Cheaters in video games have increasingly been a problem over the past few years, especially within the competitive online scene. Devs try to keep up with these ‘players’ using anti-cheat methods that collect the cheater’s information while trying to make their experience less pleasant. Call of Duty: Vanguard has revealed a creative new anti-cheat method known as Cloaking. Guess what that does? If you said, “Makes players invisible to cheaters”, then well done.
The update was announced two days ago through a blog post. It was developed by Ricochet, a team within Activision. If you’ve got any cheats turned on, you may want to turn them off. Life in Call of Duty is about to get much harder for cheaters.
I can’t see live people
If you’ve been killed by invisible bullets while playing Call of Duty: Vanguard lately it means the update is working exactly as it is meant to. ‘Cloaking’ makes opposing players within the game invisible to those running cheat software. Even the cheater’s sense of hearing will be taken away. This doesn’t alter gameplay for those playing the game correctly. In fact, those players have the opportunity to get a couple of free kills from those running around like headless chickens.
For the time being, the anti-cheat update is only available for Call of Duty: Vanguard. This won’t be the case for long though, as there are plans to add the feature to Warzone too. The change will come when Activision is happy with how the update works in Vanguard.
No longer on top
The update isn’t just stopping cheaters from playing the game. It’s also going to be culling the leaderboards. Any players with a spot on any leaderboards that are detected cheating will be automatically deleted from the list.
In addition to trolling the cheaters, Activision is also focused on banning them. Since 19 March, over 54, 000 accounts have been banned, with more on the way. Activision urges players to keep reporting accounts that are cheating, in an effort to keep gameplay as balanced as possible. Activision understands that no anti-cheat method can last forever. Cheaters are always looking for ways to get around the updates. And it’s even possible that this anti-cheat method, as creative as it is, might backfire. Players looking for a serious challenge might opt to run cheat software and see how well they can play when they can’t see or hear the opposition.