Call of Duty’s latest anti-cheat measure: hallucinations of imaginary players

polygon.com:

Call of Duty’s cheat police, who go by the moniker Team Ricochet, have revealed a particularly inventive new anti-cheat measure: “hallucinations” of imaginary players that only cheaters can see.

As explained in Team Ricochet’s latest blog, these hallucinations are decoy characters that can only be detected by cheaters, but are undetectable by legitimate players. To the cheaters, though, they look and behave like real players on the opposing team; they’re not AI characters, but clones of another active user in the match, mimicking that player’s movement. They also appear genuine to the cheat hardware and software being used, supplying the cheating player with all the illicit information they would expect.

It’s a creative and technically impressive way of disorienting and distracting cheaters within a game, but you might find yourself asking: Why bother? Why not just kick the cheating player from the game, ban them, and be done with it?

Team Ricochet explain that the hallucinations are deployed as “mitigations” — “in-game roadblocks” that mess with cheaters and prevent them impacting the games of others, while Team Ricochet observes the hapless cheats and gathers data which can help the anti-cheat squad stay ahead of the latest technology. Essentially, they’re turned from a nuisance into a useful lab rat (before subsequently being banned from the game).

Even more deliciously, the hallucinations can be used to detect and verify cheaters. If Team Ricochet suspects a player of cheating, they can place a hallucination near them that’s only visible to their cheat tools. If the player then interacts with the cloned hallucination in any way, they’ve just “self-identified” as a cheater, in a poetic self-own.

Combating cheats is