Call of Duty now makes cheaters' weapons vanish

pcgamer.com:

Call of Duty is such a huge series that it faces a never-ending war against cheaters. In recent times this has led to the creation of its proprietary Ricochet software, a kernel-level anti-cheat(opens in new tab) that runs across all its games.

A new blog post from the Ricochet developers(opens in new tab) summarises the team's findings since launch, and outlines some of the major anti-cheating measures they've put in place. Since Ricochet launched last year, «we’ve seen both significant drops in cheaters invading our games as well as some unfortunate increases—an expected ebb and flow that is a frustrating reality in game security.»

That ebb and flow is because cheat makers are constantly making new tools, and the Ricochet team has to work out how to spot this behaviour and then squish it. One of the principles that's come to be at the heart of what Ricochet is doing is what the developers call 'mitigation' which is going above-and-beyond the act of simply banning cheaters.

«Cheaters, for some reason, feel superior using software to win games they have no business winning. Hitting them with mitigations transform those euphoric feelings of being fake-best into glorious pangs of annoyance. We’ve seen the clips.»

It turns out that these are pretty funny. So 'Damage Shield', for example, makes a cheater's gunfire do almost no damage to the player they're targeting. The reason it does any damage at all is so that the target gets the visual cues to «take care of business» themselves.

Then there's 'Cloaking.' If a cheater's been slapped with this, then everyone they hit becomes invisible to them, and to their cheating software, leaving them running around levels filled with players they can't see. And presumably dying a lot.

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