As Marathon continues into its second month, Bungie has reiterated its “zero-tolerance policy around cheaters”.
Just like any live-service multiplayer game, Marathon has its problems with cheaters, largely suffering from aimbots and wall hacks. While cheaters have been gliding through the game since launch, Bungie is increasing its efforts to take down cheaters.
“We have a zero-tolerance policy around cheating. We’re actively banning confirmed cheaters and expanding our telemetry and detection methods to better catch the aforementioned cheaters,” the developer told fans recently.
While Bungie is adamant that its strong anti-cheat is already present in the game, the studio announced that “more improvements will roll out over the coming weeks”. However, the developer noted that anti-cheat is never finished for an evolving game.
“Anti-cheat is a continuous cycle of monitoring, improving, and responding,” the developer said. “This is an area that we will continue to invest in to protect the integrity of your runs.”
Bungie explained that it will continue to improve moderation of voice comms and stream sniping following complaints from the community. Additionally, the team is improving the game’s reporting tool and report feedback to make sure players know what happens when they report cheaters.
Following launch, Marathon players have called for a similar anti-cheat functionality to Arc Raiders, a game with a very aggressive cheat detection suite. As for how potent Marathon’s anti-cheat system could become, there will always still be cheaters.
No matter what efforts Bungie makes towards stopping cheaters in its brilliant extraction shooter, those who want to cheat will find a way to cheat. However, with major improvements seemingly in development for the game as it continues towards Season 2, cheaters will hopefully become less prominent as time goes on.
Alongside its anti-cheat solutions, Bungie is also looking to stomp out exploits within the game. As of the game’s last patch, the game’s annoying Thief movement exploits have been culled, but (just like with cheaters) there’s always more work to do on that front.
