‘Call of Duty’ anti-cheat system introduces ‘Cloaking’ so legitimate players can have fun punishing cheaters

“Call of Duty’s” team Ricochet has launched its PC kernel-level anti-cheat security driver on “Call of Duty: Vanguard” globally, along with a new mitigation technique to curb the damage cheaters have on legitimate players. The game introduces a new function called Cloaking that will allow real players to exact in-game revenge on those that use hacks to gain an unfair advantage.

As players can tell by its name, the new anti-cheat feature will make legitimate “Call of Duty” undetectable from players who are detected to be cheating. This means cheaters will not see where the opposing players are coming from, including their bullets and the sound they make.

The team behind the “Call of Duty” anti-cheat system says legitimate players will not be affected by Cloaking and that they could see which cheaters are suffering the effects of this new mitigation method. “Generally, they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, ‘Who is shooting me?!’” Ricochet said in a blog post. This should then allow real players to “dole out in-game punishment” on cheaters in the game.

The introduction of Cloaking follows the announcement of Damage Shield, which Ricochet started testing in “Call of Duty” last February. The previously announced mitigation technique protects legitimate players from cheaters. Once the system detects a player cheating, their bullets will inflict no real damage on other players.

Meanwhile, Ricochet noted in the same blog post that the anti-cheat security driver will arrive in “Call of Duty: Warzone” at a later time. “After a period of examining how these updates are functioning with today’s global rollout, they will also be applied to the driver for Warzone to bring parity for anti-cheat drivers across both titles,” the developers said.

Aside from Cloaking, another anti-cheat update is also focused on the leaderboard in favor of legitimate players. “Call of Duty” will start removing banned players from the leaderboard of both “Call of Duty: Vanguard” and “Call of Duty: Warzone.”

Last month, Ricochet announced it banned 90,000 accounts from the game. The team issued an update in the same blog post this week, saying another 54,000 accounts were removed from “Call of Duty.”