Imagine playing an online game and trying your very best, only to be beaten time and time again by players who are using cheats and hacks to win. This is an issue plaguing online games like Call of Duty, but it seems that Activision is cracking down hard on it with a new anti-cheating system.
This new system will be debuting with Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Vanguard where Activision will introduce a PC kernel-level driver combined with machine learning to examine player behavior. This combined with a “team of dedicated professionals” will help the company identify and weed out cheaters and ban them if they get caught.
This works by the driver monitoring processes on a computer that are interacting with the game, and will detect things like injected code that might be used to manipulate the game, which will then be reported to the company.
There are privacy concerns related to using kernel-level drivers, but Activision says that this feature will not always be on. It will only turn on when you launch the game, and shut down when you exit it, so it’s not as if it will be running all the time even when you’re not playing.