Activision Blizzard punishes cheats in the online shooter “Call of Duty Warzone” in a special way: if the system notices that one of the players uses cheats, then the other participants in the game are automatically given a shield. This method, called “damage shield”, prevents the victims of cheaters from being harmed.
‘Warzone’ developer Activision Blizzard now has ‘Damage Shield’. Featured in a blog post. So the scale has been tested for a long time. The method must be used in addition to banning the player, Activision Blizzard writes in. This will neutralize cheaters while Richochet anti-cheat software is collecting information about their system.
In addition, “Team Ricochet”, as Activision Blizzard calls it its anti-cheat department, emphasizes that “Damage Shield” should never be used accidentally or arbitrarily: the developers want to prevent fair duels from gaining unfair advantages. It remains to be seen how reliably Activision Blizzard can deliver on this promise.
In the Warzone community, which is plagued by cheaters, changes are received largely positively. Videos are circulating on Reddit showing additional measures against cheaters. Opponents of cheaters not only become invulnerable, but also temporarily invisible to cheaters if they are shot.
Blocking programs and kernel
The problem with games like “Call of Duty Warzone” is the speed with which banned players can create a new account. Therefore, in addition to bans, they also use additional measures to spoil the fun of cheaters.
Game companies like Activision have taken action against cheaters for several months. Activision announced Ricochet’s anti-fraud system last fall. This includes a team of human examiners, server algorithms to detect cheats, and a driver that is supposed to run on Windows at the kernel level. This kernel driver is designed to detect when other applications or processes want to feed “Call of Duty: Warzone”.
Many multiplayer games now rely on these kernel drivers to protect their gameplay from hacking wallhacks and aimbots, for example. These games include Valorant, PUBG and Apex Legends. Such anti-fraud systems are regularly discussed in the respective communities: on the one hand they provide better protection against fraud than other anti-fraud measures, and on the other hand, universal access rights at the kernel level cause suspicion. Denuvo’s anti-cheat software was so controversial among “Doom Eternal” players that the developers later removed it.
(Immolate)