Call of Duty now shows you when a cheater has been booted right in the kill feed

theverge.com:

By Tom Warren, a senior editor covering Microsoft, PC gaming, console, and tech. He founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge in 2012.

There’s nothing worse in an online multiplayer Call of Duty lobby than facing a cheater that ruins the game, but players can now revel in the satisfaction of seeing them booted in real time. Activision’s proprietary Ricochet anti-cheat system will now notify Call of Duty lobbies when a cheater has been removed from a game. It’s the latest shot in an ongoing battle to kick cheaters out of PC games.

The notifications are being added to season five of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0, which kicked off on Wednesday and also includes the ability to equip a dog.

Activision has been pursuing cheaters for awhile now, after issuing a stern warning a few years ago that “cheaters aren’t welcome.” The Ricochet anti-cheat system arrived in 2021 with a kernel-level driver designed to catch PC cheaters — developed internally for the Call of Duty franchise by Activision.

It’s an ongoing cat-and-mouse game to catch cheaters and the methods that developers use to circumvent anti-cheat systems. This has led to Call of Duty making legit players invisible to cheaters, enabling an automatic god mode to destroy cheaters, and even a crackdown on third-party hardware cheating devices like XIM, Cronus Zen, and ReaSnow S1.

These hardware devices are becoming increasingly popular as they’re designed to be undetectable and provide mouse and keyboard users with the benefits of aim assist from a controller mixed with the benefits of movement from mouse and keyboard.

Ubisoft is also trying to prevent Rainbow Six Siege players from using this third-party hardware, even