Wardogs cheaters will be easy to deal with, claims CEO

FPS games on PC have had cheaters and players using unfair hacks for as long as they’ve been around. Various anticheat solutions have come and gone, to varying degrees of success. One of the latest, that almost every modern FPS game is implementing, are hardware-level protections, such as enabling secure boot and TPM 2.0. Wardogs will follow suit with that requirement, Bulkhead CEO Joe Brammer told Polygon. He wouldn’t go into much more detail about the studio’s specific anticheat plans, but when it comes to exploits, he thinks the game itself will protect players from unfair behavior:

“The nice thing about cash is we can clearly see abnormal behavior,” he explained over Google Meet. “What we see is probably very similar to what supermarkets see: people are very predictable in how they both spend and treat their money. So we can quickly start to map out what is an unusual behavior and what isn’t.”

By “cash,” Brammer is referring to the Wardogs metagame economy it has. Every action you take in Wardogs will reward you with XP and cash. You can then spend that cash on better weapons, equipment, vehicles —you get the gist. However, to the untrained eye, it may seem easy to exploit, because players can just repeat actions ad infinitum, right?

That’s what he’s talking about when he describes “abnormal behavior.” Playing in that way will very quickly flag to Bulkhead that you’re trying to take advantage of the system. But there’s another, even better method to disincentivize players from doing it: diminishing returns. Performing the same action on repeat will reward less cash each time.

“Even if you’re not abusing it, if someone shoots me and I get revived, that person gets $1,000. If I get shot by the same person again, the sniper, I’m like ‘You got me again, for god’s sake,’ but I can be revived again. That person gets $800, then $600, and so on. It goes down anyway because that’s not a fun gameplay loop for anyone. If you want to sit in a server and abuse that with a friend, sure. You won’t make that much money, we can see it, and we’ll ban you. So cash is the best anticheat.”

While it isn’t hacking in the traditional sense because offenders haven’t installed any third-party cheats, this sort of exploitation can ruin a game that has an economy, such as Wardogs. Another example is Arc Raiders; though it approaches currency and experience differently, mechanics such as the expedition often require a certain amount of cash on your character to reap the most rewards.

As a result, various duplication glitches have been rife throughout the game’s lifespan, and it seems like for every method that gets banned, another two show up to take its place. Numerous Arc Raiders patches have claimed to “fix” a duplication method. So for Wardogs to be hyper-aware of how players may try to game the system this early on bodes well for its future.

Read more from our interview here, where Brammer explains how Wardogs is an FPS for “dad gamers.”