Call of Duty gets into psychological warfare as new anti-cheat tech plagues hackers with 'hallucinations'

pcgamer.com:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hackers are losing it, man. Team Ricochet, the cadre of COD devs with the unenviable task of foiling the game's many cheaters, has put out an update detailing a new bit of anti-cheat tech. It's called Hallucinations and, well, it does exactly what its name suggests.

«Hallucinations place decoy characters within the game that can only be detected by cheaters that have been specifically flagged by [Team Ricochet's] system,» reads the update. They can't be seen by legitimate players, but «serve to disorient cheaters in a variety of ways».

Essentially, these hallucinations are clones of someone else in the match, «mimicking their movement to trick a cheater into believing the character they see is a real-life player». Even more cunning, the hallucinatory players will still spit out the kind of information that hackers can pick up using «nefarious tools,» making it «impossible for cheaters to know at first glance which is real». 

It's some real Wile E. Coyote stuff: Duping hackers into expending their energy hunting down fakes while polite society continues on with its match of MW2 or Warzone.

There's an obvious question here: Why not just ban cheaters outright instead of playing elaborate mind games with them? Well, first off, I think that sounds much less fun, but Team Ricochet says that, because COD cheats are a «big business» that's «constantly evolving,» they need ways to keep on top of how cheaters are changing things up. 

«Allowing cheaters to remain in the game in a mitigated state provides #TeamRICOCHET with intel, while keeping cheaters occupied, in the dark, and unable to harm your in-game experience,» says the COD anti-cheat team. The data the team gathers as cheaters fruitlessly