When Small Impact Games set the servers live for the first Marauders closed alpha on Steam two weeks ago, the team expected to see exhilarating space battles, extract camping, and squabbles over loot. Instead, in the first 24 hours, Small Impact had to fight a small, but unexpected fire started by cheaters.
Although the servers had only just gone live, the development team had to work out how and why certain bad faith actors rocketed to the top of the leaderboards. The servers at the time were wobbling due to the sheer number of people trying to get into the game, all while certain names became billionaires without playing a single game. It's a problem all too familiar with online multiplayer games, but it's one the team wasn't expecting to fight in an alpha.
That's because, for the last two years, Marauders has been developed with the help of 3,000 loyal players - all who backed the game when it originally hit crowdfunding platform Fig. "I think we've been spoiled by our Fig community," lead developer James Rowbotham tells The Loadout when we ask about the cheating. "They're very friendly, so we never had those problems." The team assumed that because the alpha was being opened only to those who pre-ordered the game the rules of war would stay the same. It didn't.
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