Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt publisher and developer Sharkmob has recently detailed its approach to anti-cheat, providing insight into how it plans on keeping the free-to-play battle royale as clean as possible.
Cheaters are a rampant problem in online games, especially hurting those with a competitive component. To ensure a fair and fun environment, Sharkmob’s “main weapon” is a dedicated team of people “that is continuously looking [at] all the various reports that we get, and monitors for cheaters and hackers through various means.”
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt Anti-cheat
This method alone has banned around 755 accounts so far, that number increasing by an average of 50 per day.
The developer does, however, admit that it “cannot win over cheaters completely,” but will continue “making it as annoying as possible for people that cheat by removing them quickly,” which forces them to create a new Steam and Sharkmob account in order to continue playing.
Another piece of the Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt anti-cheat puzzle involves examining player behavior for “impossible values and patterns.” The developer looks at what the battle royale’s best players are capable of, making accounts that perform twice as well easy targets.
“To compare, this would be the same as someone being able to continuously break the world record in 100-meter sprint, which of course is highly unlikely and technically even breaks the laws of physics as its only possible to move the input device with precision at a certain speed as a human.”
In addition, players who have previously cheated will also end up banned retroactively.
Lastly, there is Easy Anti-Cheat, a software that’s all too familiar to fans of online games and which looks for attempts to alter the game’s executable.
“It takes some time to gather and analyze all the various information but once we have identified and securely confirmed the various hacks, we activate the ban wave katana which bans multiple accounts at once,” the developer notes.
Players using hacks identified by Easy Anti-Cheat are also automatically flagged, making it harder for them to get an unfair advantage over their peers.
As Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodhunt’s grows, its existing anti-cheat methods might, however, not be enough.
Sharkmob is considering and requesting feedback on adding two-factor authentication as well as “gating the veteran community behind a player level that takes a few hours to reach” while assigning new players to a different set of servers.
“Cheating has no place in Bloodhunt, and we have zero tolerance for this as it wastes precious development time that could have been better spent improving the gameplay instead and additionally sours the experience for our player base,” the developer said.
Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodhunt is out now on PC and PS5.
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