Palworld Details Plans to Combat Cheating

Pocketpair has shared the first details of its plans to crack down on Palworld cheaters, which include several countermeasure confirmations. Some of the newly announced actions will be implemented in a matter of weeks, whereas others are a bit further away from reaching Palworld.

In the first few weeks that followed its mid-January release, the biggest obstacle to enjoying Palworld's multiplayer modes was the game's online infrastructure, which was struggling to keep up with the massive player traffic. Just as Pocketpair got a handle on that issue, or at least managed to mitigate it by throwing money at Palworld's hosting provider, another problematic trend began gaining momentum: rampant cheating.

Taking to Twitter on February 16, the Japanese studio denounced Palworld cheaters, asserting it would not «tolerate any fraudulent activity.» To that end, the developer intends to implement several countermeasures, starting with a «player list function» that will help keep track of cheaters on each server, thus assisting in the developer's efforts to issue timely bans and prevent repeat offenses. The feature will be part of an upcoming Palworld update meant to roll out in late February, Pocketpair said.

Beyond that, the developer has also made plans to implement an «external» system geared toward identifying and preventing cheating and other fraudulent activities that are «particularly frequent.» That description suggests Pocketpair might have set its sights on dealing with some especially egregious forms of griefing that have become prevalent lately. E.g., reports of hackers deleting other people's characters or filling their inventories with rocks have been on the rise in recent weeks. Ditto for the claims that some players' save data has gotten stolen and overwritten by malicious actors using their Steam IDs—fabricated from the client side—to join public Palworld servers with pirated copies of the game.

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