KC Fox

Rust & Anti-cheat - We've seen a rise in cheat activity and raising community concerns for several weeks. It's a problem we're constantly monitoring, a subject we rarely discuss for good reason. We're stepping up all measures to address the situation and continuously talking to Epic EasyAntiCheat. During school break, it's typical for this time of the year to see higher cheat activity; along with Rust's continuing popularity, we're reaching new heights in concurrent players, which also brings more cheat users and cheat developers. What are we doing? The best form of anti-cheat is for video game developers is not to reveal what we're doing. That isn't a great answer, it sounds like we're doing nothing, but if we tell what we're doing, it'll only reveal our hand and assist cheat developers and cheat users. Potentially enabling cheat users to bypass or counter any measures. It's an endless cat-and-mouse game we've been battling since Rust's inception and will be until Rust fades into history. On the outside, it can appear we're not directly dealing with cheating, but EAC and we do actively address issues and exploits via updates often. If we're not doing something, it's generally for a good or technical reasons. We see suggestions on how to improve things all the time and how much we suck, but we're rarely going directly reply to a direct anti cheat suggestion so as not to reveal what we may or may not be doing. Often cheaters are temporarily banned. This can be for 1-30 days. The ban isn't shown on their Steam profile, this policy is on Steam's end, and out of our control. This can often look as if the account isn't banned and is still active. A game ban is usually placed once the temporary ban expires. This is why sometimes accounts appear to be active for long periods before a ban notification is sent/displayed. I can say that we're in constant open discussions with Epic EasyAntiCheat, improving tools, and continuing to grow the support team who handles player reports and other anti-cheat matters. We constantly talk with Rust server owners who relay their and your experiences. There is a lot more going on behind the scenes. We're working on it, and apologise for the negative experiences. Please keep shouting at us when we're doing a shit job, we may not reply, but we do read and talk internally.