In the last few days, cheaters in Call of Duty: Vanguard may have noticed their games have been curiously empty—at least, until a silent, invisible bullet pierces their skull.
That’s thanks to a new technique called Cloaking, a feature recently added to Vanguard’s Ricochet anti-cheat system. While it’s been active for some time, Team Ricochet highlighted the feature in a recent blog post (thanks, GameDeveloper) outlining some of Ricochet’s latest mitigation features.
Here’s how it works: if Ricochet detects a cheater, that player may find themselves unable to see or hear other players or weapon fire. Legitimate players, however, can still see the now-helpless cheater, and dole out punishment accordingly—with the developer joking you can likely identify cheaters by looking for the players “spinning in circles hollering, ‘Who is shooting me?!'”
Cloaking exists alongside existing mitigation techniques like Damage Shield, which removes a cheater’s ability to inflict critical hits, to put off cheaters by making their experience as miserable as possible. It joins an announcement that Richochet is now globally available for Vanguard, and while there’ll be a brief period to let the updates settle, Team Ricochet eventually hopes to bring Vanguard’s mitigation techniques over to Warzone for complete security parity.