As part of the ongoing fight against cheaters, the team behind Call of Duty's server-side and kernel-level anti-cheat solution announced that it has implemented a new mitigation technique called "stealth," which will make cheaters invisible during matches.
As explained in a new blog post highlighting the latest developments in Call of Duty's Riochet anti-cheat solution, Cloaking follows a similar philosophy to its predecessor's Damage Shield program, which aims to "give legitimate players an edge over cheaters," meaning more glamorous than plug-ins.
When cheaters are detected in a match, Damage Shield effectively opens the God Mode for all legitimate players, while Cloaking focuses on cheaters, making them unable to see opponents, bullets, and even sounds. "However," legitimate players," the post explains, "can see cheaters affected by stealth (generally speaking, they're the players you see going around in circles shouting 'who's shooting me') and can punish the opener in the game."
Separately, the Ricochet team revealed that it has now banned another 54,000 accounts since the previously announced 90,000 ban figures. It also clarified that all banned players will be removed from the leaderboard.
Ricochet's server-side anti-cheat backend has been available for Call of Duty: Vanguard and Call of Duty: Warzone for some time. So far, however, only Call of Duty: Warzone has used the system's kernel-level drivers. Today, that's changed when upgraded kernel-level drivers were rolled out for Vanguard worldwide.
According to the Richette team, the changes will then be applied to Call of Duty: Warzone, but only "after checking how these updates work for a while" to "minimize any issues players may encounter."
The time phase of Activision Blizzard's latest attempt to crack down on Call of Duty cheaters is a difficult time for both Activision Blizzard itself and the COD IP. Activision Blizzard remains mired in controversy following shocking allegations last year about its workplace culture. In a Lawsuit filing in California last July, Activision Blizzard was described as a "hotbed of harassment and discrimination against women." Call of Duty was recently blown up and is losing players, with a third of its previously confirmed monthly active players already lost in the past year.