For those playing Tekken 8 online, chances are you’ve come across “pluggers.” These are people who pull the plug when they’re about to lose to avoid taking a loss in their record. Unfortunately, this is a common occurrence given there’s really no penalty for doing this…at least for now. That’s about to change soon, though, as the devs have acknowledged that Tekken 8 pluggers will be getting punishments and it will be in several tiers, even.

This was confirmed by the dev team in a recent Tekken Talk episode where Yasude Esports, Michael Murray, Kohei “Nakatsu” Ikeda, and Katsuhiro Harada took turns talking about various topics, which included pluggers.

What Is Being Done About the Tekken 8 Plugging Situation?

First off, the devs acknowledged that there is a problem with people pulling the plug in online matches in Tekken 8 since it also happens to them.

The first step of action is to fix the disconnect rate counter, so people can avoid people who constantly disconnect to prevent a loss. In the future, the devs are planning to ban pluggers. While some might only get a warning, some will get suspended for an undetermined number of days, while others will get a permanent ban.

The Tekken dev team already has a list of people who will receive a ban, though they are looking at the legalities of it given each country has different rules and such.

Per the developers, they are advising people that do get plugged on to report them by one of the following methods (SleepingwithYelena):

1. Navigating to their profile and reporting them for intentional disconnect. The developers are monitoring reports, and if a player receives a lot of reports, their punishment will get bigger. REPORT THEM.
2. Record the match and share it on X (Twitter) under the following hashtag: #T8_report. The developers monitor this hashtag and if the footage seems legit, they add the plugger to their list.

Of course, this doesn’t guarantee that whomever you report will automatically get a ban or punishment, as this can easily be abused.

Let’s hope something happens to this and doesn’t end up like Tekken 7 where nothing tangible happened.

One easy solution would be to give pluggers an instant loss if and when they do this. This means that players don’t need to file a report, and this should prevent these same people from attempting this in the first place.

No word yet on when these changes will take effect, but we’re expecting a patch to be released in the near future. In case you haven’t bought the game yet, go read our review here to see why this is an instant fighting game classic.