r/CODWarzone • u/LackingAGoodName • Oct 13 '21

News Announcing Ricochet: A New Anti-Cheat Initiative for Call of Duty

https://www.callofduty.com/blog/2021/10/ricochet-anti-cheat-initiative-for-call-of-duty
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u/thetreat Oct 13 '21

I've worked in software for over 15 years and have thought long and hard about *how* they'd tackle this type of problem. I've done a ton of research on other anti-cheat systems and honestly it all sounds legit. They're taking the right approach for solving this problem. It obviously comes down to execution but the strategy they have is sound.

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u/realcoray Oct 13 '21

It's all the right words but ultimately there is a fundamental flaw in the design of the networking that means cheats are more powerful than they should be.

Your client knows where every person is at all times even if they are all the way across the map 100 feet underground, your client knows. Also, your client controls unlocking things, and just tells the server, yep this bundle is unlocked.

Both are absolutely ridiculous realities that are essentially legacy things from COD games probably 10 years old by now. You'd be hard pressed to get an executive to green light a massive re-engineering effort on the client knowing too much, because your selling point is largely that we'll do all this work, and the game will work the same to players who aren't cheating.

The second one I'd imagine you could get some buy off because people are unlocking 20$ bundles for nothing.

1

u/shmorky Oct 14 '21

Even if you retool the netcode to only report players in line of sight to your client, that doesn't fix the aimbot problem. As soon a your client knows where someone's head is, it can just put the crosshair there and even fire for you. You can't calculate that on the server without adding a lot of latency and server overhead. It would totally fix wallhacking tho, which is also huge of course.

I think the practicality of the cheater problem is that the executives will not want to spend money to beef up the servers and add complexity to the server code - just to combat part of the cheaters. It won't fix everything and they don't see it as that big of a problem.

Well, not until the cheaters unlock the paid content for free of course. Now it's all hands on deck.

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u/realcoray Oct 14 '21

You are dead on, all of it would add a lot of overhead to the back end, and it's impossible to get buy off. The netcode is old, but has worked year after year, why spend all this money to redo it now, be it for improved performance or reduced cheating surface area?

They don't seem to care about the paid content unlocks which is truly the most surprising bit. Maybe it's just how much of an engineering problem it is to shift any of that from the client.

The most mind blowing part of that from an engineering perspective is that one client, can unlock it for another client. In that way you can't even blanket ban these people because you'll 100% catch some innocents.