1.2% Of All Rust Players Could Be Cheaters, Developer Facepunch Studios Says

Highlights

Rust developer Facepunch Studios released a new anti-cheat update, banning 63,393 players since April, with over 320,000 user reports of potential cheaters.
Between April and June, 55,375 permanent bans were issued, with 1.2% of the player base potentially being cheaters.
Facepunch is working on experimental features to disrupt cheats, with the next anti-cheat update planned for November.

Earlier this week, Rust developer Facepunch Studios released a brand-new blog post for the game’s big monthly update. From motorbikes to handcuffs, July was another big month for Rust players.

But what may have gone unnoticed by players was the new anti-cheat update from Facepunch. According to the studio, a total of 63,393 players have been banned since April. While 8,018 of these bans were temporary, a massive 55,375 bans were permanent. A breakdown of the bans revealed that there were 15,440 perma bans in June, 19,876 in May, and 20,059 in April.

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Between April and June, Facepunch’s statistics show that there were over 320,000 user reports of potential cheaters. However, these reports only come from the game’s official servers. As for non-official servers, the blog post claims that there have been a massive 3,645,165 reports since April.

“Over the last 31-days, we’ve had 1,751,457 unique players, and close to half a million daily active players,” Facepunch said. “Using the metrics above, it could be interpreted that 1.2% of the player base are cheaters, it’s very common for cheaters to use many accounts over the course of the month. Cheaters often receive an account suspension, get another account, receive another ban, rinse and repeat inflating the true number.”

The studio then stated that it was working on “many experimental features to disrupt cheats” and that some of these changes are near completion and will be deployed soon. There’s no word on what these experimental features are, but other massive titles such as Call of Duty have often employed wild features that negatively affect a cheater.

Various Call of Duty titles have combated cheaters in the past by making enemies invisible, inserting fake enemies, and even making their bullets do little to no damage. But why not just ban them altogether? Well, as Facepunch noted in its blog post, cheaters will often receive a ban, make a new account, cheat again, get banned again, and just rinse and repeat. Thus, the idea of “trolling” cheaters will hopefully prevent them from continuing to cheat in the future.

Facepunch says the next anti-cheat update will be released in November.