Warzone will now make sure cheaters plummet to their deaths as comeuppance for their crimes

Modern Warfare 3 has arrived, and with it, a new update to Ricochet Anti-Cheat, Activision’s ever-evolving watcher. The team behind it has revealed some of the new tools being deployed on the backend, and a few delicious new additions to the ever-growing list of tricks the game can use to torment cheaters.

The developer is calling this new punishment Splat, and it will be available in Warzone (where it makes sense) when the battle royale mode launches in early December with Season 1.

When the game discovers a cheater in Warzone, Splat is one thing that can be triggered. Splat simply disables the player parachute, ensuring that they end up, well, splatting on the ground the next time they need to parachute. It also ups their velocity to absurd degrees, making a simple bunny hop deadly when their feet touch the ground.

A little less visible work has also gone into the updated Ricochet Anti-Cheat, with it now relying on Machine Learning. The machine-driven, self-teaching tech is used to enhance existing tools, and to better anticipate cheater behaviour.

For instance, the Replay Investigation Tool (introduced earlier this year), has benefited from better efficiency thanks to the integration of Machine Learning. The Replay Investigation Tool works to recreate game data in video, so someone on the team can view and judge it.

Going forward, a Machine Learning model will be trained to identify the most pressing of these clips, and allow the team to prioritise them over others. The main goal of Machine Learning is to increase speed and efficiency of the team’s efforts.