One of the biggest complaints about Reloaded Games' APB: Reloaded – next to the obvious topic of lag and performance – has been cheaters. Now it's hard to tell sometimes who's cheating and who's just really good at sniping you with a pistol from nearly 100 meters out. Well, GamersFirst published an updated post on their new method for finding, catching and combating cheaters, as well as utilizing a brutal name-and-shame tactic to discourage other players from doing the same thing.
Over on the APB blog, the team lays out a very detailed look at how they're dealing with cheaters these days with the free-to-play, open-world, PvP cops versus robbers game. As noted in the post...
“What kind of cheating did we catch? The current combination of tools can now catch a wide range of activities using almost every conceivable method of detection. The FairFight system has been great, since it has acted as a “key” to let us pull together a lot of disparate the data into one single effort. As a result we found lots of players who actively had a cheat running, but, sort-of didn’t use it much, and often appeared to be running mostly legit, while relying on their purchased cheat tool “to cheat just a little bit.”Of course any cheat is a gross violation of our terms of service, and just as when pregnant; there is no “a-little-bit-of-pregnant” category in the human gestational cycle, just as there is no “a-little-bit-of-cheating” category when playing a fair game.”
In another time and place I would have used that pregnant line... seriously.
Nevertheless, the team has been utilizing the FairFight system for the past few months, giving them a collection of very detailed and expansive data reads on the community and the community's playing habits... legit and otherwise.
As noted in the blog...
Some of these new insights made us very happy; for example it turns out that the numbers of actual cheaters in APB is much lower than the community would believe. But some insights made us terribly sad; players with as many as 8,000 hours of playtime were caught red-handed cheating.
It seems unbelievable that players would put that much time into a game they obviously love, but would opt to buy cheats and ruin the experience not only for themselves but also for other people playing.
Even still, this sort of verifies that a lot of other legit players would tend to think that certain opponents would “turn on” cheats just to gain an edge and then turn them off. The data that G1 has gathered actually seems to reinforce this kind of thinking... which is kind of amazing when you think about what strong intuitive foresight from players and some hard data from cheat trackers can produce.
As stated in the blog, it's only a very small percentage that's causing problems for the community at large...
“...the number of cheaters who log in to the game stayed pretty constant around 1.2% of all players (some of which were re-rolls). Inversely 98.8% of players in APB played on a daily basis without any trace of any cheat (which we are very thankful to see)! So as usual, it’s the 1% who is messing up the world for the rest of humanity.”
They go on to mention that even still, a lot of the times when players were accusing other players of cheating oftentimes it was just the other players were really good at the game (and I'd wager some lag played a part in it, as well).
Anyway, the team is still working hard on advancing APB: Reloaded and continuing to evolve ways to keep the community safe from the cheating menace who are scummy enough to purchase cheats in order to win.
You can learn more about APB: Reloaded by paying a kind visit to the game's official website. It's entirely free-to-play so there's no worries about losing any money in trying it out.
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