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A new Call of Duty: Warzone anti-cheat system will make players invincible if it detects cheating, placing a shield around rule-abiding players when fighting hacked accounts. Despite its massive success, Call of Duty: Warzone’s current state is less than ideal. With a plague of bugs and glitches interfering with gameplay, and a massive rise in cheaters ruining matches, the Call of Duty battle royale has a long way to go before it’s in perfect condition.

The problems have only gotten worse, especially as the free-to-play game integrated with other Call of Duty games like Black Ops Cold War and Vanguard. To remedy the ongoing problem, Activision recently confirmed it’s working on Warzone 2, which will be built in an all-new engine and will hopefully fix the plethora of issues prevalent in the first game. The battle royale sequel will reportedly launch sometime after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which is rumored to release in October of this year. Despite work on the sequel, Call of Duty: Warzone developers are also still working to fix the original battle royale, with much of the focus centered around hacked clients.

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According to the official Call of Duty Blog (via Eurogamer), Call of Duty: Warzone devs are implementing a new mitigation technique called the “Damage Shield,” which makes players invincible if cheating is detected in the lobby. The #TeamRICOCHET mitigation technique detects whether a cheater is tampering with the game in real-time and effectively “disables the cheater’s ability to inflict critical damage on other players,” according to the blog post. The system additionally leaves the cheater vulnerable to other players, while simultaneously allowing Ricochet’s Anti-Cheat system to collect data regarding the cheater’s hacks and systems. The developers assured that the mitigation technique has safeguards to prevent it from inflicting a Damage Shield against rule-abiding players and will therefore not interfere with normal gameplay. The developers confirmed that the Damage Shield is officially out of its testing phase and has been deployed in all servers, and more systems are in development.

Call of Duty: Warzone is giving players god mode called Damage Shield to combat cheaters.

Call of Duty: Warzone has reportedly seen a reduction in cheat reporting after the mitigations were introduced in the last few weeks, though the developers did not reveal how significant that drop was. The roll-out of new anti-cheat systems coincides with the efforts of the RICOCHET Anti-Cheat kernel-level driver on PC, which has been able to catch and disable hacked accounts. RICOCHET Anti-Cheat was originally unveiled back in October and is a multi-faceted approach intent on combating the cheating epidemic across Call of Duty games, especially Warzone. The anti-cheat system features server-side tools that continuously monitor in-game analytics, investigate systems used by cheaters, and strengthen account security to ensure players are safe from hackers. The anti-cheat first launched alongside Call of Duty: Vanguard and came to Warzone during the highly-anticipated Call of Duty: Warzone Pacific update.

While the Damage Shield is not a perfect solution, it may drastically improve the gameplay experience, even when a cheater is in the lobby. Previously, all players could do to combat cheaters was to report them, though that often didn’t stop the Warzone hacker from eliminating players first. Now, players have some level of defense against hackers, though it has not been identified how capable the system is at detecting cheaters, such as how early in the game RICOCHET will start placing Damage Shields.

Next: Warzone Players on Xbox Consoles Can't Even Open The Game Due to Bugs

Source: Call of Duty Blog (via Eurogamer)