Call of Duty trolls cheaters with imaginary enemies

Is that person in the room with us right now?

Activision has implemented a “Mitigation” called “Hallucination” in Call Of Duty. “Mitigation” is the tacticool name that Team Ricochet, COD’s anti-cheating department, gives to measures that identify and reduce cheating. Hallucination spawns imaginary enemies in the field of view of cheaters. These keep them busy while innocent players get to shoot each other up.

Regarding Hallucination’s decoys, Ricochet says they “are undetectable by legitimate players, and they cannot impact a legitimate player’s aim, progression, end of match stats or overall gameplay experience, but serve to disorient cheaters in a variety of ways”.

If you’re a cheater, the decoys will act just like real players and also look like real players in the cheater’s software of choice. The game places these decoys near suspicious players, so those who shoot at them will immediately out themselves as cheaters.

Why not just ban cheaters outright?

Team Ricochet bans many cheaters every day, but that’s not the most productive action to take in all situations. Cheating tech is constantly evolving, and sometimes it’s best to learn about the cheats involved before taking radical action. Mitigations allow innocents to play undisturbed and keep cheaters at bay while gathering important data.

Also, and this is just my opinion, this is a valid companion to banning because it is hilarious. I just can’t pretend to not love it when cheaters unwittingly turn into the equivalent of a dumb MGSV guard when they signed up to play as Snake.

Activision is no stranger to trolling cheaters. The company had previously made innocent players invisible in the eyes of cheaters, pitted suspected cheaters against each other, made the weapons of cheaters fire only blanks, and even removed weapons from the hands of cheaters — while also preventing them from using melee combat. Still, this Mitigation that feels straight out of Uncharted 3’s Djinn-induced trip might just take the cake anti-cheating cake.

Tiago Manuel

Tiago is a freelancer who used to write about video games, cults, and video game cults. He now writes for Destructoid in an attempt to find himself on the winning side when the robot uprising comes.

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