Hello Bloodhunt Community!
Following up on our last article about how we swung the ban katana during the games Early Access phase, we wanted to take a minute and show you the amount of work that we have been putting into ensuring that we are clearing out the cheaters as quickly as possible.
Player reporting and monitoring
The main weapon that we have against cheaters is a dedicated team that is continuously looking through all the various reports that we get and monitors for cheaters and hackers through various means.
So far we have banned about ~755 accounts and continue to ban roughly around ~50 accounts on average per day through this process.
While we cannot beat the cheaters completely, we are making it as annoying as possible for people that cheat by removing them quickly, which means that they need to go through the hassle of creating a new Steam account and a Sharkmob account before they can play again.
The success of this is very dependent on player reports, so we appreciate that you keep being vigilant.
From our sampling of servers, we’ve been able to confirm that the most extreme cheaters are quite rare for the moment, but we agree that when they do appear, they ruin the entire server. So we need to keep on top of this.
Banning based on mathematically impossible circumstances
The next step for us is to start banning players based on impossible values and patterns.
We are starting to get a very good idea of what the best of the best players are capable of, and we have caught some players that are often at least twice as good as the best players in the world.
To compare, this would be the same as someone being able to continuously break the world record in the 100-meter sprint, which of course is highly unlikely and technically even breaks the laws of physics as it’s only possible to move the input device with precision at a certain speed (as a human).
Players who have previously cheated and get caught will get banned retroactively as well, as we have statistics for our game covering the entire player base.
Cheating has no place in Bloodhunt, and we have zero tolerance for this as it wastes precious development time that could have been better spent improving the gameplay instead and also sours the experience for our player base.
Easy Anti-Cheat bans
Easy Anti-Cheat is always looking for hackers trying to manipulate the Bloodhunt executable in memory in various ways.
It takes some time to gather and analyse all the various information, but once we have identified and securely confirmed the various hacks, we activate the ban wave katana which bans multiple accounts at once.
This also renders the existing caught hacks as useless as players will get instantly flagged if detected.
This is an endless battle, however, as making cheats is a lucrative business, and new cheats with new methods of cheating are constantly being developed. But our intention is to act as fast as possible when a new cheat is detected to get them out of play as fast as possible.
Also, we are happy to tell you that yesterday we unleashed our first Katana Ban Wave which resulted in the termination of almost 900 accounts.
So, what’s next?
This is a continuous effort which will never end, and as the game grows and gets more popular so will also the amount of people that are wanting to cheat.
With this in mind, we are looking at doing more and we are interested in hearing your thoughts on this.
2-Factor Authentication (2FA)
This is an effective method to gate the game behind a phone number. While it’s easy enough to get a new phone number to create a new account, it usually comes at a cost and is quite time-consuming. In particular, now that it’s getting more and more difficult to get a new SIM card in most countries without some kind of identification.
We think that this could be very effective and remove a large number of cheaters.
Additional gating
Once the game gets more popular and we have a very large player base, we could potentially look at gating the veteran community behind a player level that takes a few hours to reach, and have new players go through a different set of servers against other new players as they learn the ropes.
Of course, this means that new players could potentially run into cheaters but we will continue to be vigilant on these servers to ensure that we keep banning players as we catch them.
But the intention is to protect the active and dedicated user base as much as possible.
At this point in time, these are only ideas and not something we have started developing yet, but we are very interested to hear your feedback, and if you have any other good ideas of how we can keep Bloodhunt safe from hackers and cheaters.
Let us know what you think and, as always, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
