Cheaters in Call of Duty will now be punished by having everyone else vanish.

Vanguard has added a new weapon to its arsenal of tactics for humiliating cheaters in Call of Duty: 

Vanguard. The online shooter's anti-cheat technology now features Cloaking, a new "mitigation approach" that renders everyone save the cheater invisible, a punishment worthy of Black Mirror.

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When Call of Duty's RICOCHET anti-cheat system detects someone cheating by using aimbots or other illegal methods, everyone else in the game will become invisible to them. Bullets will be concealed, and all gunshot noises will be suppressed.

"Legitimate players, on the other hand, can spot cheaters affected by cloaking (usually, they'll be the ones spinning in circles yelling, 'Who is shooting me?!') and penalise them in-game," Vanguard's development team stated in a blog post on Thursday. Brutal.

This current effort to deter cheaters by severe prejudice follows similar processes. Damage Shield, for example, stops anyone discovered meddling with the game from inflicting critical damage. Activision has also vowed to ban cheats from all future Call of Duty games forever.

In order to combat the plague of online cheating, developers have sought to think outside the box. When their software isn't requesting contentious kernel-level access to users' computers, they're toying with concepts like isolating cheaters on distinct matchmaking islands.

Activision, for its part, bans tens of thousands of cheats from Vanguard, Warzone, and other modern Call of Duty games on a regular basis. It's also gone on the legal warpath with firms like Bungie and Riot Games, attempting to litigate cheat developers into extinction.

Cheating is often blamed for the loss of players in live service games. Halo Infinite is one of the most recent instances of this. Vanguard, on the other hand, has suffered for a variety of reasons, failing to draw the massive popularity of Call of Duty spin-offs like Modern Warfare and Black Ops. A new Modern Warfare 2 is widely expected to be the series' next instalment, with a probable unveiling in May and a release date around the Christmas season of 2022.