The new update for Call of Duty’s anti-cheat system Ricochet has an ingenious way to spoil the fun for cheaters. In future, anyone who cheats will see non-existent opponents.
Nobody likes to play with cheaters – especially not in shooters, where cheaters are a particularly persistent problem. To protect its players from cheaters, Activision relies on the in-house anti-cheat system Ricochet
in the current titles of the popular Call of Duty series, including Modern Warfare 2.
With the latest update, the developers of Ricochet have come up with a particularly nasty method to make it as difficult as possible for users of cheat software to play the game: Hallucinations
How exactly does it work?
In a (current blogpost) the Ricochet team recently announced the latest changes to the anti-cheat system. In the post, the developers talk mainly about measures they call “mitigations”. These are ways and means to put as many obstacles as possible in the way of cheaters in a running round.
This can be done in several ways; such as taking away weapons from verified cheaters, making other players invisible to the cheaters, or slowing the cheaters down as if they were on quicksand.
The latest of these mitigation measures is simply called Hallucination and does pretty much what the name promises. It creates ghost opponents that are only visible to the cheater and behave exactly like real players.
Even cheat software is said to be confused by the hallucinations, so cheaters will then be more concerned with shooting ghosts than normal, honest players. For them, the ghosts are simply invisible. Many a cheater will soon doubt his sanity.
Why not just banish them?
By applying such “soft” anti-cheat measures, developers can collect data about the cheaters, for example, find out what cheating software they use and how it works.
This makes it possible to develop countermeasures in the long term and to exclude cheaters from Call of Duty in the future from the outset. If cheaters were banned immediately, it would not be possible to siphon off this valuable data.
What do you think of the new cheater defence in Call of Duty? Are you convinced by the Ricochet system or do you think that such measures are in vain? Feel free to let us know in the comments.
