Bungie’s anti-cheat policies are “non-negotiable.” If they detect that you’re cheating, you’re gone forever. Do not pass go, do not waste your calories whining about your ban online.
That is, according to a recent blog post and video pair released by the Marathon developer. In it, they don’t just illustrate what the cheating penalties will be – they describe how they intend to make the lives of cheat developers just a little bit worse.
“We want you to know your deaths are due to your own mistakes or enemy outplays,” the post reads. “Not because your run was compromised by network issues, cheaters, or the hardware hosting your connection to the world.”
“No network or security model can guarantee perfection, but we are committed to protecting the Marathon competitive experience and ensuring everyone has their fair chance at exfiltrating with a backpack full of sweet loot.”
If you’re worried about false-positives catching innocent players in this crossfire, Bungie said that an appeals system would be offered to players; but did not describe what the contents of that system might look like. Presumably, that’s because Bungie doesn’t yet know what it’ll look like either.
“No system is perfect,” the post continues, “so we will have an appeals system to monitor for any issues in detection.”
Technically, even this is not a promise of an unban. So far, Bungie has only confirmed what’s in the above quote: that this system will monitor for detection issues. Nothing more as of yet.
Bungie is taking the threat of cheaters extremely seriously, illustrating how the extraction shooter genre is especially reliant on all players playing fair. Dying to a wallhacker won’t just shove you into a respawn screen. After all, you stand to lose so much more than your life: your loot too!
Marathon Will Actively Deny Cheaters The Data They Need To Cheat
Bungie has designed Marathon such that cheat software will be outright starved of the information it needs to operate. The game will run a lot of important processes server-side, denying a malicious computer the ability to send, or read, data it’s not supposed to.
This information includes, but is not limited to, every single bullet fired from every gun. “New networking systems allow your movement and actions to feel responsive,” Bungie says, “while the server carefully tracks each bullet to its target even with high packet loss.”
“This new server authority model means that invalid client actions will be rejected without impacting other players’ experiences. This protects the gameplay experience against exploits such as teleporting, unlimited ammo, or damage manipulation.”
They’ve also got a ‘Fog of War’ system, that only sends each player the data they could reasonably expect to have. If a player “shouldn’t” be able to sense something through normal play, they just won’t get data about it. Bungie cites “wall hacks” as one of the cheats that’d be suppressed by this system.
Marathon will use client-side anticheat as well. “We use a combination of third-party game security software plus additional proprietary security layers,” Bungie clarifies, “many of which are new for Marathon. Our security includes both user-mode and kernel-mode components.”
Cheating in Marathon sounds like a seriously daunting task, but in an eternal arms race like the anti-cheat wars, nothing is truly impossible. We’ll find out precisely how hard it is to cheat in Marathon when the game gets a full release on March 5th.
