Call of Duty deploys phantom players to mess with cheats

pcgamesn.com:

Call of Duty cheats ruin the fun. There’s nothing that makes me want to put the game down and go touch grass quite so immediately as someone in my Modern Warfare 2 or Warzone 2 lobby who’s clearly aimbotting or wallhacking, picking off players with inhuman speed and rocketing up the leaderboard. It’s a blight on all the best FPS games, but Activision’s anti-cheat crew Team Ricochet has a fun new way to deal with them.

“Cheating in videogames such as Call of Duty is big business, and the technology behind cheats is constantly evolving,” Team Ricochet says. In recent times, the team has taken an interesting approach to counteract these troublemakers: rather than immediately booting them out, they’re left in-game but with their experience hindered.

“Allowing cheaters to remain in the game in a mitigated state provides us with intel,” Team Ricochet explains, “while keeping cheaters occupied, in the dark, and unable to harm your in-game experience.” This means they won’t be able to ruin your lobbies, and the developers can continue to gather data about these players and how they are hacking, which can then be analyzed to help improve the ability to reliably detect others using similar tools.

It seems to be working, too; Team Ricochet reports that “In Modern Warfare 2 we mitigated four players for every one report.” Meaning that the Ricochet detection tools are able to shut down three cheaters before they can negatively impact other players for every one that slips through the net and gets player-reported. However, there are some changes in the works as to exactly how these ‘mitigations’ are implemented.

In the past, a tool called ‘Quicksand’ would deliberately mess with the controls of players detected to be using cheats.