Cheating has always been an issue — it’s just a reality of competition. In the world of video games, however, it can become a surprisingly pronounced problem, especially when third-party software or hacking comes into play. Online multiplayer on PC is especially vulnerable to this sort of approach, forcing developers to find better ways to identify cheaters and force them to face consequences for their actions.
Banning players for cheating is a common response, but I think Call of Duty‘s Ricochet system might actually be way better — and more entertaining. The system doles out some pretty funny mid-game consequences for players when it spots them cheating, flipping the script in some pretty effective ways. The funniest one I’ve seen just happened in a streamed game of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, and I wish more games would go similar routes when messing with cheaters, as it effectively flips any trolling efforts they’ve made right on their head.
Anti-cheating tech has gotten more inventive over the years, keeping up with efforts by certain players to game the system — with the latest tech potentially being the funniest way to do so I’ve seen to date. While Activision’s Ricochet system has some trouble dealing with all the hackers out there who have found ways to break the shooter, one Black Ops 7 match saw a cheater lose their guns midway through a firefight. While livestreaming a playback of a Black Ops 7 match, former pro player Christopher Duarte saw a player suddenly lose their gun in the middle of the match — with the firearm literally disappearing from the player’s hands. This left Duarte cracking up over the missing weapon while hopping around other players.
Ricochet took my opponents guns away mid game yesterday. Dudes have been cheating all season and swear up and down they don’t but there it is 
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Call of Duty publisher Activision later confirmed that this wasn’t a glitch but the result of the Ricochet system catching the player cheating. As a result, the tech revoked his weapons, leaving him in the game with no means of survival or victory. This is far from the first time Ricochet has messed with the gameplay experience as a means of exposing cheaters, with previous updates resulting in those kinds of players being isolated in lobbies or sent falling to their in-game deaths. However, actually stripping players of their weapons and leaving them to scramble in the match might be the funniest method I’ve seen yet.
There’s always going to be efforts by some players to break whatever system they’re operating in. Especially in the modern era, where third-party hardware is readily available and coding knowledge is widespread, it’s going to be inevitable that a certain type of player is going to do their best to break the rules to gain the best advantage. In the past, the move seemed to be to ban those players from online play — but even those methods are imperfect, as dummy accounts can be set up to allow those players to keep ruining the experience for everyone else.
Ricochet’s ability to flip the script on the cheaters and ruin their experience is a much more rewarding result to see. Sometimes, the tech causes players to not be able to do damage to other players or makes them effectively intangible for the rest of the match — incapable of getting kills and using their tech to their advantage. Seeing a player suddenly lose their weapons in the middle of a firefight is the funniest option, though, especially in the moment where the cheater looks around and realizes what’s happened. It’s the kind of thing I want to see put into practice on a larger scale. In games like Call of Duty, having their weapons malfunction or disappear is a great idea — imagine expanding it so that all their grenades suddenly set off while on their body or an air strike is instantly called on their location. It doesn’t necessarily break the game for everyone else, but it does point out the player who has been exposed as a cheater.
This is the sort of style I want to see in other games, too. Imagine a MOBA like League of Legends where, if someone is caught cheating by Riot Vanguard, they suddenly find themselves alone on a team against every other player. Or think about the vindication players could feel if, while playing a fighting game like Street Fighter 6, a cheating player suddenly finds themselves only doing a minuscule fraction of damage with each successful hit while taking massive damage from even the slightest tap. Just ending the online match and throwing out the cheater is the standard approach to exposing cheaters, especially if it means consequences for their account. However, especially given how often cheaters cross over with online trolls in multiplayer spaces, getting a little payback with some ridiculous turn of events feels far more vindicating.
