Call of Duty’s Ricochet Systems Will Tell Lobbies When They Kick Players Out

gameranx.com:

Activision has revealed they will involve Call of Duty’s players with their anti-cheating efforts.

The official Call of Duty Twitter account posted this update:

“RICOCHET has entered the chat

Starting in Season 05, the kill feed will notify lobbies when #TeamRICOCHET and it’s systems have removed a problem player from the game.”

All the way back in 2021, Activision revealed Ricochet, their custom built anti cheating software for their Call of Duty games. While some fans were skeptical about Ricochet, Activision’s many Call of Duty studios have proven up to the task of updating Ricochet to address cheaters across their games.

Later that year, Activision revealed that they banned as much as 48,000 players, and Ricochet has proven even more effective since.

Most recently, Activision has started playing around with the cheaters themselves. As they have explained, when Ricochet finds cheaters, they don’t ban them immediately. Instead, they keep cheaters playing, but then change things around so that the cheaters lose their weapons, attack fake enemies, or get locked into smaller parts of the map.

The point of this action is for Activision to observe the cheaters playing themselves. Playing the long game, Activision is out observing how to detect cheaters again, and ultimately track down the cheating software themselves.

So, this new update adds another wrinkle to Activision’s anti cheating strategies. Right until now, cheaters get isolated and messed around with, to make them regret using cheats on their game. Maybe there are some hackers who find a perverse pleasure fighting with the developers in this way, but at least thus far we haven’t seen any evidence of that yet.

Anyway, this new change adds a social dimension to what