Call of Duty anti-cheat software makes potential cheaters ‘hallucinate’

Team Ricochet shows alleged cheaters in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 enemies that aren’t actually there. In this way, data can be collected and possibly confirmed whether a player is indeed using cheat software.

The Ricochet core anti-cheating software for the Call of Duty games allows suspected cheaters to see a copy of a legitimate player, invisible to others. This ‘hallucination’ is only visible to the cheater and primarily causes the player to become disoriented and thus unable to hinder legitimate players. At the same time, it would be a way to catch an alleged cheater in the act, because aimbots, wallhacks and other cheats must also target these copies. The data that Team Ricochet collects from interacting with copies helps identify other cheaters with the same software.

Hallucinating a potential cheater is according to Team Ricochet one of the new ways to identify cheaters and gather information about the software and player used. The anti-cheat developer calls this a mitigation; cheaters are not immediately banned but are disadvantaged and hindered in various ways. The developer also removed a mitigation called Quicksand. This involved slowing down a cheater and sometimes arbitrary controls were adjusted. On the other hand, this would be too distracting for legitimate players.

Other mitigations that are still actively used against cheaters in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 are Damage Shield, where the cheater’s weapons do hardly any damage, Cloaking, where legitimate players become invisible to the cheater, and Disarm, where cheaters’ weapons suddenly disappear. Team Ricochet writes that all these measures are intended to make life difficult for a cheater, but not to hinder legitimate players.

And that would work well; For every report that players made of a cheater in Modern Warfare II, another three accounts were detected using similar software. So, aside from hindering and tormenting cheaters, Team Ricochet would actually generate useful data from players that can be monitored more closely through mitigations without affecting legitimate players. The company does not mention absolute figures.