In an effort to combat cheating in Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Vanguard, Activision originally launched the latest title in the series along with an anti-cheating platform known as Ricochet. As the developer plans the rollout of Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific, that anti-cheating program will be receiving an upgrade and will be a required part of logging in for PC players.
This latest Ricochet update comes from a series of attempts by Activision to crackdown on cheaters in Call of Duty: Warzone that make for an unfair playing experience for players that don't cheat. However, the Ricochet platform doesn't only target aimbots and wallhackers, but is attempting to find and stop methods of bypassing certain reward thresholds and avoiding bans.
The update to the Ricochet anti-cheating method will be applying what is known as a kernal-level driver to PC players that will activate as soon as Call of Duty: Warzone is booted up and turns off with the game as well. This basically means that Ricochet will have first priority when searching through a player's game files and looking for any programs that shouldn't be present without cheating. In addition to finding things like aimbots and other programs that can give a player a serious advantage over others, the anit-cheat program is also looking to pinpoint the origins of several cheat systems that nefarious players use.
According to Activision, another goal of Ricochet is to find the cheat developers and account sellers who profit off of introducing cheats into the community and giving players shortcuts through online progress. There will also be changes coming to the security enforcement policies, so there may soon be more risk to using or selling these cheat programs online. Players can expect to see the rollout start in the Asia-Pacific region before begining to go worldwide as the developer takes in feedback of how the anit-cheat system is affecting Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific's first season.
For the majority of players who don't use cheats in either the regular multiplayer or the battle royale modes of Call of Duty, the update to Ricochet will likely come and go with little bother. However, some may still have concerns over the kernel-level driver that comes with the anti-cheat platform and how it is able to bypass some priorities and permissions in order to target cheaters in Call of Duty: Warzone. Taking Activision at its word, there shouldn't be any major privacy concerns, but the community will likely have a knee-jerk reaction to sift through the data and see exactly what the developer can find on player PCs.
Call of Duty: Warzone is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Call of Duty