Once Human developers name and shame hundreds of banned players

Once Human's Second Season is ongoing, and the developers have taken this opportunity to take a swing at the cheater problem. In a recent blog post, Starry Studio gave a detailed list of all the players banned in the first three weeks of August, and on what charges these bans were meted out.

This is a second round of naming and shaming of hackers and exploiters on a public list like this from the Once Human developers. This may not tackle the cheater problem fully, but it's still a good reminder of the strict no-cheating policy even on PvE servers.

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Once Human has banned over 1000 cheaters now, but is it a big enough number?

Be it live service or single-player, a small number of enterprising players will always attempt to cheese their way through the game. Once Human's ban policy in this regard has a low barrier for conviction.

Players who have used Fast Travel to exploit Wilderness Express and get absurdly high scores also fall under this policing scope. Likewise, a few bug-abusing players received relatively mild punishments of bans lasting from three days to a week.

The larger crackdown, on the other hand, was on players using "Unauthorized Software" or those who were involved in "Malicious Code Cracking." They were banned for a flat amount of 3600 days - which for all intents and purposes might as well be a permaban.

Granted, these are not IP bans, so these Machiavellian individuals can simply hop on with an alt account on this free-to-play MMO. However, the grind would still be substantial for cheaters starting a new beginner character. The ban hammer thus did its job to both penalize and disincentivize cheating.

That said, as Reddit user Superb_Sea_1071 has pointed out in a related post on the Once Human subreddit, the ban hammer might need to cover more area. On the one hand, simply banning users for cheesing progression through purely in-game tools shows a very hardline stance against cheating. On the other, Starry Studio has only banned about 1000 players in over a month.

In a free-to-play game that has over 10 million registered users and likely 1 million active concurrent players, this number is not much. Once Human has PvP multiplayer, and cheating is much more serious in a competitive environment like that.

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By comparison, Rainbow Six Siege, a multiplayer game with a similarly sized playerbase, has banned five times as many users per month on average starting from its release in 2020.

In any case, the developers declared that their resolute efforts "to combat cheating and the malicious exploitation of bugs" have only just begun. It remains to be seen if the resolution holds sway, or if exploits will become more common in the coming days.

Check out our other guides on the game:

• All Gold Mods in Once Human, and where to get them
• All Memetic Specializations in Once Human and the best ones to pick
• Once Human weapons tier list
• All ammo types in Once Human, and how to craft them
• All Once Human Memetic tree perks, explored