Dev Blog #003 - How We Nuke Cheaters
We go into Early Access on 17 September. A lot more people are about to be playing, which is great, but it also means more teaming in FFA, more bot accounts, and more banned players making a fresh account and coming straight back the same evening.
A few of you have asked what we're actually doing about all this, so here's what we've been building.
Trusted Lobbies
These are lobbies you can only join if you meet certain criteria. Account age, games played, purchases, that sort of thing.
At the moment, banning a cheater costs them about thirty seconds. New account, back in a lobby, same behaviour, and the person who reported them gets to play against them again. Trusted Lobbies deal with that. A new account can still play OpenFront, it just can't drop straight into the lobbies that expect some history behind you, and history is the one thing you can't throw together in an afternoon.
Game analyzer
This is a service that looks at the commands players send during a game and flags anything that doesn't look like a person playing.
Bots stop being subtle the moment you look at their inputs. Timing that never varies, the same sequence of actions over and over, a click rate nobody keeps up for an hour. The analyzer picks up on that across a lot of games at once and puts the suspicious accounts in front of us, rather than us waiting for someone to notice and open a ticket.
Public accounts by default
When a game ends, you'll be able to see who you played with. We're also putting this behind an API so you can build your own tools with it.
We think this one will make the biggest difference of the four. Teaming is almost impossible to prove from a single game and completely obvious across twenty. Plenty of you have been tracking it by hand already, with screenshots and notes and a lot of patience, and you've been better at it than we have. Now you'll have the real data. If someone wants to build a proper detector on top of it, please do. We'll be watching what you make.
In-game reporting
Click the i info button and you'll get a report option, so you can report someone while it's happening instead of trying to remember the details later in a Discord ticket.
Mods and admins will be able to see how many times a player has been reported and factor that in when they decide what to do. Worth being clear about how we'll use it. A pile of reports gets you looked at, it doesn't get you banned. And if a group decides to mass report someone they've got a grudge against, that's going to go badly for the group.
What this won't do
None of this ends cheating. People who are determined enough will work around all four of these eventually, and we'd rather say that now than act surprised later. What we can do is make cheating a lot more effort than it's worth, and make it much faster for us to catch someone when they try.
These are rolling out over the next few weeks and through Early Access. If you find a hole in any of them, tell us on Discord. The teaming reports we've had from you so far have already led to bans, so it does genuinely make a difference.
See you on the 17th.
The OpenFront team