Call of Duty Employs Clones of Real Players to Combat Cheaters

Activision has implemented various strategies in its ongoing struggle against Call of Duty cheaters, ranging from obstructing their ability to spot targets to confiscating their weapons. The most recent action taken by the developers is among the initial measures aimed at countering Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2.0 hackers who employ prohibited tools, such as wallhacks, to gain an unfair advantage by acquiring additional information.

When Activision’s systems detect or suspect cheaters, a “hallucination” can be activated. These do not affect legitimate players at all and are designed to disrupt hackers. Here’s the really neat part: According to the Ricochet anti-cheat team, each hallucination is a clone of a real player in the match. Hallucinations move, look, and interact with the world just like the player would do to trick cheaters into thinking they’ve faced a real opponent.

Ricochet says cheaters can’t tell a hallucination from a real player at first glance (the team notes that the image above shows one hallucination and one real player). Hallucinations transmit the same kind of hidden information that cheaters get from legitimate players through their illegal tools. Hallucinations are also used near suspected cheaters. If the shadowy-looking player interacts with the hallucinations at all, then boom, he’s posing as a hacker.

On the other hand, Ricochet has finished one of his hack mitigations. It was called Quicksand, and oddly enough, it slowed Call of Duty cheats or froze them in place. It can also mess with their monitoring system. An updated version of Quicksand may be added in the future, but it’s on the shelf for now.

“While Quicksand was a fun mitigation against bad Casters, it could also be visually confusing for anyone in the lobby,” the Call of Duty blog post reads. “Imagine facing an enemy that moved at a snail’s pace in the middle of your rotation out of a hot zone. It could trip you up.”

At the same time, Ricochet provided an update on its efforts to limit the use of XIM-type controllers used by fraudsters. “In the first two weeks since this detection was launched, we saw a 59 percent drop in usage of these devices in Modern Warfare II and Warzone,” Team Ricochet wrote. “Of these users, 57 percent did not use the device again.” Persistent users of such devices will be penalized, the anti-cheat team pointed out.