There are few things as maddening as sending the enemy to the great respawn point in the sky, only for him to spin and aimbot you down mercilessly seconds later. It disrupts the game’s immersion. Instead of a contest of skill, it becomes a contest of software exploits. The publisher behind the battle royale juggernaut Free Fire begins a nuclear housecleaning of its own. In an unprecedented enforcement action, the company has permanently banned more than 7.6 million accounts.
To contextualise that number, that is, pretty much the entire population of Hong Kong, was wiped from the server in one fell swoop. This is not just a warning; it is a death sentence on the Internet. The skins, ranks, or any progress for those accounts are gone, deleted into the void.
The Arsenal of Cheats
The bans breakdown shows what looks like a highly sophisticated cheating tools black market. The most common offences are “auto-aim” (aimbots) and ”it is wallhacks. An aimbot is a program that takes over the player’s cursor and automatically snaps it to an enemy’s head as soon as the enemy comes into the player’s line of sight. It eliminates the necessity for reflex. Wallhacks, on the other hand, make solid objects transparent so that a cheater can see opponents using trees and buildings as cover.
Apart from the use of modified client files, Garena also noted the use of virtual machines in a report. In fact, some players were even directly editing the game’s code to speed themselves up or make themselves invincible! It is an arms race. Creators build walls; Hackers build ladders. This time, however, the developers didn’t tip the ladder over until it was full of people.
The Technology of Detection
How do you nab seven million? You don’t do it manually. You use behavioural analysis algorithms. Modern-day anti-cheats work a hell of a lot like fraud detection at your bank. They look for statistical anomalies. Realistic but ultimately impossible for a human to achieve, a player with a 99% headshot rate over a thousand games. For example, if a player is unable to see an enemy but is still tracking that enemy’s movement, the software identifies it.
This wave of bans suggests Garena has improved its detection matrix, possibly using server-side validation to verify whether the data from players’ phones aligns with the game world’s physics. For example, if the game knows you can only walk 5 meters per second and your phone says you travelled 50 meters in the last second, the server knows you must be cheating. Such a logic is cold and hard, without any room for dispute.
Saving the Ecosystem
Why go to such extremes? Because a hacker-filled game is a game that is dying. Free Fire depends on a fair balance of play. Once legitimate players realise they cannot win without cheating, they abandon the game. And once those real players exit, so too do the “whales” (those who pay for a few cosmetics).
A short-term hit to active user counts (because it means banning 7.6 million users) is a long-term investment in the health of the game. This sends a message to the community that the integrity of a match is more important than the number of users. This is vindication for the millions of honest players who’ve taken a bullet through a wall, or been blasted with a sniper rifle from the other side of the map. For the time being, the playing field has been levelled.
