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Fall Guys Studio Forced Cheaters To Play Together On Cheater Island

Mediatonic closed it down in favor of harsher penalties for cheating.

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Fall Guys studio Mediatonic has revealed an unusual way of dealing with cheaters that it has since abandoned: It sent them to "Cheater Island," where they were forced to play with other cheaters.

"At launch, we had some of our own cheat detection built into the game. We weren't banning anyone at this point, just gathering data carefully. We wanted to be 100% sure that our cheat detection would only catch people who were legitimately cheating," read a tweet by the official Fall Guys account. "After we confirmed that it was working--We secretly launched Fall Guys Cheater Island."

The Fall Guys Twitter account tweeted a long thread about cheater island, how the studio was overwhelmed by the amount of cheaters trying to play Fall Guys, and its upcoming plans to combat dishonest players. The UK-based studio reemphasized that it's adding Fortnite's anti-cheat system in the coming weeks.

"Our cheat detection system was good but we hadn't expected so many players and we had no idea the lengths that some players would go to cheat. We tried to create a system around honesty," the studio tweeted. "But as soon as we realized we were in an ARMS RACE we called up the experts at Epic."

Infinity Ward did something similar when the Santa Monica-based studio put Call of Duty: Warzone cheaters into the same lobby to try and discourage players from cheating. The popular battle royale still has a huge cheating problem.

Mediatonic decommissioned Cheater Island this week after videos of cheater-filled matches started to spread around social media. The studio said that those videos "made the game look bad" and said future updates should help combat the Fall Guys cheating issue.

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