Call of Duty Warzone is rolling out new ways to mess with cheaters, including Damage Shield

Call of Duty Warzone anti-cheat has a new way to crack down on cheaters which sounds very frustrating for them and very good to us.

The latest Warzone anti-cheat update on the Call of Duty blog noted that the implementation of the Ricochet kernel-level driver had helped drop cheating to an all-time low over the winter break. It's come back up since then - still not as bad as it got back in Verdansk, thankfully - but a new tool called Damage Shield should help mitigate the effects of cheaters in Call of Duty Warzone while also gathering more data on their methods.

Damage Shield sounds like a power-up, but it's quite the opposite: if a server detects a player is actively tampering with the game, it can disable their ability to inflict critical damage on the fly. No matter how magnetically drawn their crosshairs may be to your noggin, they won't be able to score increased damage.

Why not just turn off the cheaters' damage outright? Well, this way the server can keep gathering more info on how the hack functions without the cheater immediately realizing they've been made, and legit competitors can more easily clean them up the old fashioned way (since Damage Shield isn't meant to affect critical damage dealt out by legit players).

Activision Damage Shield is now live on Warzone servers around the world, and other means of cheat mitigation will keep launching periodically - though it won't announce them all, since it wants them to remain unpleasant surprises for cheaters.

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