Call of Duty anti-cheat tool Ricochet ‘cloaks’ legit players to cheaters

Call of Duty’s latest measure to thwart cheaters is rather novel: Legitimate players will be made invisible to cheaters. Developers told the community of the Ricochet anti-cheat system’s new feature, called Cloaking, in a blog post on Tuesday.

“With Cloaking, players that are detected to be cheating can find themselves unable to see opposing players in the game world,” Team Ricochet said. “Characters, bullets, even sound from legitimate players will be undetectable to cheaters.”

Cheaters can be seen and attacked by legitimate players. “Generally, they’ll be the players you see spinning in circles hollering, ‘Who is shooting me?’” Team Ricochet wrote. Fair players are encouraged to “dole out in-game punishment.”

Ricochet (or kernel-level) is an anti-cheat tool that allows for very detailed access to applications and software installed on a personal computer. It was introduced in Warzone: Call of Duty Vanguard: Call of Duty’s multiplayer when the latter launched in November. Ricochet will be on alert for any applications that try to manipulate or interact with the Call of Duty client.

The Verge observed that even though Team Ricochet is only now announcing Cloaking, Cloaking has or has been in-game for at least half of February.

Ricochet stated that Cloaking is a complement to Damage Shield (a mitigation method introduced in February). With Damage Shield, once Ricochet detects a player is tampering with the game, it disables their ability to inflict critical damage on others while still collecting data about what they’re doing and what’s on their system.

Team Ricochet claimed that all studios involved in maintaining the multiplayer leaderboards were now taking down cheaters. The deletion comes after “any security enforcement that results in a ban to a player.”

Also, the team reported that since March 18, when they began to reported that 90,000 cheatersAnother 54,000 accounts were also banned during that week. “While we may not announce all bans as they happen, know they occur both daily and in waves,” Team Ricochet said.