Activision Announces a New Method To Detect Cheaters Called ‘Hallucinations’ in Ricochet Anti-Cheat System

Activision has announced a new update to its Ricochet Anti-Cheat System that is deployed in the Call of Duty games. They’ve added a new mitigation that is used to make cheating difficult for people who use the hacks, while also collecting data to remove them from the game. The latest mitigation to be introduced into the system is ‘Hallucinations’.

‘Hallucinations’ in Call of Duty explained

Hallucinations will place decoy characters, or clones of players active in the game, who can only be detected by the cheaters. In the blogpost, Activision mentions that “these false characters are undetectable by legitimate players”. Therefore, legitimate players have nothing to worry about with their gameplay or performance as the Hallucinations won’t be impacting “a legitimate player’s aim, progression, end of match stats or overall gameplay experience”. They will only disorient the cheaters, or the ones detected to be suspicious players by the system, who will get to see a real-life player in front of them.

Additionally, Activision has now removed Quicksand, another mitigation that slows down or freezes a detected in-game cheater’s movements. It made them easier targets for other players. However, the blog post mentions that Quicksand’s now been put back on the shelf. They explain that the mitigation’s effect on the cheaters often comes across as visually jarring to other players in the lobby.

Other updates

The blogpost also provides an update on the progress they made with their third-party hardware device detection that they introduced earlier in April this year. A 59% drop in the use of these devices has reportedly been detected within the first two weeks of launching the detection system. Of these users 57% users refrained from using the devices, while the other 43% did not. The blog post mentions that these repeat offenders have been penalized.