Valve's latest third-person MOBA-like hero shooter, Deadlock, has had a pretty serious cheater problem, despite still being an invite-only public test. While the game has thus far operated on a player reporting system to identify and punish cheaters, a recent game patch has introduced a rather comical—and seemingly effective—anti-cheat system that can either ban cheating players or turn them into frogs until the end of the match.

Valve says that the new anti-cheat system is set up to be fairly conservative at the moment to avoid any false positives. Aside from the new anti-cheat, Deadlock's September 26 update introduced a new hero, Mirage, whose design and gameplay seem rooted in the jinn from Arabic myths (aka djinn or genie) and added a pretty vast collection of gameplay updates, balances, and quality-of-life improvements throughout the game.

Valve's latest arena shooter Deadlock has been generating hype for a long time, with recent concurrent player counts exceeding 170,000 at one point, according to SteamDB. More recently, however, reports indicate that cheaters are already invading Deadlock, despite the fact that the game is still in invite-only public alpha testing.

As shown in a recent Reddit post containing a kill-cam video from Deadlock, a supposed cheater very brazenly appears to use a wall hack to track an enemy through a wall and pre-emptively dodge an attack. In the clip, the gamer who spotted the alleged infraction, this isn't even the first time they have encountered the same cheater in-game, and there are countless reports on both Reddit and the Deadlock forum reporting similar experiences.

The Call of Duty RICOCHET Anti-Cheat team announced earlier this month that their newly updated system was capable of detecting "third-party hardware devices that alter the Call of Duty gameplay experience" - this makes reference to a plethora of gaming input modification devices including the Cronus Zen/Max, XIM Apex and FPS Boost Strike Pack. All readily available from direct stores, Amazon and various e-tailers. These hardware modules are hooked up to a gamepad or mouse plus keyboard combination, and allow the user to bypass the legitimate control input detection on the host hardware, be it a games console or PC. Stock scripts and macros can be utilized - for example - to boost in-game aim assist to unprecedented levels, mitigate weapon recoil, and add support for mouse and keyboard in otherwise non-compatible games. Anti-cheat software suites have been unable to detect the extra layer of code, since it runs on an external device - until now.

CoD's security team elaborates on their cheat spotter: "Since our previous progress report, TeamRICOCHET has developed and tested a detection for third-party hardware devices that alter the Call of Duty gameplay experience. These devices act as a passthrough for controllers on PC and console and, when used improperly or maliciously, can provide a player with the ability to gain an unfair gameplay advantage, such as reducing or eliminating recoil. Testing is complete: This detection is deployed globally on all platforms. Users across PC or console who are detected to be using third-party hardware devices to impact the Modern Warfare II or Warzone 2.0 gameplay experience will first see a warning about the improper use of these devices..."

One thing that phenomenon games like PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds can boast of is an extraordinary number of active players at any given time (there's been in excess of 3 million active players at one point in time already). This is mostly due to the multiplayer, competitive nature of the game; and where there's competition, there's ways (and ways) of trying to trump it. In a blog post, PUBG developers have taken an open stance on the issue of cheaters, which continues to be one of the most harrowing plagues in PUBG. And the results are in: PUBG has detected "over 100,000 instances of the new pattern related to use of cheat and now we have confirmed that it was clearly an attempt of compromising our game." And for those, players, there's only one solution: "these players will be permanently banned in a single wave."

That more players will be banned than many games have players at any one point in their longevity is already impressive enough. However, PUBG's dedication to maintain its game in a fun, fair state has become a torch of sorts for the company: "We will continue to check the data logs like this even if it means the anti-cheat team has to filter through hundreds of billions of data logs manually. In addition, we are looking into adopting a new solution to detect and ban more cheaters and we have been continuously strengthening our security systems. We have also liaised with investigative authorities in some countries to take legal actions against developers and distributors of cheats. We are determined to take strong measures against them going forward." Et tu, cheaters? Ready to feel the banhammer of righteousness?

Playing against hackers and cheaters in multiplayer games is rarely fun, so now Rockstar is showing them just how it feels. It's hit upon a cruel and unusual punishment for cheaters in Max Payne 3's multiplayer: forcing them to play in a "Cheaters Pool" filled only with other hoodlums. "Anyone found to have used hacked saves, modded games, or other exploits to gain an unfair advantage in Max Payne 3 Multiplayer, or to circumvent the leaderboards will be quarantined from all other players into a 'Cheaters Pool', where they'll only be able to compete in multiplayer matches with other confirmed miscreants," Rockstar explains in a blog post. They'll also be cut from the leaderboards. Rockstar could deign to allow these rapscallions to rejoin civilised society, but will permaban them for a second infraction. Lets hope that one day all online games will adopt such measures.

If online gaming wasn't hard enough a game-hacking site called Artificial Aiming has some members that are now targeting innocent players for Punkbuster bans in Battlefield 3. They were able to do this by corrupting a streaming Punkbuster ban list shared by certain server admins. A junior member from the Artificial Aiming forums that took the lead on this attack is focusing on servers that use GGC-Stream. He is are quoted as saying,

"We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans. In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban wave and now were are banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150+ bf3 players alone"