So, with F2P rapidly approaching, a new dread has set on myself, and that is that the gates to cheating will be rammed open.

As anyone knows, F2P and cheaters typically go hand in hand. Getting banned hurts a lot less when you got the game for free. And repeat offenders can just rejoin the battlefield on an easy-to-make brand new steam account to keep ruining everyone's day.

So now my question is, what is being done to fight back?

Right now the tools we have to deal with cheaters seem extremely lacking.

Ensuring the enemy is a cheater:

Ahh, the classic conundrum, is he cheating or is he Shouldermount in disguise? Too fine a distinction?

Right now, we have no tools to tell. There is no spectator mode. There is no kill cam. There isn't a damage-taken resume when you die. And we have no way of knowing a persons Accuracy percentage.

All we can do is right now is take a wild guess, and probably look extremely salty if we call out a cheater with no proof.


Voting players off:

We can offer to vote kick player, but there is no actual vote, players have to manually tab, hit E, select the player in question and then hope 5 or more people follow the same process. Most games streamline the voting system so that once someone goes into the trouble of singling out a cheater, all other players just need to press one button for yes/no. Also, we should be allowed to see why said player is being voted off.

If there is one caveat we have, is that members of the opposite team can kick someone right now, which is amazing, but it does bring a problem: We have no way of informing the enemy team that they have a cheater.

That's right, due to the games ridiculous policy of no talking to the enemy during matches, we can't alert the enemy team they have a cheater. This needs addressing.

Reporting players:

There is no in-game way of reporting a player. And finding the webway of reporting players is a hassle. I don't actually know if we even have a team dedicated to this or if it's taking out time from the QA team.

Automated Bans:

I don't believe the game has any automated ban system. How can we experience schadenfreude if we can't post people getting VAC'd while blatantly gloating about their cheating?

Limited access to ranged weaponry:

This could be an interesting one seeing as they hinted that Free players won't have access to all classes. However, most likely they'll have access to Tacts, which are the ones most likely to encourage cheaters.

So all in all, I'm extremely worried that we might head to F2P with almost no tools to combat cheating. And I'd rather not have the devs start working on this after it has become a problem.

Poor Shouldermount, always getting blamed for everything.

Friend of mine saw a stormboy with a Kannon deffgun once on harkus. Or was it a loota with a jet pack?

MM needs to count him as 5 players when balancing matches

Was going to ask this for this week's twitch stream.

I am very curious how behaviours going to act against hackers.
since this game is only playable through steam It's gonna suffer alot from hacker if it goes f2p.
You can still see CSGO and TF2 full of hackers eventhough valve trying their best to send them vacation.

Overwatch is great example of punishing hackers though its not f2p game. basically permantely ban everyhackers even if they make new account prevent it by reroute their ip address.(basically perma ban ip address)

This will be the make or break of the game. There are hundreds of possible ways to troll and sabotage a match and literally nothing you can actively do against it. By going f2p ppl will just do these things on their smurf accounts without any fear of repercussion.
Even now the amount of verbal abuse, namecalling and the names of various characters are out of line and not enforced. Sabotaging gameplay like constantly misplacing the rhino, 1 person squad vehicle spam and the various methods of non lethal friendly fire will skyrocket.
If you think those are just doomsday ramblings look at f2p communities like League of legends and see to which length players go there to aggrivate their teammates for the sake of triggering them or to prove a (their) point. (mid or feed, x char or afk)

true I have seen other factions players join LSM and just sabotaging by riding rhino straight into lava.

Nathan mentioned IP addresses getting banned in one of the live streams. I don't remember which one.

next time screenshot