Call of Duty Will Now Troll Game Cheaters To Death

Call of Duty: Vanguard’s new update gives cheaters hard time, doling out a fittingly ironic penalty to those who abuse the game.

Through a new “Cloaking” system, Call of Duty: Vanguard players who are caught to be cheating will no longer be able to see hostile players in the game. Enemy characters, bullets, and sounds will be completely undetectable to cheaters, while honest players will see them, and the cheating players, like sitting ducks.

While cheaters will end up “spinning in circles hollering, ‘who is shooting me?!’”, as Activision puts it in a blog post, honest players can nab a quick kill, putting those annoying cheaters in their place.

Activision is styling the Cloaking system as an “in-game mitigation technique to reduce the impact of cheaters”. But to us, it sounds more like the anti-cheat team has found a way to troll the trollers. What better way to show cheaters just how bad their hacks can be, than by deliberately destroying their game and letting real players get one over on them.

Troll the trolls

The new feature is equal to the Damage Shield system that was released for Warzone earlier this year, which actually made cheater’s bullets useless. When the server detects a cheater in Warzone, it disables their ability to impose critical damage on opposing players, letting enemies quickly kill them off.

Additionally, players who are now banned for cheating will be withdrawn from global Call of Duty leaderboards. Activision said that change was executed in response to player feedback when some fans presented concerns over how cheating would impact global competitive rankings.

Activision said more than 144,000 accounts have now been banned across Call of Duty titles using its Ricochet anti-cheat software.

In the past, it’s emphasized its commitment to ensuring only cheaters are caught by the anti-cheat software, reassuring “law-abiding community members” that they don’t need to need to be worried about their bullets accidentally being made limp, or the enemy team suddenly turning invisible in front of their eyes.

Cheating has become something of a sticking point among Call of Duty: Vanguard players. Aimbots and wallhacks let evil players exploit the game for an unjust advantage, sometimes in a way that destroys the multiplayer experience for others. Activision started addressing those problems wholesale last year, rolling out its new Ricochet kernel-level, anti-cheat security system.

Punishing cheaters by trolling them certainly sounds like an effective strategy to get more sales.

The new anti-cheat features are now live in Call of Duty: Vanguard, just in time for Season 3. They will release it to Warzone soon, too.