In the lead up to Modern Warfare III’s launch, #TeamRICOCHET has banned over 80,000 accounts across Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare II, barring these accounts from accessing Modern Warfare III.
Another important piece of this prevention puzzle is our game code obfuscation and encryption. To play Call of Duty, we send each player the game code (via the game executable) to experience the game. When we send out the game executable, which contains detailed instructions for how our game works, we are essentially sending out copies of our house keys. Imagine trying to keep a bad guy who has copies of your keys from breaking into your home.
To make it harder to unlock the front door, the RICOCHET Anti-Cheat teams are constantly working on new obfuscation techniques to make the game code harder for bad actors to analyze. We then encrypt (or digitally lock) the entire Call of Duty executable, so it is much harder to tamper with. This makes it more difficult for the cheat developers to analyze and modify our code and remove our protections.
This is the ebb and flow of anti-cheat security.
When we take steps to stop cheaters, they readjust their process and look for new opportunities. The nature of multiplayer games, where our systems (the server) exchanges information with your computer (the clients) to make the multiplayer action happen, is how cheating can occur. Our anti-cheat efforts tackle each touchpoint of this trust process, from client to server-side systems and enhancing those process with Machine Learning to combat unfair play.