Developers Infinity Ward and Raven Software have introduced new anti-cheat tech that’ll troll Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Warzone 2.0 hackers in a hilarious way: introducing hallucinations that only cheaters can see.
Activision has worked on curbing hackers in the past through its proprietary Call of Duty anti-cheat system Ricochet, implementing software that thwarts cheaters by snatching their guns, making legit players invisible, and banning them outright. This new mitigation tactic for the twin shooters, called hallucinations, is yet another way to detect and yeet cheaters to create a fairer game.
Hallucinations will out Call of Duty cheaters
Team Ricochet took to the official Call of Duty website on June 29 to share a progress report now that season four in both games is underway. In the post, Team Ricochet revealed the new mitigation tactic is meant to clock cheaters, explaining that hallucinations will place decoy characters in the game that look like real players but are merely a clone to essentially out a cheater.
“These false characters are undetectable by legitimate players, and they can’t impact a legitimate player’s aim, progression, end of match stats, or overall gameplay experience, but serve to disorient cheaters in a variety of ways,” Team Ricochet said. “Hallucinations can be deployed both as a method of mitigation for verified cheaters or, in secret, as a detection for suspicious players.”
Hallucinations also generate the same kinds of information that cheaters often have access to, revealing unique data to make them appear like legitimate players. These fakes can also be hidden and positioned anywhere relative to a cheater, meaning if the team suspects you of cheating, they can place a hallucination in your vicinity. If you interact with it, well then, you’ll have been caught in 4K. And because there’s no real discernible difference between the real and the fake, it’ll be nigh impossible to tell if (and when) you’re interacting with a hallucination. Team Ricochet said this is another way of ejecting bad actors from Call of Duty games, one of many the team is constantly working on.
“[Hallucinations are] a first but foundational step in one of many efforts to combat what the community refers to as ‘non-rage’ hackers,” Team Ricochet said. “These are cheaters using prohibited tools for additional in-game information, giving them an unfair advantage against other players. Using these tools is against our Security and Enforcement Policy and will result in account bans.”
Kotaku reached out to publisher Activision for comment.
Team Ricochet is also shelving a mitigation tactic called quicksand, which froze or slowed cheaters’ in-game movement speed to make them sitting ducks, because it impacted the experience too much for normal players. Maybe if cheaters just, IDK, stopped cheating, then we could have nice things. Until then, cheaters will be battling against figments of their imaginations.