Greeting Agonians,

For today's update we have a major project that we have been keeping under wraps that we are very excited to officially announce. We plan to have this system packaged and included in the upcoming patch. We were hoping to have the patch out today but there are still some last minute issues being ironed out so we decided to hold off until sometime over the weekend. Our expectation is to be able to patch tomorrow and we will keep you updated if anything changes. The full patch notes will be released in a separate update when the patch goes live.

EasyAntiCheat Implementation

The original source code for Darkfall has extremely limited ability to monitor, track and in turn punish individuals who cheat in the game. The GM team at Big Picture Games has spent a lot of their time in-game enforcing our anti-macroing and mob exploiting beta policies, issuing hundreds of temporary bans throughout early development. However it has been much harder for us as a team to track potential hackers and those taking advantage of 3rd party programs as it is currently not easily detectable in, or out of, game.

We also have seen a lot of concerns from our community about bias and favoritism in our enforcement policies which saddens us as a team. Although many of us on the team came from the previous Darkfall community, which is where our company was originally forged from, we have had strict internal processes meant to address situations where bias could come into play. We received many videos and reports from players about suspicious activity and investigate all claims, but we also as a company are not going to go on witch hunts or ban people based solely off of video evidence.

In order to provide the most fair and competitive experience that we can to our players, and after vetting many different options available to us, we have decided to partner with the anti-cheat company EasyAntiCheat. This anti-cheat 3rd party software is used in many well known games out in the market such as Rust, For Honor, Ghost Recon: Wildlands and Smite and it has been a pleasure working with the team members over there these past few months.

So what exactly does EasyAntiCheat do? The software will be packaged in the next patch and monitors both the activity occurring on a player's local game client as well as the server. It provides many tools for us as a team to be able to automatically track and ban players who are using 3rd party hacks or those who are trying to make game alterations to provide unfair advantages. One of the biggest benefits for us as a team is it allows us to enforce our strict launch policies automatically, taking away any possible influence team members at Big Picture Games could have.

For more information on EasyAntiCheat's capabilities, you can visit their website here: https://www.easyanticheat.net/features/

No matter who you are, what clan you are in, how long you have been playing, or how well known you may be, we WILL take action to the full extent on anyone this new system catches who is hacking or exploiting the game. It is extremely important to us at Big Picture Games to provide all of you the best gaming experience we possibly can, and ensuring that we keep Darkfall: Rise of Agon as hack and cheat free as we can is part of that equation.

We look forward to being able to publicly test this software after our upcoming patch, and will continue to work with the team at EasyAntiCheat to optimize and customize it for Darkfall: Rise of Agon. Please note that there will be a new installer with the next patch and old lobby versions will no longer work.

Thank you for reading and keep an eye out for the patch this weekend!

Join us in the discussion.

Sincerely,

- The Team at Big Picture Games