Call Of Duty implements hallucinations to mitigate cheaters with the latest version of Ricochet

June 30 (Portaltic/EP) –

Activision has announced a new update to its Ricochet anti-fraud system to Call Of Duty, which in its latest iteration introduces hallucinations, that is, it places decoy characters within the game that can only be detected by cheating players to disorient them.

The Warzone team implemented this anti-cheat system in December 2021, which detects and deactivates offending accounts and thanks to which they have on occasion recognized having detected “a significant drop” of in-game cheats.

During these months the company has been implementing different tools to mitigate cheating. Among them, the so-called damage shield, which disables the ability of these players to inflict damage on other players, but keeps them exposed to enemy fire.

Another of Ricochet’s outstanding techniques is ‘Cloaking’, which consists of concealing the opponents from those players who are cheating during games. That way, the characters, bullets, and sound of legitimate players become imperceptible to cheaters.

call of duty has announced now a new update of this system, which has introduced the so-called hallucinations. This method consists of placing decoy characters within the game that can only be detected by cheaters that the system has previously flagged.

“These fake characters They are undetectable to legitimate players and cannot affect a legitimate player’s aiming, progress, end-of-match stats, or gameplay experience, but they do serve to mislead cheaters in a number of ways.”

Decoy players are not based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), but instead are a clone of an active user in the game, so it mimics their movements to fool cheaters into thinking that the character they see is from a player from the real life.

The company has also explained that, although its team of developers “is continually working on new systems and detections to hinder cheaters”, sometimes unwanted results occur.

It is the case of Quicksand, a mitigation that would slow or freeze the movement of detected cheaters in-game, making them easy targets. Regarding this measure, Call of Duty has recognized that “although it was fun to implement it against bad actors, it could also be visually jarring” for any other player, so it finally dismissed it.