While Halo Infinite pits Spartans against each other in multiplayer, developer 343 Industries has been fighting its own battle against cheaters behind the scenes. The recent mid-season update improved the game’s anti-cheat measures, but there’s more to come.
In a blog post on Halo Waypoint, the team’s PC, security, and safety departments detailed their plan to combat cheaters. “Cheating will be a never-ending battle,” the post reads. “The good news is, we’ve already laid a lot of the groundwork to continue this fight long into the future.” That groundwork has five key points.
The first is prevention, which stops cheating before it can even begin. Older bits of code are especially prone to this. Thus, 343 will “fix legacy components that were secure enough on a console but don’t meet the bar for a modern PC game.” Second is protection. The under-the-hood Arbiter system — not to be confused with the character of the same name — is how 343 does this now, and it secures game and player data during multiplayer matches.
After this is detection, which means the team will be figuring out how people cheat in order to shut those methods down. Fourth is enforcement: 343 wants to dole out bans that “correlate to the severity of cheats.” The punishment should fit the crime, if you will. Finally, the fifth point is improvement. It’s simple enough: 343 wants to continue evolving its tools as cheaters do the same.
The wording might be broad in the blog post, but it’s still good to know that the team is actively working on this issue. Updated anti-cheat tools are on the way, as are the game’s co-op mode and Forge.
