Respawn has revealed they are now officially implementing Titanfall’s anti-cheat system, and the way they are going about it is glorious, but may have problems.
So, they explain that they had been using FairFight to seek out cheaters since the game’s official launch, but bans hadn’t been getting implemented since March 21. (We can actually corroborate that in our report four days before that here.) Cheaters will see this red message at the Private Lobby screen:
* Fairfight: Cheat detected
This is where it gets good. So yes, cheaters can still keep playing Titanfall, but only against other banned players, culled from the herd into a twisted version of time out. Respawns describes gameplay in the banned players’ lobby as the ‘Wimbledon of aimbot contests.’
Now, here’s where it can get nebulous and sucky. See, if your friends are cheaters, you get penalized by association. If you are in a party with a cheater, that party will be relegated to the banned players’ lobby. In other words, you’re stuck playing with those aimbots. This is not a ban applied to you, but your friend, so you can still play in the regular lobbies assuming you do not play with your banned friend.
Of course, you can dispute bans, by emailing anticheat at respawn dot com. I have some reservations about this system: it would seem cheaters would be incentivized to drag their friends down with them. Wouldn’t this arrangement unwittingly place most players stuck in banned players’ lobbies? Maybe they feel cheaters should still have the opportunity to keep playing since their money is also good? Considering this is the 1st time we’re seeing something like this being applied at this scale, we are about to find out. We’ll let you know if Respawn updates the public on how well their anticheat is going.
