Deadlock Cheaters Are Being Turned Into Frogs
Deadlock, Valve’s newest game, has been racking up extremely impressive player counts. At the time of writing, 78,826 players are currently playing Deadlock. Those numbers are doubly impressive when you consider the fact that the game isn’t even officially out yet. Sadly, not all of those users play fair. In an effort to combat Deadlock cheaters, Valve has recently released the first version of their anti cheat. With this anti-cheat, players can punish cheaters in a hilarious way: they can choose to turn them into frogs.
Cheaters Frogged Up
On the official Deadlock forums, Valve dev Yoshi explains how the frog-process will work:
“When a user is detected as cheating, during the game session the opponents will be given a choice between banning the user immediately and ending the match or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them afterwards. The system is set to conservative detection levels as we work on a v2 anti-cheat system that is more extensive. We will turn on the banning of users in a couple of days after the update is out. When a match is ended this way, the results will not count for other players.“
We all know how frustrating cheaters can be. Seeing them banned in the middle of a match is pretty satisfying, but seeing them turned into helpless low HP frogs is all the more fun. Players who are in a rush can also vote to just simply ban the user immediately and end the match right there and then.
Important to note is that the result of the match get nullified for all players. If you happen to end up with a cheater on your team who then gets turned into a frog, you don’t have to worry about the consequences. Obviously, knowingly queuing with a cheater will probably have consequences further down the line.
The Future of Deadlock’s Anti-Cheat
Valve currently has ‘a group of people working on anti cheat’, as they mention on their Discord channel. There is also a review group on Discord that manually looks into reported cheaters games, all with the aim of making the AC more robust.
Just how effective Deadlock’s anti cheat will be is obviously not known yet. Valve’s TF2 and CS2 games are notoriously plagued with cheaters in the higher ranks, so hopefully they manage to put out a more robust anti cheat system for their latest game. And who knows: perhaps they can learn a thing or two in the process and apply those things to the anti cheat systems of their existing games.
