Further improvements on anti-cheat measures in Bloodhunt
Hello Bloodhunt Community!
Thank you for taking the time to fill in the recent Bloodhunt community survey.
We are currently going through and analysing the results and will be back with a learnings article soon.
Prior to that, we want to address the state of our anti-cheat efforts which we can see is still one of the main pain points for our player base.
As many of you know, we’ve been working actively on the removal of cheaters in Bloodhunt. We’ve done this both through manual measures – such as player reports – but also by using automatic measures including cheat detection and statistics.
We continue to have a zero-tolerance policy on cheating and actively work on addressing the problem.
What have we done so far?
As mentioned in a previous article, which you can find here, our main weapon has been a dedicated team that is looking at all of your player reports. Please continue reporting cheaters you see! It helps us keep Bloodhunt as free as it can be from cheating. To report a player, go here.
Some data
To date, we have removed ~11,000 players from Bloodhunt, a large majority of these being for cheating. Around ~7,500 of these are from manual bans.
The daily average of manual bans for August is currently at 18. The daily average for July was 28, and prior to that the daily average for June was 60. This shows that our efforts to remove cheaters as quickly as possible is having a clear and positive effect.
However, with the game currently having fewer active players than before, the odds of running into a cheater increases due to the smaller number of players ending up on the same servers more often. This means that we need to take the next step in our anti-cheat enforcement efforts.
Combating cheating further
In previous anti-cheat updates, we mentioned some possible next steps we can take to combat cheating, specifically 2-factor authentication (2FA) and additional gating. Unfortunately, with the status of the game and the number of active players, we cannot see these being adequate solutions to develop at this point in time, as it would split the community even more and create much longer matchmaking times.
But we are not giving up on keeping this game clean from cheaters and we will explore other options for removing them more effectively.
Multiple ban waves
Our next steps in dealing with cheaters more effectively is rolling out continuous ban waves. As the game has been running live for a couple of months now, we have an extremely good idea of what is possible and what isn’t when it comes to statistics in Bloodhunt. We will now analyse these values at a faster pace to automatically remove players that are able to continuously pull off moves that surpass the very best Bloodhunt players.
The intention is to ban cheaters faster and making it even more dissatisfying to cheat than it already is in Bloodhunt.
We hope that these changes will further improve the experience. As always, we are eager to hear what you think.
Until next time, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
