Outriders Will Watermark Cheater Gameplay


Letting the world know you are a dirty, dirty cheater.

Continue reading “Outriders Will Watermark Cheater Gameplay”

Destiny 2 Now Needs SMS For PvP


To combat cheating.

Continue reading “Destiny 2 Now Needs SMS For PvP”

Hotcakes: Nothing Says Sincere Like An Apology Under Duress


And people making cheats for emotionally stunted manbabies.

Continue reading “Hotcakes: Nothing Says Sincere Like An Apology Under Duress”

Guilt By Association: Bungie May Ban Cheaters Fireteam


Don’t cheat? Tough, you might be hit with the banhammer.

Continue reading “Guilt By Association: Bungie May Ban Cheaters Fireteam”

Apex Legends To Target High Risk Regions, Matchmake Cheaters


Cheating in Apex Legends is for ratfinks, and if Respawn has anything to say about it cheaters will be thrown into a pit where their only company will be other ratfink cheaters. In the latest community update, Respawn gave a list of plans on how it will deal with the cheating that has been going on. Plans include automatic detection and bans of cheaters, as well as matchmaking detected cheaters and spammers together.

  • Using machine learning to create behavior models that detect and auto ban cheaters.
  • Requiring TFA in certain regions on high risk accounts.
  • Improving detection that identifies and bans new spam accounts before they are used.
  • Ongoing work to adapt to new cheats.
  • Matchmaking that matches detected cheaters and spammers together.
  • Investigating how people party up for matches. Even if you are not specifically using a cheat, partying up with cheaters is still cheating.
  • Increasing resources whether that be people or tech.

Don’t cheat in Apex Legends, or any competitive multiplayer game for that matter.

Source: Reddit

The Division Hops On Board The Perma-Ban Train


TheDivision 2016-02-20 09-09-09-82

With Ubisoft announcing just a few days ago that it would be banning permanently banning cheaters in Rainbow Six Siege, the idea that The Division would follow suit was merely an inevitability. In no surprising motion, the developer has announced that the zero-tolerance policy will indeed be making its way to the streets of Manhattan to weed out unruly players.

Just how serious is Ubisoft? Enough to punish more than 30,000 accounts with around 10% of those receiving permanent bans over the past month. Due to a perceived likelihood of recidivism by cheaters, these bans will now be permanent on the first offense.

Following this campaign of suspensions and bans, it also became clear that while huge progress has been made in terms of cheat detection, our 14 days suspension on first offense policy has not been dissuasive enough. Judging from your feedback, and based on what we witnessed when cheaters came back to the game, we have now decided to push our policy one step further: we will now start applying permanent bans on first offense when players are caught using cheat engines and we will communicate clearly when new ban waves are taking place.

It is unlikely that Ubisoft will go as far as Blizzard has with Overwatch cheaters, banning them on subsequent accounts. Cheating has been a major problem on the PC version of The Division going as far back as the beta, with players using programs that modify client-side data to give themselves unlimited health and ammo, among other unfair advantages.

(Source: Ubisoft)

Daybreak Unbanning Cheaters Who Apologize On Youtube


2015-01-16_00028

The first step for a recovering cheater is admitting you have a problem and placing your faith in an almighty benefactor. That benefactor, in this case, is Daybreak Game Company. John Smedley took to Twitter to comment that, after a recent massive ban wave in H1Z1, a large number of players have been emailing him to beg for forgiveness. Instead of asking for Daybreak’s forgiveness, Smedley wants cheaters to ask for the player’s forgiveness. Publicly, via Youtube.

Apologize publicly and you get another chance. Do it again and I hear John Smedley makes you smoke the whole pack of cheats.

With seven thousand ESP hackers banned over the past few days, that’s going to be a lot of Youtube videos.

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

H1Z1 To Cheaters: Thanks For The Donations


2015-01-16_00028

Sony Online Entertainment has an excellent track record on fighting cheaters, to the point where in Planetside 2 many developers have thrown in the towel and given up. H1Z1, currently in early access, is looking to be no different.

SOE senior game designer Jimmy Whisenhunt has posted to his Twitter account regarding a recent wave of bans, thanking the cheaters for their generous donations.

//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

You can follow Whisenhunt on Twitter for further ban announcements.

(Source: Twitter)

Jagex Bans A Laundry List Of Max-Level Players


scaperune2

One criticism I see levied against Jagex on a regular basis is that the company is reluctant to ban long time or high level players who use bots to automate certain aspects of the game. In a recent move against players using automated software, a wave of high level players have been reportedly banned, with the list growing by the hour.

As of this writing, at least 166 high level and rich players have been caught in the sweep, with the names being published here and updated regularly. It appears that a large number of players banned were using bot programs to automate the skill Dungeoneering, where players run through randomly generated dungeons for experience and rewards.

Hopefully this will serve as a warning to the other cheaters. Probably won’t.

Taco Tuesday: How Will Planetside Manage Cheaters?


00025934-photo-planetside-core-combat

Last year I asked John Smedley if Planetside would be shutting down with Planetside 2 releasing, since Planetside was already dead in the water in terms of population. The response I received was that Sony would rather seek options including transforming Planetside into the free to play model before they shut the servers down, and that there would be more details as to where things were going in 2013. Just a day or so ago, Sony Online Entertainment threw a block grant of six months of game time in Planetside for Planetside 2 players. John Smedley also noted on Twitter:

This also gives us more time to make it f2p. So enjoy starting tmw late morning. And yes I’m sure we will miss flag some people.

Even though I knew that Sony preferred free to play to shutting the game down outright, my reaction to the announcement is still a sound “why?” I understand why Sony would want to take that road, since by their own admission no one plays Planetside anymore and therefore anything is better than nothing. On the other hand, players like myself are fully aware of why Planetside doesn’t have a trial system: because hackers were abusing it and mass-creating accounts. So when Planetside goes free to play, it’s hardly unrealistic to assume that the hackers will simply return in droves to ruin the experience once again.

Will Planetside become a den of aimbots, exploits, and hackers? At first, most assuredly. Afterward, who can say? Part of me wants to say that Sony will address the problem of mass-hacking in Planetside because otherwise the investment required to take the game free to play wouldn’t be worth it. A game like Planetside that is fully player vs player will see its population turn right around and leave if the game is infested with hackers. The hope, of course, is that Planetside will generate enough revenue after the transition that Sony can afford to have some full time staffers on hand to update the systems to battle cheaters at a software level while simultaneously having staff in-game to track down and ban cheaters by hand.

And again, this all comes down to how prepared Sony is to deal with the cheaters who will no doubt show up once the doors open.