Fall Guys hackers have been a problem for the last few weeks and Mediatonic is doing something a little weird: they’re asking that players stop making videos showing Fall Guys cheaters and to stop reporting them entirely.
If you haven’t yet played Fall Guys, you’ve missed out on a party battle royale that’s a lot of fun. In short, this game is a 3-D platformer where players have to navigate tricky obstacles in a Battle Royale format. People get eliminated in several rounds — and only one player can come out on top as the winner.
Fall Guys has been a massively popular game and that also presents a problem: there are quite a few Fall Guys hackers out there ruining games for people. Most commonly, these hackers will use some kind of hack to simply fly over all of the obstacles and land in the end zone.
Many game developers rely on their communities to report cheaters and hackers to ensure that the game is fun for everyone. Mediatonic, however, has done the complete opposite: they’re asking that players don’t report cheaters and to stop making videos about them.
“Please try to avoid sharing videos/posts about cheaters,” read a tweet from the official Fall Guys account. “They appear to encourage new players to cheat. Please don’t share ‘live streams’ of hackers – The one that keeps being shared is actually a looped video of someone who is already banned.”
There are two issues here: reporting cheaters and sharing videos of cheaters. These are two separate issues surrounding the game topic, and Mediatonic has provided a pretty good explanation of both.
There are only 9,999 possible numbers to represent players. If you were to tell them “Hey, Fall Guy #2,348 is hacking!,” that’s not very useful information because there are likely more than one thousand people sharing that exact same number at any one time. Furthermore, the game’s automated cheat detection system already bans the player at the end of the round anyway, so a report is unnecessary.
A broader problem is the subject of Fall Guys hackers videos. In Mediatonic’s estimation, talking about cheating (and naturally, showing cheating) encourages other people to cheat, so they’re asking for players to not share any videos to keep the problem from getting worse.
While these are certainly sensible requests, one has to wonder what’s being done to catch these cheaters and hackers quicker. Mediatonic has already said that Fall Guys hackers will be dealt with faster in a future update — hopefully, the cheating problem will soon be solved.
We're currently working on an update that will prevent a lot of the cheating from being possible 🙌
Until then:
😶 Players that are caught cheating during a game, will be banned afterwards
😶 We're catching a lot of players
😶 Most players that cheat are caught the first time
— Fall Guys (@FallGuysGame) September 2, 2020