Incredibly popular battle royale gameshow Fall Guys has been battling a hacker problem as of late, though thankfully it seems back-up is coming in the form of Epic's Anti-Cheat system. Ahead of that though, the official account has given an entertaining explanation of how developer Mediatonic has tried to deal with the issue thus far.
As the Twitter thread details, the game launched with some cheat detection, so they were able to tell who was cheating, but at the time weren't doing anything about it; so they would be flagged as cheaters, but no punishments given. After tweaking the system to ensure false flags weren't an issue, they started secretly building a project known as 'Cheater Island' — an artificial 'region' of servers were cheaters would be matchmade with each other to ensure they'd all play together.
After we confirmed that it was working - We secretly launched
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
Fall Guys Cheater Island™
It was a magical place where cheaters could happily compete against themselves for the Cheater's Crown*
*Literally just a normal crown but tainted with a hollow feeling of guilt and regret
Over time, they began lowering the threshold on the cheat detection so that the next time they tried to matchmake, they'd be sent to the queue on Cheater Island. The slight issue was that Cheater Island had its own set of global servers, so they'd also need enough cheaters to "populate" the cheating servers. This meant many cheaters were actually stuck in the falling animation loading screen before the game for a very long time. Alas, cheaters being cheaters they also found ways around this that the developers had to plug including using Family Sharing on Steam.
Then last week it seems the Cheater Island servers finally got enough people to have matches, which resulted in some very interesting videos shared to social media of people who the developers think were Cheater Island matches, although they clarify they have no way to be certain. As a result, sadly, the developers have now closed down Cheater Island and cheaters will now just find themselves unable to login.
Here's another video that we think is Cheater Island
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
The person recording isn't cheating...
Either they didn't cheat, just for the video...
Or it's a genuine server and a legit player...
Either way, it makes the game look bad pic.twitter.com/wxTyIA9Urr
Which brings us to the present day, and the Fall Guys account has confirmed that the game's next patch will be entitled 'Big Yeetus and Anti-Cheatus' which will include the game getting Epic's Anti-Cheat system, as well as —presumably — the big hammer Big Yeetus that was teased a couple of weeks ago. No word on exactly when the update is due yet, but it's likely not far off.
Now...
— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020
Our next update is called:
BIG YEETUS AND ANTI-CHEATUS
I'll tell you more about the Yeetus part later
But the Anti-Cheatus part...
We're actually adding Epic's Anti-Cheat which will be a huge step forward as we continue to improve things!
COMING SOON
Fall Guys is available now on PlayStation 4 and PC.