Valve has a creative and extremely amusing solution to punish players who are suspected of cheating in Deadlock, the company’s MOBA-style third-person shooter that is currently playable, but in early development. As of Thursday, cheaters will be turned into helpless frogs, and whether they turn into frogs or not is decided by the opposing team.
According to an update posted to the official Deadlock forums, the game’s new (and still incomplete) anti-cheat detection system, will work like so:
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.
Here’s what punitively being transmogrified into a frog in Deadlock looks like in practice:
Valve’s certainly not new at this anti-cheat thing, and has crafted similarly creative solutions to combat cheaters in the past. The developer has previously lured cheaters into exposing themselves, in games like Dota 2, and then issued tens of thousands of account bans. Sometimes those bans even come gift-wrapped, in an effort to humiliate cheaters and delight honest players. Valve has also rewarded players for playing fair; Team Fortress 2 players who didn’t take advantage of idling programs to unlock hats in that game were rewarded with a hat of their own, the Cheater’s Lament.
Other developers have pursued similarly creative ways to punish and shame cheaters. Call of Duty’s anti-cheat measures have caused cheaters to see hallucinations and disabled their parachutes in games of Warzone, sending them plummeting them to their deaths as they deployed onto the battle royale game’s island. Fall Guys developer Mediatonic took a more traditional approach to dealing with cheaters, segregating them to their own island so they could fight only among their dishonest brethren.
Valve’s approach to dehumanizing Deadlock cheaters is apparently a long-pursued anti-cheat measure at the company. According to former developer Burton Johnsey, Valve developed a similar system for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive that would turn cheaters into one of the game’s infamous chickens.
