Mission Update - 31 July (Trampler Capture)

Hey raiders,

We wanted to give you a quick update on the current status of our next update and the return of Trampler Capturing.

A few weeks ago, we disabled Trampler Capturing. This was not an active attempt to "stop cheaters from stealing tramplers," but rather a measured decision to give players time to report any cheats or cheaters they encountered and help us identify the best way to address the issue while improving our anti-cheat systems.

Trampler Capturing is a particularly vulnerable feature if we don't protect it against teleportation and no-clip exploits, and even more so with limited options to report cheaters following an expedition. The improvements made in our last anti-cheat update resulted in a noticeable improvement on this front, and with this update we're building on that even further.

However, one of the biggest challenges in fighting cheaters is that it's very easy to accidentally flag legitimate players. During our internal testing for this update, we've seen that become a much more prominent issue. Because of this, alongside a few other critical issues that have come up in this build, we've seen the planned release times slip on a few occasions.

Throughout the week, we've been testing new detection methods and refining our checks every day. While we've made significant progress, we're still concerned that the current version could result in too many false-positive bans and similar issues to those that led to the initial deactivation of Trampler Capturing.

To shed some light on the false-ban issue: to reliably determine whether a player's movement is legitimate, the anti-cheat has to account for many different situations. It needs to know whether the player is on foot or riding a Trampler, whether they've grabbed a ladder, whether the Trampler is accelerating, or whether it suddenly turned around after colliding with a rock or another Trampler. It also has to consider where a player jumped from and where they landed.

On top of all that, the system has to handle network conditions such as high ping and packet loss.

We've already solved most of these cases, but there are still a few edge cases we aren't satisfied with yet, alongside some other issues in the build that need to be ironed out before we're comfortable releasing the update. As a result, we're now expecting to release it sometime next week.

We want to make it clear that once Trampler Capturing is reactivated, we do not plan to deactivate it again. The systems we're putting in place, along with the anti-cheat improvements, should ensure that the issues which led to the feature's removal do not arise again going forward.

Thank you all for your patience.

Maksym

Head of Hologryph Studio