At the beginning of the year, in the development blog Surviving a Decade, I mentioned, «This year we’re dedicating more resources into anti-cheat than ever», this is a commitment we’re dedicated to, and I want to share more information about what we’ve been up too.
Over the past couple of months, we have slowly eliminated or limited information leaks which cheaters abuse to aid them in several ways. For example, players health, Tool Cupboards and turret authorization lists could be read in the network data, allowing cheaters to use and gain a further unfair advantage. These are now fixed.
In continuing efforts to battle cheaters and clean up many long-standing issues, especially around information leaks, buried stashes are no longer networked, meaning cheaters will no longer know where stashes are buried.
There is much more to be done in this area, and we are working on it.
Expanding the support team size over the past year has allowed us to get more support staff focusing on anti-cheat, which includes going in-game and dealing with and disrupting cheaters directly based on player reports. Some staff over the coming months will be dedicated solely to anti-cheat measures full-time. This isn’t limited to Facepunch servers, but across the board.
In addition to the above, we’ve deployed some stricter measures surrounding anti-cheating, eliminated several priority exploits, and will deploy further measures soon.
In the last month:
- 26,954 bans have been applied
- 22,542 of which were permanent
- 4,412 of which were temporary
- 949,422 cheating reports received
- 90.8% of bans were applied automatically
Since the 1st January 2024:
- 84,753 bans have been applied
- 71,371 of which were permanent
- 13,382 of which were temporary
- 3,116,133 cheating reports received
- 92.9% of bans were applied automatically
Based on fiscal quarters:
- 72,849 bans applied in 2023 Q1
- 65,608 bans applied in 2023 Q2
- 81,682 bans applied in 2023 Q3
- 55,672 bans applied in 2023 Q4
- 81,084 bans applied in 2024 Q1
Notes
- Bans are placed for multiple reasons, the numbers above do not strictly reflect only cheat-related bans, but cheat-related bans do make up the vast majority of bans.
- A single player can receive multiple bans, for example, if a user is temporarily banned and then later switched to a permanent ban, this is counted as 2 bans in the above metrics.