Fall Guys is going to take a page from FromSoftware’s handling of Dark Souls 3; not that players will incur gory deaths every three minutes from a sniping archer two miles away, but more so that Steam‘s Family-Sharing functionality will be disabled to help block a frustrating swell of people that are managing to cheat in one of the most adorable titles out right now.
In a tweet that Mediatonic pushed out this morning, they’re expecting that blocking the family-sharing will help weed out a massive amount of cheaters from the battle-royale/Fusion Frenzy style of game that has taken the internet by storm.
We discovered cheaters were using Family-Sharing to get around our banning system on Steam by creating new accounts and sharing with themselves, so we've unfortunately had to disable that for now.
It should massively help with the cheating issues though!
— Fall Guys (@FallGuysGame) August 25, 2020
Of course, if there’s anything that is a guarantee in the modern era of online gaming, it’s that cheaters will inevitably find a new way to gain an advantage because, somehow, they deserve to win more than everyone else playing the game.
We’ve seen it in Counter-Strike, Warzone, and almost every competitively played title in existence; people will circumvent cheating protection because they want to win.
The move has infuriated a few fans of the title, stating that they’ve only purchased the title as it had Family-Sharing on Steam.
Imagine thinking this is a valid thought process
— Ki'el The Nomad (@NomadTheCreator) August 25, 2020
The movement, which is slowly growing on Reddit and Twitter, smells of the Valorant anti-cheat opposers: bad-faith actors that wanted to weaken Riot Games’ anti-cheat by starting a commotion about the Chinese deep-state using the anti-cheat to create an international bot-network.
A claim that, frankly, had validity should the stars align.
If the move does limit the number of cheaters online, however, it’s going to be an uphill battle to convince the community to rescind the protection; the only people who enjoy playing with cheaters are cheaters, and it’s infinitely less fun for them if they need to compete against other cheaters.
Yet the core demographic for Fall Guys (and any competitive title) is simply thrilled that there is a solution forthcoming sooner rather than later about the cheating which has become rampant in two short weeks, skewing results as players simply flew above obstacle courses or leaped outside of maps to protect themselves instead of…you know, competing.
Mediatonic noted that, once a more permanent solution is available, they are keen to turn Steam’s Family-Sharing option back on, yet offered no estimate as to when that may be. As long as courses can be played without cheaters, however, it’s difficult to mourn the loss of the feature in favor of keeping competition fair and balanced.
