Team Ricochet shows alleged cheaters in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 enemies that aren’t actually there. In this way, data can be collected and it may be possible to confirm whether a player is indeed using cheating software.
The Ricochet core anti-cheat software for the Call of Duty games shows alleged cheaters an invisible copy of a legitimate player. This ‘hallucination’ is visible only to the cheater and primarily disorients the player so that he cannot interfere with legitimate players. At the same time, it would be a way to catch an alleged cheater in the act, because aimbots, wallhacks and other cheats should also work on these copies. The data that Team Ricochet collects from the interaction with copies helps to identify other cheaters with the same software.
Hallucinating a potential cheater is one of the new ways to identify cheaters and gather information about the software and player used, according to Team Ricochet . The anti-cheat developer calls this a mitigation; cheaters are not immediately banned but are disadvantaged and hindered in various ways. The developer also removed a mitigation called Quicksand. This slowed down a cheater and sometimes random controls were adjusted. This, on the other hand, would be too distracting for legitimate players.
Other mitigations that are still known to be actively used against cheaters in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Warzone 2 are Damage Shield where the cheater’s weapons deal minimal damage, Cloaking where legitimate players become invisible to the cheater, and Disarm where the weapons of cheaters suddenly disappear. Team Ricochet writes that all these measures are intended to make a cheater’s life miserable, but not to interfere with legitimate players.
And that would work well; for every report of a cheater reported by players in Modern Warfare II, three more accounts would have been detected with similar software. Apart from harassing and tormenting cheaters, Team Ricochet would actually generate useful data from players that could be more closely monitored by mitigations without affecting legitimate players. The company does not mention absolute figures.
