Activision Readies Hilarious Punishment For COD Modern Warfare 3 Cheaters

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 releases today, and in preparation for that and the future, the Call of Duty team has made some changes to the anti-cheat system. Namely, RICOCHET: Anti-Cheat has gained machine learning capabilities and some funny features to handle inbound cheaters to hopefully dissuade them and improve other players’ experiences.

The CoD development team made a blog post today outlining changes rolling out to the game regarding anti-cheat ahead of the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 release. The first major change noted is the enabling of machine learning to enhance anti-cheat overall. With respect to the Replay Investigation Tool, a machine learning model is “trained to identify suspicious behavior like wall hacks or raging (plus many others), and immediately prioritizes and alerts the team to review the issue for account action.”


Beyond the machine learning features, the CoD team is also introducing something called Splat. This is a new means by which cheaters will be handled in-game to minimize their impact. Specifically, if a cheater is discovered, the feature may randomly for fun “disable their parachute sending them careening into the ground after they deploy.” If the cheater is caught post-deployment, then Splat can adjust the player's velocity, changing a bunny hop into a quick visit to the moon, taking them out instantly.

Splat is a really cool mechanism that will hopefully send a message to cheaters playing the game, and everyone else shouldn’t notice any difference in their games. Further, the machine learning capabilities should make catching cheaters infinitely more efficient and effective, but we will have to see what happens in the new Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.