In hopes of teaching cheaters a lesson of ruining fun, developers Mediatonic devised a system that would pool cheaters into their own lobby, dubbing these Fall Guys servers as Cheater Island. Sadly, despite filling these servers with cheaters, the idea didn’t stick for long.
Taking to Twitter, Mediatonic shared the tale of Fall Guys Cheater Island on how it came to be, and how eventually they decided to get rid of it.
I’ve got lots of spicy content for you this week – The Dev team have been super busy on the new update 👀
For now…
BUCKLE UP
Let me tell you a wild story
It’s called
The RISE and FALL of Cheater Island
Tagging @Netflix incase they want to make a film or series out of it
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
They explained that they started with their anti-cheat system, one that wouldn’t insta-ban cheaters but instead matchmake them in their own servers.With them collecting enough data on cheaters and being 100 sure that the system was foolproof, they decided to launch these cheater lobbies, only big issue was they weren’t getting filled. To help solve this, they decided to lower the threshold in terms of what was considered cheating, and eventually these servers got filled with cheaters.
Remember, at this point, we had data on who was cheating, but we weren’t acting on it
Fall Guys Cheater Island™ had a population of 0
So, very carefully, over time, we started to lower the threshold on the cheat detection
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
Well despite having good intentions, this idea eventually backfired as it was beginning to get hard to differentiate what lobbies had actual cheaters and which ones didn’t. Many legitimate players ended up uploading videos showing lobbies that, to Mediatonic eyes were indeed cheater lobbies, but in reality were just normal lobbies filled with cheaters.
Somebody actually uploaded this video to Reddit with the title:
“Ever played a round of Fall Mountain where all the players are cheating?”
The problem is… this LOOKS like Cheater Island but we can’t be 100% sure pic.twitter.com/byJi6r0Ykc
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
And thus, due to the big success of the game and the amount of cheaters appearing in it, the team had to call in Epic Games for some help and as of today, has released a whole new anti-cheat system to replace the one they had before.
What do you guys think, was this the right decision for the team to remove cheater island?