The never-ending battle against hackers in cheaters in online games has taken a toll on all sorts of franchises, with even the mighty Call of Duty dealing with it on a regular basis.
Activision’s RICOCHET Anti-Cheat system has certainly had its ups and downs, with aimbots and wallhacks popping up in Warzone and basically every CoD game in recent memory. But the publisher is not backing down, and the latest development shows the lengths it’s going to try to keep games fair.
The company’s lawyers have been at work shutting down cheaters for years, but this time ahead of Modern Warfare 4, they’ve got the video proof to back it up. In a new series of posts on Twitter/X, Activision released real-life footage of cheat-makers being served court papers, and it’s awesome.
Today, CoD posted that it’s “disrupted more than 375 cheat reseller operations, served more than 80 cease-and-desist demands and shut down more than 30 vendors, and there’s more to come, including litigation when necessary.”
“BUILD CHEATS. SELL CHEATS. WE WILL FIND YOU,” Activision said. “This work allows us to go after the people and businesses behind cheating products and disrupt the ecosystem that profits from them. It’s another way we’re working to make cheating harder – not just for the people using cheats, but for the people building and selling them.”
As for MW4’s beta last weekend, Activision said that “across millions of matches played, infection rates were lower, hardware bans were harder to evade and our time to action improved,” but the battle continues with the legal system as its biggest loadout weapon.
I have to tip my hat to Activision on this one, because cheats suck, cheaters suck, and cheat-makers suck the hardest. Many of them likely feel as though they are immortal, like a god-mode cheat in a game, but videos and images like the ones below should hopefully sway some people to think otherwise when they decide to try and sell cheats for games.
The cheater epidemic likely won’t stop anytime soon, but I hope that the fear of legal repercussions may deter some people. I doubt it, but that doesn’t make the videos any less enjoyable.
