The Rust Team Talks About How Many Cheaters There Really Are, and New Ways to Stop Them

The developer of RustFacepunch Studios, has released a new blog post for the game’s big monthly update. Among the new features is a new Anti-cheat update.

According to the study, since April there have been Total banned 63,393 players. While 8,018 of these bans were temporary, a whopping 55,375 were permanent. A breakdown revealed that there were 15,440 permanent bans in June, 19,876 in May, and 20,059 in April.

Between April and June, Facepunch statistics show that there were over 320,000 reports of potential cheaters from other players. However, these reports are only coming from the game’s official servers. As for the unofficial servers, the blog post states that there have been 3,645,165 reports since April.

Commentary from Rust developers

“Over the last 31 days, we’ve had 1,751,457 unique players and nearly half a million daily active players,” Facepunch said. “Using the above metrics, one could interpret that 1.2% of the total players are cheaters; it is very common for such players to use many accounts during the month. Cheaters often get an account suspension, get another account, get another ban, and so on, inflating the real number.”

The studio later said it was working on “many experimental functions to combat cheating” and that some of these changes are being completed and will be released soon. It is not known what they are, however.

There are many ways to annoy cheaters, and Call of Duty has showcased several examples over the years, including creating fake enemies, nullifying damage, and making honest players invisible. One of the most popular methods is the Splat, a technique that cuts off cheaters’ parachutes. But why not just ban the cheaters? According to the authors of Rust, the problem is that many users simply create a new account and start cheating again, in an infinite cycle. Making their life hell with strange events should be more effective and make them stop cheating.