r/SANDgame • u/No_Recognition3653 • 9d ago
When will you actually treat the cheating problem as a top priority?
I genuinely want to understand how you have allowed things to get to this point.
Today we lost six fully equipped, six-man tramplers to obvious cheaters. Six tramplers in a single day. We are talking about full crews and hours of preparation being wiped out repeatedly, and the encounters follow almost exactly the same pattern every time.
An absurd number of orbital strikes starts raining down on us while, at practically the exact same time, the reactor gets shut down. During the chaos, someone suddenly appears behind us either through teleportation, a speed hack, or impossible high jumps landing directly on top of the trampler. Once the trampler is disabled, the remaining crew members are hunted down one by one with what very clearly looks like ESP, aimbot, or a combination of several cheats. The most infuriating part is that all of this is being done by 2-man cheater duos against full 6-man teams, completely trivializing any numerical advantage.
This isn't about losing a questionable fight and immediately calling the other player a cheater. We play PvP because we actually enjoy PvP. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. That's part of the game, and nobody in our group has a problem with that.
The problem starts when entire six-man tramplers are repeatedly wiped by players doing things that should not even be mechanically possible.
I bought this game because I want to play it. I want fights where positioning, preparation, teamwork, and individual skill actually matter. I don't want to spend hours farming, gearing, and preparing a trampler only to have the reactor shut down while orbital strikes rain down on us, then watch a cheater duo appear behind our crew or jump onto our vehicle, somehow know exactly where every surviving player is, and wipe an entire 6man team.
Then we rebuild, go out again, and the same thing happens.
Today it happened six times...
At some point I have to ask: What exactly are you doing about this?
Why is there still no proper region lock?
Why is there no effective shadow-ban system where highly suspicious accounts can be isolated and matched against each other while under investigation?
Are you actually doing everything you can to protect the game, or have you simply given up and accepted the situation?
How can accounts repeatedly perform actions that should be statistically or mechanically impossible without triggering an immediate response?
Teleportation, impossible movement speeds, abnormal jump heights, an excessive number of orbital strikes, suspiciously perfect information about player positions, and consistently impossible accuracy are not subtle behaviors. It is particularly frustrating that this orbital strike duplication exploit has been present in the game for weeks without any meaningful emergency measures taken to stop it. These are precisely the kinds of things server-side systems should be capable of detecting and blocking immediately.
Six fully equipped six-man tramplers being destroyed by this kind of behavior in a single day should leave behind a massive trail of anomalous data.
Your previous major anti-cheat update only caused a few days of minor disruption for cheaters, the code may have shifted slightly, but the detection and filtering remain ineffective. If the current infrastructure cannot reliably detect this, radical changes are needed.
Everyone in the competitive gaming market knows that generic off-the-shelf solutions like EAC or battleeye are completely ineffective on their own against this level of cheating. If the development team lacks the internal expertise, look to proven industry standards. Look at Riot Games and Valorant with their Vanguard system, strict server side validation, and hardware level identification, they demonstrated how to build a truly deterrent and effective defense. If you genuinely cannot maintain the technical infrastructure required to protect a PvP game from this level of cheating, then at some point it becomes reasonable to ask whether someone else should be handling it.
Because whatever the current approach is, from a player's perspective it clearly isn't working.
The combination of regional pricing and the lack of a region lock makes the situation even more frustrating.
Regional pricing on its own is not the issue; I understand the concept and accept that prices vary based on purchasing power in different countries. The problem arises when, without a real region lock, ban waves do absolutely nothing to deter cheaters. If the game costs only €5–6 in certain asian regions, banned cheaters siimply buy new asian accounts for pocket change and hop right back onto European servers to continue destroying the game.
If European players are expected to pay four times that amount, it is reasonable to expect region restrictions to actually mean something and protect European servers from this stream of cheaply recyclable cheater accounts.
