The war isn’t over, but a tech upgrade like this certainly doesn’t hurt.
Following Broken Arrow’s cheating scandal - which was partially responsible for the game’s falling Steam reviews - the developers at Steel Balalaika promised to make a few changes to the game. Topping the list there, they wanted a focused effort on making the lives of each cheater as hard as possible.
Broken Arrow’spretty cool, and they don’t want cheaters to spoil theRTSfun for others.
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Beneath the cheating problem and accusations of discrimination, there’s still a good game under there.
With the “imminent” patch 1.09, Steel Balalaika has listed all the ways they’ll make cheaters suffer for their crimes, but they also show off a few new features that players have been requesting: namely, harsher penalties for people who frequently leave games too early.
First up, the devs have a wall of severed heads to show off.
“More than 5000 accounts have been banned from playing in multiplayer since the launch of the game,” Steel Balalaika’sSteam postreads, “because they were caught cheating.”
“We have already expanded the team with an additional person dedicated to the management of cheating reports and appeals in case of false positives.”
On top of this, the game is also being upgraded with better tools for recording and studying player behavior. The devs argue that this won’t just help them catch cheaters; with better match data, they can improve the gameplay experience as well.
Steel Balalaika also clarifies that they won’t ban people for cheating in single-player modes. “This allows us to reduce the number of appeals and focus on multiplayer cheating.”
Broken Arrow Adds A Leaver Penalty System
As a team-based multiplayer experience, having people drop out mid-game can be rather disruptive. Some games can handle it better than others, and while leavers can certainly do damage in Broken Arrow, the devs have implemented ways to try and mitigate the damage.
At it’s core, the Broken Arrow leaver penalty system is what you expect from other games. If you abandon a game early, you won’t be able to hop into another one for a few real-world minutes.
So if an emergency happens, and you need to leave the computer, the penalty won’t affect you much. But if you’re just trying to re-roll into a better matchup, don’t do that.
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“You have left the previous match and abandoned your teammates,” the in-game popup reads, “as a penalty you cannot create or join a new lobby during [sic] the next several minutes. Use the surrender function next time to avoid this penalty.”
And speaking of: yes - they’re adding a surrender option! As a way to abandon a clearly-lost game without incurring the leaver’s penalty, the surrender function starts a quick vote to gauge the team’s feeling on the match. If the vote passes, the game ends. Simple stuff, but effective.
“We know that there are many other areas of improvement, community requests, suggestions, and more.” The dev’s Steam post continues. “We are looking forward to keeping you updated on our current and future work, so if you don’t see the changes you’re looking for in this list, rest assured, we have more to come.”
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