Ah, cheating. It is as old as time itself; from the first moment any kind of human competition existed, there was a desire to perform better than others — and for some, that meant doing it at any cost. From a gaming perspective, it’s far more colloquially known as hacking. And in shooters, it is especially infuriating.
That is why I am tickled to read about counter-measures that do more than simply ban a suspected dillweed – inconveniencing and infuriating the party who is partaking in the ass-hattery delights me greatly. So it is with great relish that I read a development blog from #TeamRICOCHET where they lay out their fiendish methods of douchebag detecting dickery.
#TeamRICOCHET is thrilled to share with the community several updates to RICOCHET including the Hallucination decoy and In-Game Reporting, live in Call of Duty #Warzone and #MWII
RICOCHET Anti-Cheat Report 👉 https://t.co/LdE2ouEvTb pic.twitter.com/j8YLY0kBYD
— Call of Duty (@CallofDuty) June 29, 2023
Known as ‘Mitigations’, these in-game mutators can alter the experience of a specific player within the game world. Some of them are fairly straightforward, like a disarm effect that strips them of their weapons or simply rendering legitimate players invisible to the cheating party – but a far more entertaining one is being implemented soon: Hallucinations.
The tech behind the hallucinated party is quite neat – they are not a bot or AI driven presence in the game. Rather they are a clone of another player within the match, echoing their movement and actions to really sell the illusion that they are just another human body doing stuff. The cool part is that the way they are presented provides all the usual tasty hooks that third-party advantages like to latch on to, such as parsing location information (wall hacks/player location data) and player damage locations (for aim hack goodies).
For developers, this is a fun way to observe a cheater (or suspected cheater) and both gather information, or outright nail the case closed on them being a scumbag. Many titles that struggle with cheating employ a fairly basic loop of player reporting and investigation, which has a high turn around and means that the offending party gets to flaunt their game ruining powers across a ton of player hours – hardly ideal. Other games might have a throttle on reports that means a threshold of received notifications will automatically restrict or ban a player – a system that is ripe for abuse. Having tools like the Mitigations can be a great tool to gather further information a lot more rapidly – especially if data collection is clever enough to provide some hard facts on how the suspected party interacted with one of these phantoms.
Early hallucinations involved spawning fake players that only existed within geometry – meaning wall/aimhax would be trying to track an impossible target
If this is fascinating to you, they have actually provided the full whitepaper research document that was presented at GDC in 2023. It gives a super comprehensive look behind the entire concept and implementation process – including some humorous examples of the hallucinations in action. There is even some research on how they performed against some well known cheat programs (no, they are not named or linked to) which is funny to think that someone has the job description of Cheat/Hack Tester within the Dev team.
I am sure some cheat developers are scrutinising over this document for clues as to how to try and circumvent the mitigations as we speak – but in reality every layer of difficulty presented to them is welcome, because why the heck not. It’s not like they are making it easy for the regular players who just wanna get their game on.
Expect to see these mitigations in action during the Season 4 content update for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II. Although I sincerely hope you are only seeing them in humorous YouTube videos – not in person. That would be very naughty.
How do you feel about fun fakery for cheaters? Let us know in the comments or on social media.
