“Cheating in Call of Duty is frustrating for players, developers, and the entire community.” The many teams of people at Activision, Raven, Sledgehammer, and all of the Call of Duty developers know that cheating is a plague on the game for everyone. After years of efforts to combat the issue, Activision has now revealed its full internally developed Call of Duty anti-cheat solution: RICOCHET Anti-Cheat.
Set to launch alongside Vanguard on November 5th, and then in Warzone with the Pacific update later this year (expected to be around November 30/December 1, if the Season Six countdown is anything to go by), Ricochet Anti-Cheat is a “robust anti-cheat system supported by a team of dedicated professionals focused on fighting unfair play.” They call it a “multi-faceted approach to combatting cheating,” which uses server-side analytics and tools that will identify cheaters.
The server-side enhancements offered by Ricochet Anti-Cheat are further bolstered by another piece of the system: a new kernel-level driver for PC players which will ensure they are playing fair, monitoring any and all applications that may try to modify the game’s code. It was developed entirely internally specifically for the Call of Duty franchise, and will launch with Warzone’s Pacific update. It’s coming to Vanguard at a later date. They note that the driver is specifically to prevent cheats for PC players, it will benefit console players who play against PC players in cross-play.
This kernel-level driver only operates while playing Warzone on PC and will turn off when Warzone is shut down. It monitors software and applications that interact with Call of Duty Warzone to ensure that they aren’t making any overlays or modifications that would provide an unfair advantage to anyone, thus spoiling the experience for other players. They have tested for performance and stability across a wide range of PCs and will continue iterating following its launch. This driver will be required to play Warzone (following its launch), and will be automatically installed as part of the Pacific update without any action required from the player. As it is connected to the Warzone game files, the driver can only be uninstalled by uninstalling Warzone altogether. Reinstallation of the application will include the kernel-level driver.
Furthermore, Richochet Anti-Cheat is designed to be an ever-evolving system, using feedback and player reporting, manual input from the Ricochet teams, and machine learning via the kernel-level driver to learn about suspicious behaviors and stay one step ahead of cheaters. The multiple pieces of RICOCHET Anti-Cheat—server-side detections, kernel-level driver, player reporting, staffed by a full team, and constant evolution—should create an environment that feels much more fair to play in overall, with a Call of Duty anti-cheat that is proactive rather than reactive.
At this time, it looks like Warzone and Vanguard are the only games planned to implement Ricochet Anti-Cheat, but it’s assumed that it will be part of each new Call of Duty release moving forward, partcularly if Activision keeps up with the Warzone integrations for each yearly release. More information about Ricochet is due in the coming weeks ahead of its rollout as part of Warzone and Vanguard.
[Source: Call of Duty, FAQ]
