Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 deploys decoy ‘hallucinations’ against cheats

Call of Duty’s cheat police, who go by the moniker Team Ricochet, have revealed a particularly inventive new anti-cheat measure: “hallucinations” of imaginary players that only cheaters can see.

As explained in Team Ricochet’s latest blog, these hallucinations are decoy characters that can only be detected by cheaters, but are undetectable by legitimate players. To the cheaters, though, they look and behave like real players on the opposing team; they’re not AI characters, but clones of another active user in the match, mimicking that player’s movement. The clones also look real to any cheat software or hardware being used. This allows the player cheating to get all of the information that they need.

It’s a creative and technically impressive way of disorienting and distracting cheaters within a game, but you might find yourself asking: Why bother? Why not simply ban or kick out the cheater from the game and call it a day?

Team Ricochet explain that the hallucinations are deployed as “mitigations” — “in-game roadblocks” that mess with cheaters and prevent them impacting the games of others, while Team Ricochet observes the hapless cheats and gathers data which can help the anti-cheat squad stay ahead of the latest technology. Essentially, they’re turned from a nuisance into a useful lab rat (before subsequently being banned from the game).

Hallucinations are also a great way to verify and detect cheaters. If Team Ricochet suspects a player of cheating, they can place a hallucination near them that’s only visible to their cheat tools. If the player then interacts with the cloned hallucination in any way, they’ve just “self-identified” as a cheater, in a poetic self-own.

It is frustrating and difficult to combat cheats, but this often leads to some creative solutions. Team Ricochet’s hallucinations join an anti-cheat hall of fame that includes the secret Dota 2, “honeypot” that lured 40,000 cheaters to their doom; Fall Guys’ hellish “cheater island”, which condemned cheaters to only matchmake with other cheaters; and fake cheat software for Counter-Strike Global OffensiveThe show humiliated cheaters with a slapstick comedy by having them explode or disappear from the map.

It is possible to have too much pleasure punishing cheaters. Team Ricochet explained that it had stopped using another mitigation it called “quicksand”, which would slow the movement of cheating players, making them sitting ducks, as well as randomly altering their input settings. It was “a fun mitigation to deploy against bad actors,” the team said, but it could also be distracting and just plain weird for legitimate players to see the cheats suddenly moving at half-speed and behaving erratically.

Since their aim is for legitimate players’ experience to be completely undisturbed, Team Ricochet let quicksand go — with what seems to me, despite the very professional tone of their blog, some regret. Now that’s true heroism in the name of the war on cheats.