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Why Fall Guys’ “cheater island” was both the worst and best design choice
Cheat-proofing an online video game is a difficult process.
If you pay attention to gaming trends, you already know about the game “Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout”. A fun online party game for all ages, “Fall Guys” has captured the attention of over 2 million players since it has been released by Mediatronic and Devolver Digital. It is, by all means, a runaway success, especially during 2020 when distributed online gaming is likely the only way to safely play video games in large groups.
Every online game has trouble with players who want to cheat. In the case of “Fall Guys” where each game is a race to see who can reach the goal the fastest, or survive the longest, bad actors make their avatar move faster, jump higher, defy gravity, and other physics-based exploits. While this does raise some questions about the architecture of the client-server system in place for “Fall Guys” — the question remains. How to prevent cheaters from overrunning the game?
In a recent twitter thread, the official “Fall Guys” twitter account details their previous method of dealing with cheaters, dubbed “Cheater Island”. In short, in order to tweak their cheat detection in a way that is not unfairly banning players who are actually not cheating, they decided to provide leniency to players who do cheat. Instead of banning cheaters, they started segregating them out of the general pool of players and grouping them together. They created a server dedicated to creating game sessions comprised of only cheaters, that they dubbed “Cheater Island”, where cheaters play a cheat-laden game of “Fall Guys”, punishment-free.
Now, you may think this doesn’t sound like a great idea, and you’re right. But there are some good game design tidbits to learn from this, so let’s unpack this “Cheater Island” and discuss the good, bad and ugly.
GOOD: A Low-Stakes Iterative Approach
The primary concern raised by Mediatronic was the fear of banning players who were playing the game legitimately…
