ANTI-CHEAT STATUS UPDATE – FEBRUARY 2024
CURRENT CHEATING LANDSCAPE
Today, we'll share what our Player Protection team is doing to reinforce our anti-cheat and security systems, in order to protect the player experience.
We recently acknowledged the increased frustration that players have felt lately regarding cheating. It is clear that the landscape of cheating in Siege is evolving. For example, the QB System on PC is directly impacting cheat creation by making new cheats more difficult to create. It has been extremely successful in shaking up the cheating ecosystem with some cheat providers leaving or shutting down. However, new solutions and additional security measures can often act as double-edged swords; we deter less experienced cheat makers, but those that are well implanted will work harder to release new functional and undetectable cheats. This is why fighting cheats is a continuous endeavor.
We've now made a concentrated push to guarantee the necessary resources that Siege needs, and as part of this, we have created a special task force. We call this task force our Strike Team, supporting Player Protection with anti-cheat and security in Siege. This strike team has brought experts from multiple fields together in order to accelerate our ability to fine tune our anti-cheat solutions and target the most prolific cheats head-on.
PREVENTING CHEAT FEATURES AND EXPLOITS
We know that there are undetected cheats and gameplay exploits currently live in the game which are leading to a deteriorated gameplay experience. This is why we've implemented a strike team to tackle some of the most problematic cheats and exploits currently working in the game. It's crucial however that we not only react to cheats but also work to make cheat creation more difficult, and to this end our strike team has also been working on adding further encryptions throughout the game.
CHEATS ADDRESSED
We've addressed a number of cheats over the recent months with updates going live with Y8S4.3.
ADDRESSED CHEATS & EXPLOITS
- Various navigation cheats.
- Various shooting-related cheats.
- Various griefing cheats.
- Various drone-related cheats.
As well as this, we've identified a prevalent cheat provider which led to a large ban wave and contributed to over 9,000 cheaters banned in January 2024, and 10,000 bans within a rolling 30-day period.
ANTI-CHEAT & BAN SYSTEMS
Let's take a look at some of our anti-cheat and security systems, how they're working for us now, and what we're doing moving forward.
To start with, we want to assure you that our anti-cheat solutions are always active and are only ever temporarily disabled to resolve issues which could affect our ability to protect legitimate players. Once resolved the affected system is then reactivated.
We do not deactivate our security or anti-cheat measures such as the QB System or MouseTrap for any prolonged amount of time, with BattlEye always remaining active.
MOUSETRAP
WORKAROUNDS
In Year 8, we fixed a number of workarounds that were enabling spoofers to avoid or reduce their chances of detection, though we are aware that some players are still able to avoid the full effects of our system. We are working hard to counter these remaining workarounds and we are confident that you'll see further reductions in spoofing soon.
EFFECTIVENESS
MouseTrap continues to find, track, and penalize players who use mouse and keyboard on console through the use of spoofing devices and has remained active and effective throughout Year 8. The usage of spoofing devices which saw a drop on the release of MouseTrap has continued to trend at this lower rate since its release. Our data also shows that players do swap to controller if viable MouseTrap workarounds are not available, making a better experience for everyone.
MOUSETRAP UPDATES
We are currently investigating new solutions to detect more types of spoofing adapters, and we've recently pushed an update to MouseTrap to further increase its effectiveness while ramping up its effects.
In this update we have:
- Optimized our detection thresholds to identify more mouse and keyboard players on console.
- Fined-tuned maximum latency penalties setting for the remainder of the season.
These changes will allow MouseTrap to detect even more players who are using mouse and keyboard on console, while adding high latency sooner.
As well as this, we are currently implementing additional in-game warning feedback for detected players and are developing an additional MouseTrap feature which will help to further level out the playing field. This feature will have a further positive impact on the match-to-match experience of console players. We will share more information on this important update during the Six Invitational.
QB SYSTEM
At its core, the purpose of the QB System is to make cheat creation more tedious, difficult, and costly, creating an unfavorable environment for cheat creators and sellers. QB is also beneficial when it comes to bans, having the ability to detect those who attempt to bypass it. We've already seen cheat creators giving up on Siege due to the increased effort that is now required for basic cheat development. It's made waves in the cheat market while having a great impact on Siege.
After the successful launch of the QB System however, it became clear that we did not have the right long-term support in place that was required to ensure the system's continued effectiveness. We've now changed our approach and have committed to regular updates for the QB System going forward.
We are now developing new iterations which will be coming in Year 9, and in the meantime, we continue to fine-tune and further strengthen this innovative security system. QB is a solid system for Siege, and we're making sure that it's receiving the resources needed in order to maximize its performance.
We're excited to share more information on our advancements with the QB System later this year.
BANS - DATA BANS + BATTLEYE
BANS NUMBERS
Here we have our latest ban data, covering the last 3 months. We can see that while we had over 9,000 bans in January, the previous month of December was less successful in terms of detections and bans. This was due to new blatant cheats becoming available, most of which were not detectable during December, resulting in fewer bans and increased frustration for players. With our team focused on the cheats that are being used right now, we aim to see similar results to January in the near future.
DATA BANS
Since their introduction, Data Bans have been a great success for Siege, finding illegitimate players that weren't already being found by our systems working at the forefront. However, we fully recognize that there is room for improvement, with some high stat cheaters remaining undetected.
Our goal with Data Bans is to ensure that we can find as many cheaters as possible while continuing to protect our honest players. At the moment, we are working to refine our data models by making use of additional player data points. This process will result in a more granular player overview, allowing us to increase the precision of the underlying system and in return boost its potency. As we continue to optimize we'll be able to adjust our thresholds, casting a wider net with full confidence, and finding and banning more cheaters that may have been going undetected.
There's more to come on Data Bans. We're also currently developing a machine learning solution which will aim to broaden our ability to detect cheaters in Siege.
We'll be sharing more on this in a future update.
BATTLEYE
BattlEye is the system that makes up for most of our cheater bans. Like our other forms of anti-cheat, BattlEye is never turned off, remaining active at all times, finding and banning thousands of cheaters each month.
As some of you may have noticed, in-game mentions of BattlEye have been removed. This change is to make sure that cheaters aren't getting information on how or what they were detected by; even minor details such as the mention of a ban system can play a role in the creation of new and undetectable cheats. This small change will help in reducing the chances of our anti-cheat systems being bypassed by cheaters and cheat makers.
CONCLUDING OUR PLANS & VISION
We know that cheaters have a big impact on Siege and everyone's enjoyment of the game, which is why we're boosting our anti-cheat resources. We already have results to show for this in January, and we have much more to come.
We are focused on strengthening our anti-cheat tools, tackling current high impact cheats, and ultimately giving players the experience that they log on for.
Make sure to watch the Six Invitational for the Year 9 Season 1 and Year 9 reveals on Saturday February 24th and Sunday February 25th, for further information on our Player Protection plans!