"Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" Season 5 is here, bringing new gear, new maps, and an immortal German Shepherd that has taken up residence in the belt. But at the same time, it also brought updates to the game's anti-cheat system. Not content with tormenting cheaters with bizarre afflictions such as hallucinations and missing weapons, COD is turning to its most powerful motivator, shame, to deter wrongdoing in multiplayer matches.

COD's anti-cheat team, Team Ricochet, announced in a Twitter post (or X tweet) that "Starting with Season 05, the kill feed will notify the lobby when #TeamRICOCHET and its systems have removed problem players from the game. In other words, when the game's anti-cheat kicked out hackers, a message will appear in the lower left corner of the screen.

And why not? Exiting cheaters from the game is the ultimate form of getting rid of them, and everyone likes it when games like "Tarkov" publish the kill lists of the cheaters they have eliminated. While it is unlikely that sticking a user's name in the kill feed every time a cheater is banned will significantly reduce the number of cheaters, it is certainly satisfying for players to see their enemies who use hacks receive swift justice.

Indeed, players already seem to be responding positively to the change. The replies to Team Ricochet's tweet are filled with "W," "nice," and other words that kids these days might use to express their approval. There are plenty of people complaining about the overzealous ban and begging for their accounts to be reinstated, as is always the case when such an announcement is made.

Being a tremendously huge series, it is always interesting to see what COD dishes out to manage the countless cheaters that attack every day. It has become a kind of video game laboratory, trying all sorts of wild ideas to deter cheaters and keep honest players (relatively) happy. Sometimes, like the aforementioned hallucinations, the idea works so well that it is adopted into the game. Others, such as "quick sandwiches" that randomly move cheating players at half-speed, end up detracting from the legitimate player's experience and are removed. However, it is always interesting to see what stage the anti-cheat measures are at in these popular multiplayer games.