Call of Duty’s latest update will now notify players of cheater bans in-game

A new update to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone’s anti-cheat will now let players know if a cheater has been punished in real-time.

The details:

• Along with the release of Season 5, the game's official Twitter account announced that its Ricochet anti-cheat has received a new feature. When a player is in a game with a banned cheater, they will be notified of the cheater's removal via the in-game kill feed. This announcement follows Activision's report earlier this week that "new detections directly targeting cheat developers at the source" resulted in the suspension of over 14,000 accounts within 24 hours.
• Ricochet was introduced in COD: Vanguard in 2021, along with numerous "mitigations" to make cheaters' lives more difficult. This includes making legitimate players invisible, causing the cheater to "hallucinate" and see clones of others, and even removing all weapons from them. The reason for not outright banning cheaters as soon as possible is said to be to allow the anti-cheat team to learn how different cheating software works in order to prevent certain methods from being used in the future.
• The update has received generally positive feedback; however, some are skeptical of the new feature, claiming that it could be used to make it appear that cheaters are being dealt with when in fact nothing has been done. However, the skepticism isn't entirely unjustified, as cheaters have been rampant in both Warzone and MWII since their releases, despite Activision's claims of large ban waves. Ranked modes, in particular, are notorious for being infested with both obvious and subtle cheaters, with some even flying out of bounds.

More Call of Duty news:

• Modern Warfare 3's reveal date, key art, and new weapons have been leaked online. Activision previously confirmed that the game's reveal would take place inside Warzone, although it did not share when. According to the newly shared key art, it will apparently be held on August 17 as a limited-time event.
• Sony and Microsoft have agreed to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for at least the next ten years, following Microsoft's victory over the Federal Trade Commission, which allows it to complete its $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The rest of the publisher's IPs, however, are not covered by the agreement, leaving the door open for future exclusive entries in iconic franchises like Spyro and Crash.