Bad news for those who find it hard to game without a nifty cheat code or two.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III - the latest game in the series, which was released last week – will include a fresh update to its anti-cheat system, to deter cheaters once and for all.
The game has already been hugely popular – UK broadband providers reported record levels of network traffic when the game became available to download ahead of its release.
The anti-cheating update, which will spell major disappointment for those who don’t like to game by the rules, will be welcomed by those who play fair and square.
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Named Splat, the new fair gaming tech will randomly – and hilariously – disable the parachutes of those players it detects are cheaters. The result? Player characters will plummet straight to the ground after deployment at the start of a match, all without warning. Now we know why it’s called Splat.
“Often when a cheater appears in a match they are immediately kicked from the experience,” a Call of Duty blog post wrote about the update.
“Sometimes, we issue mitigations to minimize their impact privately to keep them in the game so we can absorb all the information we can about the account and the machine used to cheat.
“While we hesitate to call it an in-game Mitigation – because it’s immediately obvious when it happens – we have developed a new trick for cheaters going forward.”
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Falling to your death before the game has even begun isn’t the only forfeit the update brings to players. If people are detected as cheating after the start of a game, Splat can turn “a bunny hop into a 10,000-foot drop” – instantly taking them out.
Splat won’t randomly turn on for a player who isn’t verified to be cheating. For example, if player reporting doesn’t turn it on, the game can’t accidentally activate it.
While it’s fun to annoy cheaters who make it into games, Splat is a serious move by Activision – the company that makes Call of Duty – to prevent them from ever getting near a match.
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“As important as it is for us to continue to fight on behalf of all our players – which includes us – we know that part of the confidence you have in our systems is when you can see them working to protect your experience in real time,” said the Call of Duty blog.
This isn’t the first time Activision has poked fun of Call of Duty cheaters. The game developer has also gifted an automatic god mode and invisibility to players who got shot by those the system had detected as cheaters, and later shamed them by announcing they’ve been booted in the kill feed.