Fall Guys Reveals and Shuts Down Cheater Island

Fall Guys today revealed that in addition to adding the much-lauded "Big Yeetus" soon, the popular video game will be implementing new anti-cheating measures using Epic Games' Easy Anti-Cheat. Rather than simply announce that it would be adding this soon, however, Fall Guys revealed just how the team had been dealing with cheaters until now, and it turns out that it was essentially pairing cheaters together on a Cheater Island, which is not exactly unheard of with multiplayer video games. But Cheater Island is gone now, leaving cheaters simply unable to log in.

Honestly, the full explanation for this, as explained on the video game's official Twitter account, is worth a read:

At launch, we had some of our own cheat detection built into the game

We weren't banning anyone at this point, just gathering data carefully

We wanted to be 100% sure that our cheat detection would only catch people who were legitimately cheating

No false flags! 👀

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Remember, at this point, we had data on who was cheating, but we weren't acting on it

Fall Guys Cheater Island™ had a population of 0

So, very carefully, over time, we started to lower the threshold on the cheat detection

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Our threshold was originally really tolerant

Cheaters would get caught... but not be insta-banished

We hoped that they might realise cheating kills the fun 👀

Most continued 😩

We want people to have fun, but not at the expense of others

So we kept lowering the threshold

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Now, if you can imagine:

You need 40+ players to actually populate a game.

Cheater Island isn't a location in the real world...

Cheater Island had it's own set of global servers

You'd need enough cheaters in your region in order to start a Cheater Island game

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

I'm sure you've noticed...

We try to be super open and upfront with you in all of our communications

It's been very difficult to talk about cheaters though... because everything we say... gives the cheaters more ammo

They were using any info to improve their cheating...

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

At this point...

Cheaters started to realise that they could team up with friends who weren't cheaters... and they could matchmake with them...

They were escaping Cheater Island 👀

🚨 Oh no 🚨

We raced to patch this out before they all realised

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

During all of this time... we kept increasing the thresholds on our cheat detection. We were 100% confident that anyone being flagged as a cheater was DEFINITELY cheating.

This was super important to us.

We didn't want to falsely ban anyone.

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Somebody actually uploaded this video to Reddit with the title:

"Ever played a round of Fall Mountain where all the players are cheating?"

The problem is... this LOOKS like Cheater Island but we can't be 100% sure pic.twitter.com/byJi6r0Ykc

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

We DO know that Cheater Island matches were happening

We just DON'T know if that's what those videos show

For that reason, we have closed down Cheater Island

Instead, cheaters are now unable to login

We are continuously improving the threshold on our cheat detection too

— Fall Guys 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Now...

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 👑 (@FallGuysGame) September 14, 2020

Fall Guys is currently available on both PlayStation 4 and PC. It continues to be updated, and Season 2 of the popular video game is set to launch in October. Developer Mediatonic has yet to officially announce a version of the video game for Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, or mobile, but it would appear that it is gauging demand. It is currently unclear whether it might show up on either of the next-gen consoles. You can check out all of our previous coverage of the wildly popular title right here.

What do you think of Fall Guys so far? Did you get stuck on Cheater Island? Let us know in the comments, or hit me up directly on Twitter at @rollinbishop to talk all things gaming!