of Duty, just like any competitive game that achieves success, has a cheating problem. Some players will always want to cheat, cheat sellers will always sell cheats, and developers fight to stop such behaviour ruining things for everyone else. So back in 2021 publisher Activision announced it was getting serious about anti-cheat: kernel-level serious.
The Ricochet anti-cheat software focuses on the PC audience, where cheats are more easily accessible, and ever-since has been updated with amusing new tactics to strip cheaters of their ability to disrupt the game. This past June it launched a new feature that takes cheating players' weapons away (even their fists) and just leaves them at the mercy of legit players. And now it's ready to go all Final Destination on their collective ass.
A new update to the Ricochet blog initially focuses on its use of machine learning, which the developers say is a key tool in being able to sift through the vast amount of player report data Call of Duty produces. Broadly speaking, this software is getting faster at identifying cheaters and suspicious clips, though ultimately only humans can hand out bans.
Which brings us to the appropriately named Splat. Ricochet will sometimes kick cheaters immediately, but sometimes it keeps them around to track information about the account and how it's cheating: which is when it issues «mitigations» such as stripping the cheater of their weapon, or making other players invisible to them. Activision says it has «developed a new trick for cheaters» in Warzone, «we call it Splat», and here's what it does:
«With Splat, if a cheater is discovered, we may randomly, and for fun, disable their parachute, sending them careening into the ground after they
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