2023-07-01 05:57:03
It is almost certain to be a violation of five different international treaties.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hackers are freaking out. Team Ricochet, the team of COD developers who have the unenviable task of thwarting the game’s many cheaters, have released an update detailing new anti-cheat technology. It’s called Hallucinations and does exactly what its name suggests.
“Hallucinations place decoy characters in-game that can only be detected by cheaters who have been specifically flagged by the (Team Ricochet) system,” the update reads. They cannot be seen by legitimate players, but “serve to confuse cheaters in various ways”.
Essentially, these hallucinations are clones of someone else in the game, “mimicking their movements to trick the cheater into thinking the character they’re seeing is an actual player.” Cleverly enough, hallucinated players will still spit out the kind of information hackers can scavenge using ‘malicious tools’, making it ‘impossible for cheaters to tell at first glance who is real’ .
It’s a real Wile E. Coyote trick: Duping hackers into spending their energy hunting down fakes while polite society continues its game of MW2 or Warzone.
An obvious question arises here: Why not ban cheaters outright instead of playing complex mind games with them? First of all, I think it sounds a lot less fun, but Team Ricochet explains that COD cheaters are an ever-changing “big business”, and they need ways to stay on top of how cheaters change things.
“Allowing cheaters to remain in-game in a mitigated state provides #TeamRICOCHET with insight, while keeping cheaters busy, in the dark, and unable to harm your gaming experience,” says the Anti-Cheat Team of COD. The data gathered by the team while the cheaters unsuccessfully chase a bunch of holograms can then be used to bolster anti-cheater efforts in the future. But it’s mostly funny.
In addition to the details regarding Hallucinations, Team Ricochet also mentioned an anti-cheat technology that they decided to put aside. It’s regarding Quicksand, which has the effect of royally messing up the hackers’ controls, so that their characters start moving at half speed or randomly changing their keybinds. It sounds hilarious, but COD’s anti-cheat team said that “while quicksand was a fun mitigation to deploy once morest bad actors, it might also be very visually disturbing to everyone in the lobby.”
“Imagine you come across an enemy moving at snail’s speed in the middle of your rotation out of a hot area. It might trip you up.” That’s a fair point, and so quicksand won’t be part of COD’s anti-cheat efforts going forward, though it’s fun to imagine a random hacker being subjected to the quasi-biblical punishment of being beset by visions and to move inexplicably in reverse.
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