Things Are Getting Worse For Fall Guys Cheaters

Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout has proven to be a smash hit since it was released at the beginning of last month. The battle royale party game is gearing up to launch its second season any day now, so fans may be happy to know that this new season will feature more than just fancy new costumes and maps. According to a recent announcement, fans of Fall Guys will soon have extra protection from cheaters in the form of Epic Games' Easy Anti-Cheat.

However, the road to getting Easy Anti-Cheat in Fall Guys has been an interesting one. It turns out that the game's development team has made multiple attempts to curb the amount of cheaters in the game. Recently, the Fall Guys Twitter account told fans the wild tale of Cheater Island.

Apparently, Fall Guys went to some bizarre anti-cheating measures in the early days of the game. At first, Mediatonic had programmed its own anti-cheat software into Fall Guys, but there were some concerns over whether it would work as intended. Rather than banning people outright for suspected cheating, Mediatonic instead wanted to study the different ways that people would cheat. This would allow the developers to make sure that future anti-cheat measures wouldn't produce any "false flags" or otherwise ban people who didn't deserve it. Like a bunch of true scientists, the devs decided that it would be easiest to do this if all of the cheaters were in one place. With that idea in mind, Mediatonic formed a plan to send all of the cheaters to their own private oasis.

This place was given the appropriate nickname of "Fall Guys Cheater Island." The Fall Guys Twitter account describes this island as "a magical place where cheaters could happily compete against themselves for the Cheater's Crown."

This actually isn't an entirely new concept. Other games have used similar setups to punish unscrupulous players in the past. For instance, Grand Theft Auto Online has a "Bad Sports" lobby where it puts some of the more unfair players in the game. Infinity Ward has explored doing something similar with people who cheat in Call of Duty: Warzone.

The hope was that some of these Fall Guys players would realize that cheating made the game less fun, but it didn't play out that way. When there weren't enough cheaters to populate a 40-person match, the cheaters would be stuck on a loading screen where their character kept falling forever. This led to people thinking the game was broken, when in fact it was just corralling the cheaters in one place. 

Even more frustrating was the fact that Mediatonic didn't feel like it was the right time to tell everyone about Cheater Island. According to Mediatonic, cheaters were using every little bit of information to find loopholes in the game's anti-cheating measures. Because of this, Mediatonic kept quiet about the people who were falling forever, which also wasn't a great look for the game. 

By gradually lessening the threshold of Fall Guys' cheat detection software, Mediatonic was shocked to see how quickly Cheater Island finally filled up with enough new residents for a match. It came as even more of a shock when people began to seemingly upload videos of their gameplay on Cheater Island. While some of the videos are probably very entertaining, they introduced a brand new problem for the developers.

As pointed out by the Fall Guys Twitter account, video of a server in which every single player is cheating, no matter how entertaining it may be, "makes the game look bad." And so, Mediatonic decided to shut down Cheater Island and go a different route. Mediatonic explained, "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 ... as soon as we realised we were in an ARMS RACE we called up the experts at Epic."

Which brings players to the present. The next update for the game, according to the Fall Guys Twitter account, will be called "BIG YEETUS AND ANTI-CHEATUS." It seems that the game will not only be adding Easy Anti-Cheat with its next update, but also the controversial "Big Yeetus" device that was recently teased on social media. Big Yeetus is a giant hammer that can smack players across a map, and it caused a bit of an uproar among Fall Guys fans when it was first announced.

Season 2 of Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is set to launch on Oct. 6, but this new update seems to be headed to the game sooner than that. Hopefully the addition of Easy Anti-Cheat will make things easier on honest Fall Guys players and the developers trying to hunt down cheaters.