Hi, it’s Nate, CEO at Mountaintop.
We’re 4 weeks since launch, and it feels like the right time to share another update on our anti-cheat efforts.
HOW'S IT GOING?
Since launch, our anti-cheat priorities have been:
- Ensuring competitive integrity on the ladder.
- Removing cheaters from the game quickly.
Since our last update on Aug 29, we’ve banned thousands of players from Spectre Divide.
This wouldn’t be possible without your reports in-game and in Discord – thank you.
I also want to give a special shout out to our talented community of anti-cheat detectives, who've helped us identify both cheaters and cheat makers behind the scenes.
Your dedication has dramatically accelerated our anti-cheat efforts and tech.
Finally, a validating moment this week during one of the first major Spectre tournaments out of India: one of the competitors was confirmed cheating and banned mid-match by our detection systems.
This is only the beginning!
HOW HAVE SYSTEMS IMPROVED SINCE LAUNCH?
We’ve been relentlessly shipping improvements at every layer of our anti-cheat stack with each update, including:
- Client protections (e.g., obfuscation, randomization)
- Local cheat detection (e.g., detecting cheat software running on the PC)
- ESP / wall hack protections (e.g., fog of war improvements, map changes)
- Cheat heuristic detection behaviors (e.g., identifying unusual patterns of action)
- Permanent bans tied to individual players (e.g., hardware bans)
We can’t share all the details on these systems for obvious reasons, but know we’re constantly advancing the features, quality, and calibration data.
[A visualization of some of the behaviors that we’re analyzing and actioning after every match.]
As a result, we’ve seen a substantial reduction in functional cheats and hacks in the past few weeks. Almost all of the known hacks are either patched or detected.
When a new player comes in, it takes our systems a few matches to evaluate their behavior. This helps us avoid banning legit players.
We don’t always ban cheaters immediately. If we know someone is cheating, we sometimes use them to help calibrate our systems to more quickly identify other cheaters using similar cheats.
Even with these considerations, less than 1% of Ranked matches have had a known cheater.
- As a point of reference, ~3% of Ranked matches see 1+ cheating report.
WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE ANTI-CHEAT ROADMAP?
In addition to continuing to refine the systems above, one of our top priorities is letting you know when a cheater has been banned.
- You’re helping report and identify cheaters, but you’re not always seeing the results
- We're working on a system that notifies you when a player you've reported has been penalized
We’ll also be adding support for canceling a match if a cheater is banned mid-match in order to reduce the impact on your Ranked climb.
Going forward, we’ll be enforcing even faster and stricter consequences for cheating.
If you’re banned, all your accounts and their progress will be permanently lost, even if you’re only cheating on one account or you’ve stopped cheating altogether.
This is a battle that we’ll never stop fighting. To the cheaters out there reading this: play fair, or don’t play at all.
gl hf,
Nate