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The long-awaited anti-cheat software for Call of Duty servers, causing immense frustration in the playerbase. Publisher Activision and its franchise studios often ban cheaters by the thousands, but that doesn't stop many of them from subverting their bans and continuing to use hacks. It seems Activision is finally going to make cheating much more difficult and also hopefully ensure more severe punishments for those who get caught.
Activision has been hyping up its new Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War and especially Warzone, the latter of which requires crossplay to be enabled.
Activision posted a new Warzone developer Raven Software's anti-cheat system, Ricochet. Ricochet will introduce server-side tools to help catch cheaters in the act, as well as a kernel-level PC driver which monitors any apps that interact with Call of Duty games, including the players' graphics card driver. This will hypothetically detect any cheating software that attempts to manipulate Warzone. The anti-cheat system will go live in Warzone alongside the launch of its new Pacific map, and it will be added to Call of Duty: Vanguard "at a later date," seeming to confirm it won't be live in Vanguard upon its November 5 release.
Because Activision implies Ricochet anti-cheat isn't coming to Call of Duty: Vanguard until after launch, it may be cause for some concern. The Call of Duty: Vanguard beta had hackers running amok, with plenty of videos and player s documenting the prevalence of cheating in the unreleased game. Not only were there more commonplace cheats like aimbots in use, but some hackers were even able to end matches at will. It's believed hackers were able to crack the beta because of Vanguard's shared code with other recent Call of Duty games, supposedly making it easier to port over cheats rather than write completely new ones.
If the Call of Duty: Vangaurd beta was cracked in the short time it was available, hackers being present when the full game launches seem like an inevitability. Activision has not provided a timeline for when Vanguard will fully adopt Warzone's anti-cheat software, so it sounds as though player reports will have to do the brunt of the work for Sledgehammer Games until that happens. At the very least, Warzone's new Pacific map might get a relatively cheater-free launch in November.
Call of Duty: Vanguard will be available for PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and PC on November 5, 2021. Call of Duty: Warzone is available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
Sources: Call of Duty, Call of Duty/Twitter
