One of the biggest video game hits at the moment, the new free Battle Royale Call of Duty: Warzone had already hit the mark of 50 million players. With so many people active, it didn't take long for hackers to emerge: on April 14, just over a month after the game's launch, 70,000 players found cheating had already been banned.
To slow the proliferation of hacking, the developers announced a move: players identified as cheaters will only be able to play against fellow cheaters. Suddenly trying to circumvent the game's rules doesn't look so cool anymore.
In addition to this anti-cheating solution, which is actually not that new, let's take a look at 5 other unusual and creative solutions that developers have already adopted in other games to punish cheaters, or at least make their lives very difficult:
The cow monster in Witcher 3
A few years ago, players of The Witcher 3 discovered a way to earn a lot of money and very quickly: by killing cows. When you are in a region with bovine animals, just kill the cows, grab the leather and make time pass in the game for the animals to reappear and start the cycle again.
When the developers discovered this little exploit, they introduced Chort, a mega monster that surprises the player who is killing a lot of cows as a way to cheat the game for money.
Explosive car in GTA 5
There are so many mods and ways to cheat in GTA 5 that the people at Rockstar had to be very creative to deal with players who were trying to cheat. This one involved the Duke O'Death car. The fancy car was given to all players who had GTA 5 on Xbox 360 or PS3 who later switched their consoles to the current generation.
As Duke O'Death is fast, all tuned and armored, players soon figured out how to take the car to GTA Online and take advantage of other players. Instead of simply deleting the game car or banning hackers, Rockstar decided to add a patch where Duke O'Death would explode every time they tried to drive the car in GTA Online.
Turning cheating players into "prisoners"
Another three games that used the CoD strategy of banishing hackers to the same place were Max Payne 3, Titanfall and Dark Souls II. In these games, all identified cheaters would be able to continue playing, only this time the lobbies would include only other hackers, a tactic that became known as "prisoner island".
Video apology in H1Z1
In a world of zombies, the goal here is to survive the undead. But there were people who were not amused by the difficulty of the game and hacks started to spread. As a way of curbing cheating and ensuring that no one would falter again, the president of the Daybreak Game Company, the game's developer, announced that everyone who had been banned could resume normal play.
But only as long as they made a video admitting the guilt, put it up on Youtube and send the link to the developers to post on Twitter.
Sherlock Holmes in CS: GO
Instead of spending hours and hours supervising all Counter-Strike matches and players, the team responsible for the game found a very simple and efficient way to deal with hackers, called the Surveillance System or Overwatch.
Players are selected to serve as detectives and analyze possible cheating, toxic behavior, and other reports. In this scheme, the Sherlock Holmes detectives watch the matches that are already finished and figure out whether there was cheating or not. If unanimously found guilty, the accused player is banned.
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