Activision Takes On Call Of Duty: Vanguard, Warzone Cheaters With Ricochet

There's no question that cheaters ruin free-to-play and paid games alike, and they seem to congregate in competitive shooter games. Developers and publishers often employ some kind of anti-cheat to keep the cheaters at bay, but today, Activision is taking things one step further by announcing its own anti-cheat called Ricochet. The new anti-cheat software will be going live in both Call of Duty: Vanguard and Warzone later this year.

Ricochet Anti-Cheat will comprise server-side tools and enhancements along with a kernel-level driver that players will have to install. In today's announcement on the Call of Duty blog, Activision was pretty straightforward in describing the driver, saying that it will be given "a high level of access to monitor and manage software and applications on a PC."

Activision says that the driver "will check the software and applications that attempt to interact and manipulate Call of Duty: Warzone," though the company also promises that Ricochet Anti-Cheat will respect players' privacy as well. For instance, Activision claims that the driver will only operate when Warzone is running and is not always-on, meaning it will shut down when Warzone is closed. At some point after launch, the driver will go live in Call of Duty: Vanguard, but it will make its debut in Warzone first.

A big question will also be whether or not this anti-cheat will impact performance, but Activision says that it's testing the driver to "ensure system stability across a large range of PCs." Activision also promises to iterate on Ricochet after launch to keep up with cheaters who find and sell workarounds to the anti-cheat.

So, if you've come face-to-face with cheaters in Warzone, the hope is that Ricochet will help with that problem. We'll find out soon enough, as Activision says that Ricochet is going live with the Pacific update for Warzone later this year.