Dead by Daylight appears to be taking the issue of cheaters very seriously as evident in a recent update by one of the game's community managers. The post highlights Dead by Daylight's alarming ban statistics along with a roadmap detailing the game's future plans for improving its anti-cheat capabilities.
When the asymmetrical multiplayer survival-horror game kicked off in 2016, it became an instant hit thanks to its diverse cast of survivors and killers pitted in frantic and terrifying PVP matches. For fans of the horror genre, Dead by Daylight offers a unique experience as players take on the roles of iconic villains like Halloween's Michael Myers, Friday The 13th's Freddy Krueger, and Silent Hill's Pyramid Head. The game has since released numerous updates that add more killers and survivors from various franchises while refining the game's mechanics. As a popular online game, Dead by Daylight is faced with a constant arms race against hackers, cheaters, and bad actors using exploits or attempting to harass other players.
In a recent news post from developer Behaviour Interactive, the issue of cheaters and harassers is discussed in detail, highlighting the game's surprisingly high number of bans issued and revealing a roadmap for future plans on this front. Dead by Daylight has banned over 2,000 cheaters in the past week alone, adding to a shocking total of over 200,000 banned players in the game's lifetime. The game uses a combination of automated bans through the occasionally controversial Easy Anti-Cheat software, in-game countermeasures, and manual bans issued through personal investigation.
Dead by Daylight has laid out a four-point plan for its future anti-cheat measures. FIrst up, the game intends to step up its efforts to identify and fix vulnerabilities to limit the effects of cheats along with mitigating player sniping (forcefully joining a specific player's lobby). This was already partially addressed thanks to a recent Dead by Daylight update that gave streamers more security and anonymity features. Second on the list will be adding failsafes to common exploits, such as limiting the maximum time a match can run. Third, server-side validation will be implemented more often, removing cheaters' abilities to exploit the client. Lastly, Dead by Daylight intends to improve the player support system and reporting tools to make the game easier to moderate.
200,000 bans issued is a fairly significant number of bans for a non-free-to-play game, and that figure highlights the need for online games to take the matter seriously. The number is likely to rise once Dead by Daylight makes progress on its comprehensive plan to fight cheaters, and hopefully, other games with many cheaters like Grand Theft Auto 5 will follow suit.
Dead by Daylight is available on Mobile, PC, PS4, PS5, Stadia, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Dead by Daylight
