Cheating is kind of a problem in almost every online game with competition, but it can be especially grating in Overwatch. Players who are trying to do their placement or competitive matches will sometimes notice people cheating and report it, but the match still goes on the record regardless of what the report says. In the newest developer update, Blizzard’s Jeff Kaplan explains that their new automatic anti-cheat system should shut this down by shutting the match down.
Now being tested in the Playable Test Realm servers, the new anti-cheat system will end a game once it detects cheats from a player. In theory, this should stop players from wasting time in a game where the result has been tainted by a cheater and having something on their record that wasn’t fair.
Anyone who is caught cheating will face, according to Kaplan, “very harsh punishments.” It is not detailed exactly what these punishments are, but presumably they will include banning, either temporarily or permanently.
This is an interesting method of dealing with cheaters and their ability to affect games rather than strictly dealing with the source problem of banning cheaters in the first place. It’s also fairly different from Apex Legends’ solution, also revealed a few days ago, to only make cheaters play against each other.
