Nobody likes losing in Warzone, but every Call of Duty player has to face down a grizzly demise at some point. While others may see it as an opportunity to cut their teeth in the battlefield, some resort to becoming one of many Warzone cheaters. Now, in a bid to improve Warzone anti-cheat measures, Activision is rolling out its new Splat mechanic to deter pesky players who are intent on ruining the fun for others.
It may be one of the best battle royale games on PS5 and Xbox, but that doesn’t mean some Call of Duty players always want to play by the rules. “Often when a cheater appears in a match, they are immediately kicked from the experience […] we have developed a new trick for cheaters going forward in Call of Duty Warzone: We call it Splat,” says Activision in a new blog post. Alongside gathering information about the cheater while they play, Splat is designed to simply torment them.
Activision explains that “with Splat, if a cheater is discovered, we may randomly, and for fun, disable their parachute sending them careening into the ground after they deploy.” But what if that player makes it to the ground before Splat can be activated? Well, Activision is putting other tricks into play there.
The studio says that “Splat can also adjust player velocity, which transforms a bunny hop into a 10,000-foot drop, taking them out instantly. This is one of many new tricks we’ve developed – and we’ll talk about [it] more in the future.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re using the best Warzone loadouts or abiding by the Warzone meta, Splat will take you with no hesitation when activated. However, Activision details that “like all mitigations, Splat won’t randomly turn on for a player that isn’t verified to be cheating. Player reporting won’t turn it on, and the game can’t accidentally activate it.”
Activision expresses that “while it’s fun to annoy cheaters that make it into games, our aim is to prevent them from ever getting near a match. Prevention is key to the continued evolution of RICOCHET anti-cheat.” Cheating has risen exponentially in Warzone since the game’s overhaul with the release of Modern Warfare 2 last year, and it’ll likely persist with the introduction of aspects like MW3 guns from the MW3 meta when Urzikstan arrives.
Conversely, cheating is so rampant that one instance this year saw Activision and Warzone focused studio Raven Software issue over 14,000 bans in the span of 24 hours. Though this split across Warzone and Modern Warfare 2, the sheer amount of accounts forced out of games is still bewildering.
Will Urzikstan suffer from the same issues? We’ll have to wait and see. You can get a taste of the new Warzone map right now, by dropping into MW3 Zombies and seeing all that it has to offer.