Call of Duty’s anti-cheat software Ricochet has a new feature that turns on a god mode of sorts when a cheater is identified, allowing victims to destroy the miscreants. As exhibited by YouTuber TimTheTatman in a viral video, Ricochet grants players a Damage Shield that repels all of an identified cheater’s bullets, letting their victims take them out effortlessly. According to Activision, it has extensively tested the feature to ensure that the Damage Shield isn’t wrongly activated.
Call of Duty anti-cheat circumvents the problem of banned players creating new accounts
Banning cheaters has proven to have a limited impact even if IP bans are deployed. PC players especially find it easy to circumvent such bans and create new accounts. With the Damage Shield feature, Call of Duty’s servers are able to detect when the game is being tampered with, and incapacitate cheaters. “This mitigation leaves the cheater vulnerable to real players and allows Team Ricochet to collect information about a cheater’s system,” Activision wrote. “We track these encounters to ensure there is no possibility for the game to apply a Damage Shield randomly or by accident, no matter the skill level. To be clear, we will never interfere in gunfights between law-abiding community members.”
Activision further claims that Ricochet has successfully reduced instances of cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone. According to the company, cheating was at an “all-time low” in the free-to-play title during the recent holiday period. That said, Activision acknowledges that cheaters continue to find new loopholes but has promised to continue combating them and closely monitoring their activities. “This back and forth is expected, and while anti-cheat is not a magic bullet, this is a battle we’re committed to fighting,” reads a blog.
In other news, an SEC filing has revealed that Microsoft approached Activision for a deal days after its CEO Bobby Kotick was accused of misconduct, and Ubisoft has said that it would consider a buyout offer in the interest of stakeholders.
[Source: Activision, The Verge]
