Fall Guys Had A Secret Cheater Island Where It Put Misbehaving Players
Fall Guys is one of the most popular games in the world at the moment, and a game that has reached such a level of recognition is undoubtedly going to attract some unsavory folks. We normally hear about cheaters plaguing free-to-play games where there's no real consequence to getting banned (it isn't like they're losing any money they paid for the game, after all), but it seems that even Fall Guys' $20 asking price isn't enough to dissuade people from cheating to try to rack up wins, either.
In a very long Twitter thread today, Fall Guys developer Mediatonic Games detailed how it handled cheaters in the early days and weeks of the game. You might think that cheaters were just banned for their crimes, but there you'd be wrong. Instead, Mediatonic created a special "Cheater Island" that matched cheaters with other cheaters and let them go nuts, walled off the rest of the non-cheating playerbase.
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
At the start, there weren't enough confirmed cheaters to populate a game on Cheater Island as Mediatonic worked to refine its detection tools. With those players separated from the rest of the playerbase, many of them just wound up falling infinitely when queuing up for a match – at least until Mediatonic's software was able to find enough cheaters to fill a game. So, in the early days of Fall Guys' existence, if you saw someone complaining about falling forever after queuing for a match, it's likely (though not certain) they were a cheater who had been found out.
In fact, it wasn't until last week that the first Cheater Island match happened. Unfortunately, Cheater Island is not some kind of permanent solution, as this whole thread was written to announce an incoming update called Big Yeetus and Anti-Cheatus. The Big Yeetus part will be explained later, Mediatonic says, while the Anti-Cheatus part of the update references integration with Epic's anti-cheat tools.
With the impending arrival of Epic's anti-cheat software, Cheater Island has officially been shut down, and now cheaters are merely unable to log into the game. We'll let you know when more information about the Big Yeetus and Anti-Cheatus update is shared, so stay tuned for that.