‘Call of Duty’ cheaters caught out by hallucinations in latest update

30 June, 2023

Activision has announced an unusual strategy for identifying Call of Duty Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 cheaters in its latest Ricochet development, which will cause cheaters to hallucinate enemy players.

In a recent blog post, the team detailed various methods that it is using to sort legitimate players from those spoiling the matches for everyone else. According to the article, maintaining a minor level of cheating in Call of Duty is helpful for Activision as it allows the team to harvest data on these players’ antics and boot them out before a player has to report them to the community managers.

Hallucinations attempt to address “non-rage” hackers through clones of active players in the same match as them. Therefore, the hallucination acts like a real player, copying their movements, and there’s no way for the cheater to discern the difference between a hallucination and a real player.

Call of Duty’s hallucination decoys in effect CREDIT: Activision

It even “triggers the same information that cheaters would have access to using nefarious tools” on the hallucination, “revealing unique data to make them appear legitimate” and will be registered by aimbots as a target.

If a player is suspected of using cheating software, the team will place a hallucination near them. Seeing that these clones only show up to those using external tools, should the player react and start firing, then the Ricochet team has found its cheater.

“Mitigation triggers do not consider you having the best game of your life as an abnormality,” reassured Activision. “Similarly, if a wave of people submits malicious in-game reports about you, those reports can’t activate mitigations without additional corroboration. These processes do not function together in that way — and there’s a long list of ways we detect cheaters in real-time.”

Cheating is not a unique issue to Call of Duty, however, competitor Escape From Tarkov has been back and forth on its stance deciding whether datamining for upcoming updates is a bannable offence.

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