Activision has been battling against "Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare 2" cheaters and hackers, who are gaining an unfair advantage in the game through illegal means.
Because of this, Activision added a string of tactics in its game series, making cheaters unable to see targets and simply taking away their guns from them.
Call of Duty Anti-Cheat Measures
The Call of Duty's anti-cheat department, Team Ricochet, has launched a deep dive regarding new and shelved mitigations to lessen cheaters and hackers in its game series.
According to Game Rant, the latest update to the Ricochet Anti-Cheat system features setting out "hallucinations" that will disorient cheaters and hackers.
Once the system detects these cheaters or hackers, these "hallucinations" or ghost players will be deployed to confuse them. This measure will not impact legitimate players as it was designed only to disorient cheaters and hackers.
Each hallucination will be a clone of a real player in the match. Like a human player, this "ghost player" will move, look, and interact with the world to trick the hackers into thinking they have encountered a genuine opponent.
At first glance, Team Ricochet noted that cheaters would not see any difference between a hallucination and a genuine player. This newly added measure will also release the same information that cheaters would have access to using iniquitous tools, revealing unique data to make them appear legitimate.
According to the team, these hallucinations can be hidden and positioned anywhere near a suspicious player. The team said the hallucination would force these suspicious players to self-identify as a cheater once they engage with the ghost character in any way.
The team added that the character model shows "legitimate data when viewed in cheats and will also trigger things like aimbots." If these cheaters continue to use prohibited tools for additional in-game information that will give them an unfair advantage against other players, it will result in account bans that could be permanent.
Based on its updated report, the team said it is continuously working on new systems and detections to impede cheaters and hackers. The team will remain committed to gameplay integrity, as they described it as "unwavering," and will utilize every tool available to keep the experience fun and fair.
Previous Mitigations
The Ricochet team has admitted that some of their anti-cheat ideas also yield unintended results, and Quicksand was among them. Engadget reported that Quicksand would slow down a Call of Duty cheater, freeze them in place, and even mess with their control scheme.
However, Team Richochet noted that while Quicksand was a fun mitigation to deploy against bad actors, it could also be very visually annoying to anyone in the lobby.
"Imagine coming upon an enemy that was moving at a snail's pace in the middle of your rotation out of a hot zone. It could trip you up," the team said.
Quicksand is on the shelf for now, but the team could still add an updated version of it in the future.
