Fall Guys is still going strong as a fun little romp, but lately the popular battle royale has been running into a major problem, one of the cheating kind.
For weeks now, Fall Guys has been suffering from an excess of players hacking and cheating in the game to win those illusive crowns. The cheating has been so bad several features, such as family sharing, have been disabled previously to try and curtail cheating behavior. This of course has not really stopped much, other than seeing the cheating problem continue across the board.
Developer Mediatonic though has been taking some actions against it, and recently posted on twitter their one of their previous anti-cheat schemes; launching a private 'cheaters island' for everyone who has been previously flagged as cheating in Fall Guys.
"After we confirmed that it was working - We secretly launched Fall Guys Cheater Island" stated the Fall Guys twitter.
Here, players who cross a threshold on the Mediatonic cheat detection system. The idea is that if players who are knowingly cheating, they will get flagged and sent to the cheater island, where they can play Fall Guys with other cheaters and compete for crowns that way. Mediatonic admitted that they had enough data on the cheaters out there, but were waiting to act on it when they got their new systems up and running. Before there were enough people in matchmaking for Cheater Island games to form, the players would be endlessly falling as they were on their own server.
Of course, Fall Guys twitter does admit that it ran into some problems.
"It's worth pointing out at this stage - Cheaters are very smart If they know they've been tagged as a cheater - they'll work out what caused them to be tagged - and they'll tell other cheaters." stated the twitter account in a follow-up tweet.
Mediatonic have also disabled cheaters island, since unforeseen issues kept cropping up. Specifically, folks sharing videos of players cheating online, which led to Mediatonic admitting they don't if the matches shown in the videos were actually of cheater island or not. Were they cheaters not cheating for the sake of video on Cheater's Island, or had a group of cheaters infiltrated a match?
We DO know that Cheater Island matches were happening
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
We just DON'T know if that's what those videos show
For that reason, we have closed down Cheater Island
Instead, cheaters are now unable to login
We are continuously improving the threshold on our cheat detection too
Since the shut down of Cheater Island, Mediatonic has changed their tactics by simply preventing cheating players from logging into Fall Guys. Of course, the race between Mediatonic and Fall Guys cheaters is still ongoing, with the developers creating new ways to tackle and defeat cheaters running races in the game. Going forward, they are working with Epic Games, and going to implement Easy Anti-Cheat.
With the epidemic of cheating going on in Fall Guys, it is no surprise that drastic measures are being taken by Mediatonic. Filtering cheaters into singular matches against each other is actually kind of ideal, similar to the cheater lobbies in other online games on private servers, where anything goes for the win.
Hopefully this will be one of the key methods to deter cheaters in Fall Guys, though someone will always find a way to cheat if they can.
