Outriders may not be a PVP game, but the developers don’t want anyone to have unfair advantages outside of the intended game mechanics. People Can Fly and Square Enix will be taking some drastic measures against cheaters, including branding them with a “discreet but visible watermark” on the HUD to identify any footage they may post as coming from an account that engaged in cheating. They’ll also be stuck into matchmaking pools strictly for cheaters, which will make it take much longer to get a group together.
The developers outlined their policies on cheating and hacking in a Reddit post forewarning players ahead of the launch next week. They identified 200 players (or 0.01% of the total players) who cheated in some form in the Outriders demo. With progress carrying forward to the main game, they will be punishing any accounts who have been flagged for cheating at launch day. “We can see you all. Yes, even the person who gave themself 600 Legendary Weapons,” they said.
Anyone identified as a cheater will suffer the following account-wide (not character specific) repercussions:
- You will not be able to matchmake with legit players
- Matchmaking will likely take significantly longer
- You will still be able to play solo
- In future, your HUD will have a discreet but visible watermark placed on it so that gameplay footage created on this account can be readily identified as coming from a flagged account.
On launch day, April 1st, all accounts will be checked for evidence of cheats, with additional checks occurring at regular intervals afterwards. “Any account logs found to have evidence of cheating on them on or after launch day will be permanently branded,” the post says.
Players who did cheat in the demo but want to be unbranded in the main game have to delete all characters and items on their account, effectively starting fresh and wiping the slate clean. If any progress is carried over from a cheating account into the main game, it will suffer the branding.
So what are the Outriders devs looking for to smack down cheaters?
- Intentionally running the game on PC without Easy Anti Cheat (EAC)
- Modifying game files to enhance a character: levels, skills, inventory, etc.
- Externally modifying game time to reduce time dependent features such as vendors and challenges
- Using a trainer program or similar to gain advantages within the game
- Using gameplay altering programs such as aimbots or wallhacks
- Individual players who are found to be being regularly kicked by multiplayer hosts shortly after joining may also be manually reviewed as an additional anti-cheat/anti-grief safeguard.
- Using performance tweaking software (such as RivaTuner for example) to improve a personal game experience is not considered cheating.
Note that they do not consider farming to be cheating, “even though the amount of battering that that captain underwent could be considered unethical.” Farming in a loot-based game is perfectly acceptable behavior for a player, as was previously outlined in updates and changes they made to the demo at the time.
For the most part, it looks like the cheating issue impact the PC version of the game more than consoles, with most of these hacks and cheats not even being possible in the console versions. Outriders releases on April 1st.
