Our efforts to keep Battlefield 3 a fair game continue. Here’s an update on how we are staffing up our anti-cheat department and decreasing turnaround times. Also: How you can help.

Fact: We receive literally hundreds of reports each day from our players on suspicious-behaving opponents. Our first call of action is usually to manually verify whether these reports are valid or not.

Fact: In the large majority of cases, cheat reports are not valid. By far the most common outcome of a report is that we can conclude that the player is simply awesome at playing Battlefield 3. We know it can sometimes feel like you’ve been the victim of a cheater – but the stark reality in most of these cases is you’ve simply met a great adversary.

Keeping the Battlefield fair is one of our top priorities. But making sure we don’t erroneously ban a non-cheating player is of course of utmost importance. That’s why we carefully investigate before banning anyone from playing the game.

More staff, quicker turnarounds

At the same time, we want to make sure we take swift action on proven cheaters. That’s why we have staffed up and decreased the turnaround time from report to action. Going forward, you will see quicker action taken on cheaters — specifically when it comes to stats wiping and/or banning them.

Finally, here’s a reminder how you can help us by reporting suspected cheaters. If you believe you have been the victim of outright cheating, the best way to report your concerns is to enter the profile page here on Battlelog of the person you suspect and click the triangle in the top right corner of his name.

This will open up a window where you can describe to us at DICE what happened. Please enter as much detail as possible, describing what specifically makes you believe this player has used unfair methods, and preferably include a link to the Battle Report for the match in question.

How to tell if someone’s been banned

One question that we get a lot is why person X is not banned when he is obviously proven to be a cheater. The problem is, there is no good way for normal Battlelog visitors to verify whether a player has actually been banned from play or not, since a cheater’s profile normally will stay visible but with reset stats.

This means that a player who has had his stats reset (but can still play) and a player who is banned from playing will look very similar on Battlelog. One way for you to get a better idea whether someone is banned or not is to look at the date of when he last played the game. But in most cases when you think someone should have been banned, he has. There’s just not any way for us to signal that on Battlelog at the moment.

We hope this small update has provided some insight into our anti-cheat work. Have a great gaming weekend, and thanks to our community for helping us in our ongoing anti-cheat efforts.