FFIC Fall 2020: Garena To Ban 2 Teams From The Tournament

Garena Free Fire is now the world’s biggest Battle Royale game on the mobile platform. After the ban of PUBG Mobile and PUBG Mobile Lite in India, it continues to grow exponentially with an influx of players from the late titles. However, fast growth also raises the question of maintaining the balance game state. This particular aspect seems to be the weakest from the side of Free Fire.

While the company has seen a drastic increase in terms of numbers, its anti-hacking department is not doing a very good job. The game continues to ban millions and millions of hackers as well as devices every month or so. Even in the competitive scene, it's common to see pro players using cheats and got caught by the system.

This is not the first time Garena Free Fire records hacking problems in its esports circuit. According to the ban notice, ROUTE CHANGER’s RC-AngryBird and Soar Silently’s SS-RAHUL18 were detected using hacks on September 29th, 2020 by the new anti-hack system. Consequently, their accounts are banned permanently from the game.

RC-AngryBird and RAHUL18 are also banned from the Indian Free Fire competitive scene until 28th September 2021. Garena then disqualifies two teams in charge of these players from the Free Fire India Championship Fall 2020.

In the tournament, ROUTE CHANGER was racing to the top of the leaderboard after League Stage Day 9 with 143 points while Soar Silently sat at 6th place with 92 points. Both teams own very high standing in the current leaderboard.

Believe it or not, this is not the first time pro players got caught red-handed in the Indian Free Fire esports scene. Earlier on 17th May, Entity Gaming, a top esports organization in India, and TSG Army both had players banned for hacking. This was a disgrace to the widely-considered Indian best Free Fire team.

However, that was just the tip of the iceberg. Soon after, another ban read the name of 6 more Indian pro players for hacking. That ended up one of the largest cheating scandals in Indian esports. Team Insane, Team Nightmare, Western Tiger, WWW, and Dilwale all faced the music and had to leave the competitive stage till 15th May 2021.

The cheating saga continued when Global Esports shut down their popular roster “Bandra 50”. Garena investigated the team alongside Global Esports for using a modified APK of Free Fire. It does look like Garena is trying to get rid of the hacking issue to maintain a balanced gaming environment. But the question is whether the effort really paid off. A simple ban on the hackers' account and disqualification seems not heavy enough to set the precedence for others to follow.