Fall Guys may be the biggest thing since sliced bread. The battle royale game took the world by storm and has only grown exponentially since its release. With that growth, however, came players who would cheat the system and win games unfairly, dampening the experience of regular players. Thankfully, Mediatonic thought ahead and found a way to end the rebel scum with the invention of Cheater Island, lone servers that, in theory, would compile all cheaters together. Yet, it didn’t quite go as planned.
In a lengthy Twitter post, Fall Guys developers revealed their plan in a memo they titled ‘the rise and fall of Cheater Island.’
Data would track a list of cheaters and then roll them all together into the Cheater Island server. Mediatonic eventually lowered the cheat detection threshold to find more cheaters. These individuals would all queue for future games and be rolled into a server on Cheater Island where they could all cheat together and not ruin the fun for actual hardworking jelly beans.
The developers said the cheaters trying to queue for a match would run into some “troubles”:
Other issues from Cheater Island began to arise as well. When a cheater discovered what was up, they’d “work out what caused them to be tagged – and they’ll tell other cheaters.”
At this point…
Cheaters started to realise that they could team up with friends who weren’t cheaters… and they could matchmake with them…
They were escaping Cheater Island ?
? Oh no ?
We raced to patch this out before they all realised
— Fall Guys ? (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
Mediatonic went on to say that cheaters would use family-sharing to share their game to another account to get around Cheater Island. They had to disable family-sharing to fix the issue. This led to the team increasing the cheat detection to crack down on anyone not playing by the rules and ensure they didn’t falsely ban a true player. In the end, Cheater Island was a true place but after watching several videos of the servers, Mediatonic decided to forego the idea and use Epic’s anti-cheating program instead.
Our cheat detection system was good… but we hadn’t expected so many players… and we had no idea the lengths that some players would go to cheat
We tried to create a system around “Honesty”… but as soon as we realised we were in an ARMS RACE we called up the experts at Epic
It’s quite the tale, but for now, we’ll stick to them being banned. That’s probably better for all of us anyways. What are your thoughts on Fall Guys’ Cheater Island? Do you think Epic’s anti-cheat is a good call? Let us know, and stay tuned at The Nerd Stash for all your news, reviews, and more!
