Activision is tormenting Call of Duty cheaters

[Jonn]

This has to do with computers, so I am posting it here.
If there is a better place, plz inform.

Activision is tormenting Call of Duty cheaters in order to study them, stealing their weapons and turning their enemies invisible​

By Tyler Wilde
published April 05, 2023
Call of Duty's anti-cheat team has shared demonstrations of the cheater "mitigations" we learned about last year.

Call of Duty's Ricochet Anti-Cheat system doesn't always ban suspected Warzone and Modern Warfare 2 cheaters on sight. Sometimes, it keeps them around, but makes their efforts to cheat futile by applying "mitigations." For example, a mitigation called Damage Shield "disables the cheater's ability to inflict critical damage on other players" so that, no matter how hard they try, they will never score a kill.


When we first heard about mitigations last year, the Ricochet team mentioned that there were others aside from Damage Shield, and today the developers shared three videos demonstrating Call of Duty cheating mitigations currently in use. Along with Damage Shield, suspected cheaters may be subjected to Disarm, which causes weapons to vanish, and Cloak, which turns enemies invisible.

Disarm, which you can see in the video embedded at the top of this article, is the funniest to me. In the demo, the player tries to switch from a sniper rifle to their sidearm, but instead they just put the rifle away and face their enemy with empty hands. It might look like a bug the first time, but after a few times I imagine it dawns on victims that they've been got.

Activision is tormenting Call of Duty cheaters in order to study them, stealing their weapons and turning their enemies invisible

Call of Duty's anti-cheat team has shared demonstrations of the cheater "mitigations" we learned about last year.

www.pcgamer.com

 

[Misery]

Normally I dont like most of the things that Activision does, but this? Oh yeah, I can get behind this.

Just booting cheaters out of games usually doesnt do much of anything, simply because it's very fast to quickly click their way back in. But on the other hand, you dont really want to fully ban them if you can avoid it. So what do you do? You make the cheating become, well, like the opposite of a traditional cheat-code. Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start. But instead of getting extra lives and all the options, your ship explodes. Or in this case your weapons might turn into chickens or something.

Or you could do something like that indestructible scorpion thing from Serious Sam. Granted that was an anti-piracy thing, not an anti-cheating thing, but still, it'd have the same effect. Just spawn an indestructible super fast nightmare that specifically goes bonkers at whoever has been caught cheating and cant hurt anyone else at all.

 

[Jonn]

Or in this case your weapons might turn into chickens or something.

 

[Bolletje]

I had a good laugh when I read about this.

 

[Jonn]

I had a good laugh when I read about this.

A bit of schadenfreude is warranted.

"Hacking" and cheating have always been a problem in multiplayer.
I have read recently that 1 in 3 ppl cheat in First Person Shooter games these days.
This is why I no longer play multiplayer on the PC.

There is talk about using AI down the line to counter cheating.

 

[Brictoria]

I play "Rust" (on a PVE server - I enjoy the building and "exploring" portion of the game, not so much the PVP combat), but watching the videos from some of the admins on the PVP servers and what they do to cheaters there can be interesting.

The main one whose videos I occasionally watch on youtube (Camomo_10) has a number of ways to torment the cheaters (one of which is "reflecting damage" so when they do damage to someone, they take that damage themselves) and he often sits them down in-game to ask why they cheat, with some interesting responces to the questions... His aim is to prevent them harming the game for other players on that server, but at the same time to keep them on he server as long as possible to prevent them causing problems on other servers for other players there.

I can see AI being useful for countering some forms of cheating in these types of games, but I don't see it as being a "one stop shop" to prevent such actions, sadly: It may even end up being integrated into cheats for some games.

 

[Jonn]

I play "Rust" (on a PVE server - I enjoy the building and "exploring" portion of the game,

Well, if it is good enough for you, it is worth looking into.

 

[Brictoria]

Well, if it is good enough for you, it is worth looking into.

It's an "interesting" game - It requires more time investment than "Call of Duty" style games as it's a "survival", rather than "arena" type game, so each round can last from a week up to a month (when updates are made and servers reset), depending on which server you are playing on... It also has some of the more "toxic" players - often children - around, and can be difficult to get a handle on how to play\get a start.

My interest in the game is dropping off at the moment, so I'm probably going to take a break from it - With the "Fleet week" for star Citizen starting next weekend, I'll likely be focussing my game time there...