[2019] Make 'Being Boosted by a Cheater' Bans Permanent

Hey there,

Why are people only banned for 15 days when they have played with a cheat in a large number of matches?

15 days is the highest length of temporary ban we issue, we skip all previous time lengths and go straight to 15 days. We keep track of who has been previously banned for "being boosted by a cheater" and if the same behaviour continues on that account, we can ban permently.

Why are cheats allowed to cheat for a large number of matches?

The battle against the people who create new cheating software is never going to be over, for any game this will be a 24/7 fight. When a new cheat is created, BattlEye has to have time to investigate what that user is doing, how they are doing it and what is different from the cheaters profile compared to legitimate players. So for a visual example;

Player A is cheating using ABC Cheats and have been playing for 1 week, The BattlEye client has to monitor that profile and then ban once configured to realise what that profile is doing differently and how to detect other users that are using ABC Cheats.

Once that person is banned, we look into who has been pre-made queuing with that user, anything over an X amount of times (which we're not obviously going to share) are deemed as an accessory to that in some regard and receive the 15 day ban. This person hasn't actually been cheating technically, this is why only 15 days are applied as a first measure.

Why do these ban waves seem to conveniently coincide with new Seasons and new content releases?

We have several ban waves throughout each season, but BattleEye bans continuously throughout regardless. The bans for 'Being Boosted By A Cheater' go out in waves, because it takes time to look through that many profiles and confirm they were actively queuing with a known/then banned cheater.


Nothing is as simple as "Just ban them all permanently" and from the outside I can definitely see why that would be the go to answer to fix everything, but it just isn't. Things take time and things need to be investigated properly.

The only reason I can think of why the bans are only 15 days is because Ubisoft believes that players who are 'boosted by cheating' are in some ways victims of the cheats

This definitely isn't the case I can assure you, otherwise we wouldn't be banning them. If they carry on and do it again on the same account, we'll know about it and act on it.