Call of Duty cheat developers are fighting fire with fire against Activision’s anti-cheat Ricochet, with information this week revealing hackers have the advantage against the shooters’ developers and are leveraging it to full effect.
Ricochet has a few nifty tools to combat cheating in CoD. But hackers are stepping up, according to content creator NukeJesus, who published a YouTube video expose of a private cheating community on Discord called “Call of Doodie” where players discuss hacking and share cheats. One such cheat circumnavigates one of Ricochet’s features, which takes screenshots of the game screen when a player is suspected of hacking.
NukeJesus reveals the hack disables itself when it detects Ricochet is about to take a screenshot, then enables itself again after Ricochet completes its pass. With objects like wallhack markers absent from the screenshot, Ricochet assumes innocence until the next pass. It’s one of many ways cheaters are getting around the anti-cheat—but NukeJesus is making it his ambition to bring down those at the top of leaderboards who don’t deserve to be there.
NukeJesus said it took him three years to gain access to the server with “the top dogs” who populate the top 250 player list with multiple accounts before selling them for cash to those looking for CoD clout. One account sold for as much as $600, according to NukeJesus, who provided proof of the sale in his video.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg, Ricochet is lacking big time,” NukeJesus said, showing the cheat developers don’t just cover CoD but also other titles like Apex Legends, Counter-Strike 2, Escape from Tarkov, and Rust, to name a few.
Activision’s Ricochet has proven to do work in the past, with numerous ban waves seeing thousands of accounts put on ice. But many players are saying it’s just not effective enough, and they continue to encounter cheaters across the board.
Now with proof that Ricochet has been outsmarted, players are calling for a more intrusive anti-cheat like Riot Games’ Vanguard for VALORANT. “Give me that anti-cheat that goes into my entire computer man,” one player said, adding that it was “boring” playing ranked and not knowing if they were beaten fair and square or encountered a hacker.
Time will tell whether Activision goes that far, but given cheating in CoD has been a problem for well over a decade now, the best we can hope for is continued maintenance of Ricochet and action on Activision’s part so that NukeJesus’ work isn’t put to waste.
