Cheating in video games has turned into a multi-billon dollar industry, one that has forced franchises like Call of Duty to build entire teams to combat this epidemic. One of the people leading the charge is a man named David Andrews, a former Department of Defense contractor and member of the Air Force who made the leap into the video game industry. He began this career change working at Rockstar Games, helping combat cheating in Grand Theft Auto Online. Last year, he made the jump to Activision to become the Senior Director of Game Security for Call of Duty.
IGN had the opportunity to sit down with Andrews and peel back the layers on Call of Duty's anti-cheat system, Ricochet. Andrews disspelled myths about Call of Duty's anti-cheat, offered clarity on the process of how they investigate suspected cheaters, how they've hired cheater makers to combat the problem, and much more. It's a rare opportunity, as there's a lot of caution around publicly speaking about anti-cheat in gaming. If you say too much, you could inadvertedly give cheaters a heads-up on how to evade detective, after all.
With that said, we drilled down on Call of Duty's long running issue with cheaters in an attempt to make it less mysterious. It's an important subject ahead of Modern Warfare 4's release in October and something Activision is working hard to spotlight.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
IGN: Before we dive specifically into Call of Duty, tell me the difference between working on Grand Theft Auto Online, Red Dead Online, and Call of Duty, because one's obviously hyper-competitive, while Grand Theft Auto is a completely different ecosystem.
David Andrews: I think the interesting pivot for me is that the GTA Online gameplay loop is very different. Same thing for Red Dead Online, and that's where cheat developers tend to go. They're trying to shortcut whatever that gameplay loop is for their customers. And so on GTA and Red Dead, it was much more about economic progress within the world. So we had problems with money drop lobbies and things like that in the old bad days on GTA Online, which we did eventually fix. The nature of the cheating is different there. In terms of the impact and the disruption that it can cause to the players, very similar.
[There are] persistent online sessions in GTA Online versus rolling lobbies on Call of Duty. A cheater that goes undetected for too long is going to have an impact no matter what that is. There was also lots of griefing in GTA Online powered by cheats and things like that. As different as the core gameplay loops are between the two games, and you could probably say this about anything across the industry, cheating is still just ultimately super disruptive. It's a terrible experience. It's bad for our players, and the mission is always just to try to prevent as many of them as we can from getting into the game and then get them out as quickly as we can for those that make it through.
IGN: Is there something that companies can do together to solve these issues? I saw you last night talking about Wardogs and their approach. Everyone has a different strategy, but is there anything the industry can collectively do?
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/call-of-dutys-anti-cheat-boss-dispels-cheating-myths-breaks-down-review-process-and-more
