Garena Disqualifies and Bans 2 Teams from the FFIC Fall 2020
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.