Old Archives

Second chances? Not here.

A new article by Bungie's security team for Marathon states that there will be no second chancers for players caught cheating. If you are caught cheating in Marathon, you will be permanently banned.

Sure, it sounds super great but Bungie already says that there may be some unexpected flaws. No system is foolproof and that includes the anti-cheat for literally any game. To that end, Bungie will have an appeals process that can be utilized if...

This is likely to become the new norm for future releases.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 will require PC players to enable both Secure Boot and utilize TPM 2.0 on their machines.

The start of Season 5 for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and Warzone will actually serve as the gradual lead-in to the requirements for Black Ops 7. In Season 5, both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 will be optional and will not be required to be enabled.

If this news sounds familiar to you, that...

Turns out that simply using a different operating system isn't actually cheating.

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase offers a sincere apology to those users that were recently banned from their online competitive shooter for the high crime of playing on a Steam Deck, Linux, or Mac.

Several legitimate players recently got caught up in a big ban wave because NetEase forgot to whitelist compatibility layers/software that non-Windows users need to use to play games on non-Windows...

The Call of Duty anti-cheat team shares some new details.

A new post (warning: Twitter link) from the Ricochet anti-cheat team includes a few details on their efforts to stop hackers in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6. According to the team, they say that they have issued over 19,000 account bans since last week's release of Ranked Play.

Their message continues on to say that they are making "hourly sweeps" to add even more bans to the list. These bans will remove...

65,000 people used to cheat here. Now it's a ghost town.

Activision says that they have banned over 65,000 accounts from both Call of Duty: Warzone and Modern Warfare 3 just in the past week alone. The announcement comes from Activision's team working on Ricochet anti-cheat.

This latest massive ban wave comes roughly a week after Activision said that they "deployed new detections targeting Ranked Play cheaters and boosters" in Warzone. At that time, the studio...

The cheat maker was ordered to pay millions in damages, but DGAF.

This past week, the United States District Court of the Central District of California granted Activision a legal victory over EngineOwning. EngineOwning is a group that sells cheats for a myriad of video games including Counter-Strike, Battlefield, Titanfall, and Call of Duty.

The District Court granted Activision's motion for default judgement in their civil case against EngineOwning. This judgement...

Shut it down. Shut it all down.

An update from Call of Duty says that the Ricochet anti-cheat will now just shut down Call of Duty if a mouse and keyboard player activates aim assist.

The team warns that repeated use of these aim assist tools could lead to "further account action." Presumably this means that these players will be either account banned or hardware banned from Call of Duty.

Naturally, the responses to this news include people complaining...

Happy holidays you filthy animals.

The 7.35 update for DOTA 2 released in the late evening hours on December 14. With it came the usual assortment of balance adjustments, a few fixes, and a few gameplay related changes. You know, the usual. The update also kicked off Frostivus 2023, an in-game event that delivers a little holiday cheer to the world of Dota 2. It comes complete with festive cosmetics, three new premium sets for Dota Plus users, and more. Tonight's update for Dota 2 ...

Ricochet anti-cheat won't just ban cheaters in Modern Warfare 3.

With Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 set to release mere hours from now, the developers and Activision took to the Call of Duty Blog to talk about improvements to Ricochet. Ricochet being the name given to the anti-cheat service used in the previous few Call of Duty releases.

First up is the more mundane improvements that are coming to Ricochet ahead of Modern Warfare 3's launch. Activision notes that they...

They can cause offense to "public order and morals."

Capcom seems to be of the belief that mods, at least those made for PC games, could lead to "reputational damage" to the company. They feel as though mods could cause offense to "public order and morals." This could presumably lower the public perception of a game or even Capcom themselves.

These thoughts shared by Capcom came from the latest upload to Capcom's Research & Development...

Setting your mouse DPI settings too high? That's a ban.

Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) hasn't been doing too hot lately. First, the anti-cheat issued bans to those using AMD's Anti-Lag+ feature in Counter-Strike 2. Now, VAC is issuing bans for setting your mouse DPI too high.

The issue with Anti-Lag+ was due to how AMD implemented the feature into a variety of games. It altered or hooked into game files, which is a big no-no when it comes to playing games that are supported...

A new anti-cheat has entered the battlefield.

Electronic Arts just announced that they are working on implementing their own anti-cheat (or anticheat), into their current and upcoming multiplayer titles. Much like the simply named EA app, EA's new anticheat is called EA anticheat. Yes, that lack of capitalization is correct and slightly frustrating to look at.

The Battlefield 2042 team at DICE says that come the launch of Season 6 in October, the game will switch over...

Valve says this is just one step in the ongoing fight against cheating.

It's not too often that Valve comes out swinging their big ban hammer, but yesterday was one such occasion. On the official Dota 2 blog, Valve revealed that they have recently permanently banned over 40,000 accounts that were caught using third-party software to cheat. Valve used the cheaters' access to information "that wasn't visible during normal gameplay" to confirm their suspicions and dish out some...

After the win, Bungie immediately went after another cheat maker.

A two-year long legal battle against AimJunkies, a Destiny 2 cheat maker, has finally come to an end. Bungie won their suit in which they claimed AimJunkies violated Bungie's copyright. AimJunkies has been ordered to pay $3.6 million (USD) in damages and $700,000 in legal expenses.

AimJunkies is a game cheat maker and distributor that is owned by Phoenix Digital Group. The cheats mostly seemed to focus on...