When it comes to MMO survival games, of the many countless lessons learned by the abortion that was The War Z (if you want to get technical, it's now Infestation: Survival Stories, but a turd is still a turd even if you decide to start calling it a bacon diamond), an easy way to keep the fans happy and things fair is to drop no-goodniks like cheaters. Among a tome of other common sense points, Hammerpoint never learned such a simple strategy, but Rust developer FacePunch is clearly on top of things. The studio's founder, Garry Newman (yep, the one behind the infamous Half-Life mod), flicked the switch on its new anti-cheat measure "CheatPunch," and just like that, close to 5,000 players were gone.
Not gone like, "Oh, they made it so I can't cheat, I quit" gone, like banned gone, punched off of servers by the fist of an angry God gone. In a website update, studio founder Garry Newman said a shade over 4,600 cheating players were detected and immediately dropped as a result. No word on how many of them happened to be not wearing pants.
"If you get kicked from the official servers with the message that you've been banned then you have been caught. You're a naughty boy. You know what you have done," Newman wrote, adding that FacePunch's brand of justice is not only swift, but unforgiving. "You won't get unbanned. We know it was your nine year old cousin. We know your computer got hijacked. We know that the CIA is getting you banned from all your games on Steam so you will join them in the hunt for aliens."
For those who beg, whine, and / or plead that it wasn't them, Newman detailed that plans are in the works where any evidence of players' shady actions will be documented, and viewed on a site as the veritable "smoking gun" of their misdeeds.
While the measure has worked on keeping a number of less than savory individuals out of the game, Newman knows that fighting against other cheaters is an uphill battle.
"CheatPunch isn't the answer to all of our prayers. It's a stop gap solution. It's going to get rid of a bunch of cheaters, but it's not hard to get around (by design)...We fully expect cheats to be touted as 'CheatPunch proof' quite soon. That's cool. We're never going to be finished fighting."