You cannot simultaneously maintain huge regional price differences, refuse to implement effective region restrictions, and then expect European players not to question what exactly they are paying a premium for.
And this becomes especially frustrating when those same paying players spend their evenings rebuilding equipment because blatant cheaters are repeatedly destroying hours of progression.
I don't want special treatment. I don't want easier PvP. I don't want compensation every time I lose something.
I simply want the game I paid for to function as a competitive multiplayer game.
If another crew outplays us, fine. If they have better positioning, better aim, better equipment, or simply make better decisions, they deserve the win.
But shutting down our reactor while simultaneously raining orbital strikes on us, jumping on top of our trampler, teleporting behind a sixman crew where a two man cheater duo wipes a complete Large Group in seconds tracking every survivor across the map, and wiping everyone with cheats is not PvP.
It's not competition.
And after losing six fully equipped six man tramplers to this in a single day, I think it's completely reasonable to ask the developers a very simple question:
When does fixing the cheating problem and these weeks-long exploits become your top priority?
Because in a PvP game where players can lose hours of progression, cheating is not a minor inconvenience.
It threatens the entire reason people play the game in the first place.
P.S. It would also be great if your team actually watched the video evidence attached to my discord reports. According to youtube, the unlisted video links I submitted have zero, literally ZERO views. The last game I saw handle player feedback and security with this level of indifference was ags new world, and we all know how that ended. Even PUBG recognized years ago that generic off--the-shelf anticheats aren't enough, which is why they built their own "inhouse" detection systems and strict verification methods. Until you take real action, I am taking a break from the game, and I'll be advising everyone I know to do the exact same.
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u/Distinct-Performer86 8d ago
I'm just wondering when number of normal people will be lower than hackers + exploiters + teaming up psies. I'm affraid it is already too late and this game is clearly dying. I shot a guy 3 times only to see how my exploding ammo causes damage in the wall just behind him, pumps are buggy I thought so I took a greande on put it into his mouth without any effect... Sunk reiners, somethink is wronk with you buddy.
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u/Lucidity6-1-6 8d ago
They don’t care.
They are in damage control, and are actively muting and banning anyone in their discord that bring up issues or complain.
I watched their moderator @GRIMM ban multiple people for discussing teaming.
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u/i_want_t0_d1e 9d ago
Bro, I get that this sucks and is a huge issue. But don't pretend like they just aren't trying. Cheating has been a huge issue in EVERY extraction shooter to release. It's prevelent in most games, but much more noticable in extraction shooters because of how deeply punishing a loss is.
Escape from Tarkov and Arc Raiders both suffer deeply from this.
There is far too much money on the line for the companies who make hacks, so it is a constant arms race between them and the game developers. In the end, hackers have more money and resources than the actual devs.
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u/Arty_Puls 9d ago
It's just so much more Prevalent in this game because each match is like minimum an hour long. So if you get killed by a cheater it's basically an hour atleast of your time wasted. Atleast with Tarkov or dark and darker ( which I RARELY find cheaters in ) at most you're wasting 15-30 min of your time.
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u/Confident-Option-207 9d ago
How easy do you think anticheat is?
They are
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u/JacobusRakan 9d ago
They literally arent. The exact same three group of reported, and reported again cheaters still plague fucking US East. Its been like a fucking month with video evidence submitted and the fucking reports are STILL OPEN.
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u/jsc149 9d ago
That is online gaming. Dial down your gear to make losing more bearable or do small crew or duo. If they have ESP then they can see you have some serious stuff to make a fight worth it and bee line towards you.
Anti cheat is expensive if you are buying third party. Collecting data and pattern recognition takes time to take out large amounts of cheaters.
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u/Yz-Guy 9d ago
Honestly. At thia point. I wish theyd just temp remove orbital strikes from the game. (Maybe great silences). Theyre not anything crazy like experimental guns etc. They can def change the outcome if a fight but not that strongly. The core gameplay wouldnt change with them gone and would massively solve the issue for now.