Cheating is a huge problem in the gaming industry, especially at times when the gaming landscape has become more competitive than ever with the rising popularity of online multiplayer games. For publishers of such games like EA, battling cheaters and hackers will always be an ongoing endeavor, and one practical solution is to develop an anti-cheat system that employs effective mitigation techniques.

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According to a patent filed by EA last January, the anti-cheat system it's working on will be able to put cheaters at a disadvantage by imposing several penalties, one of which is to ignore 20% of their button presses. This is clearly designed to make it very difficult for cheaters to play the game, as every fifth move they make will be completely disregarded. On paper, this mechanism can give players a better chance to defeat cheaters on their own.

ea patent ignore cheater button presses

While the diagram shows an example of disregarded moves that are uniform, the patent also claims that the moves can be dismissed according to other patterns, such as Fibonacci pattern or reverse Fibonacci, while also still roughly conforming to the proportion of 20% over time. This way, cheaters can never know which of their intended moves will be completely dropped from the game.

The anti-cheat system EA is working on is also claimed to be able to detect if a player account is linked with another account that has previously been caught cheating. Therefore, cheaters won't be able to avert penalties simply by opening a new player profile to play the game. That's not to say that cheaters won't be given a chance for redemption, as the system is also designed so that one or more penalties can be removed from the player profile if a certain period of time has transpired since cheating was detected in the other profile.

In-house anti-cheat system has recently become a trend among big publishers. While there is no certainty for the patent to be developed into a final product at this point, EA can always see this as an investment for its future games as it looks to promote fair online gameplay.

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