Call of Duty Adds Creative New Anti-Cheat System to Anger Cheaters

Call of Duty has added a creative new anti-cheat system to anger hackers. Call of Duty is a massive, massive franchise and it has suffered plenty of hits to its reputation from broken releases, lackluster titles, and perhaps most unfortunately, lots and lots of cheaters. Typically, the cheaters tend to swarm a Call of Duty game like a pack of cockroaches after the majority of the player base has moved on to the next game in the series and Activision stops supporting it, but that has changed in recent years. Cheating became quite prominent when crossplay was introduced in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Call of Duty: Warzone. There have been attempts to squash out these problems, even going as far as adding a new anti-cheat system in 2021, but it still hasn't completely resolved things.

With that said, Activision can't catch every hacker or cheater simply given how big the player base is and how determined cheaters are to slip under the radar. So, to counter this, Activision has tried to find ways to constantly aggravate the hackers. If Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 or Call of Duty: Warzone 2 detects you're cheating/hacking, it will create "hallucinations" which are mimics of players who are already in the game. It's essentially a body double of a real person, except somewhere else in the game. So, if they have aimbot, they'll lock on to this mimic and attack them, but nothing will actually happen. This is designed to anger the player, as they'll keep attacking people who don't really exist and hopefully, get frustrated and leave. 

Activision says they built these Mitigation methods like Hallucinations because it helps piss off cheaters who are trying to use additional, banned tools in game.

Hallucinations can also trigger people's aimbot in game, meaning a hacker using aimbot will think it's a real player pic.twitter.com/2KDLnsZgE5

— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) June 29, 2023

New Ricochet method: Hallucinations

This method displays extra operators in game – not AI operators, but a mimic of a current in-game player – only for cheaters to see and make them believe there's players in areas where they are not.

Hallucinations look like real players to… pic.twitter.com/UVuAjTEcD6

— CharlieIntel (@charlieINTEL) June 29, 2023

If their account does get banned for cheating, these kinds of things will dissuade them from returning with a new account to cheat some more. Of course, if you're not cheating, you won't see these things. It's a fascinating solution to getting rid of cheaters. If they somehow slip through the cracks of the enforcement team, they can still get screwed over within the game. So much so, they may actually just quit the game.

What do you think of Call of Duty's new anti-cheat solution? Let me know in the comments or hit me up on Twitter @Cade_Onder.