Valve's third-person shooter MOBA Deadlock is still in early development and was kept a secret until recently. Roughly 100,000 people are playing the invite-only beta at any time. Of course, some of those players are cheaters because humans are awful. The developer has implemented an innovative and hilarious solution. Cheaters are turned into frogs.
When a cheater is detected, players on the opposing team get to choose whether they ban the cheater immediately or make them play out the rest of the game as a frog and then ban them.
According to Polygon, this isn't the first time Valve has been ahead of the game on the anti-cheat front:
Valve's certainly not new at this anti-cheat thing, and has crafted similarly creative solutions to combat cheaters in the past. The developer has previously lured cheaters into exposing themselves, in games like Dota 2, and then issued tens of thousands of account bans. Sometimes those bans even come gift-wrapped, in an effort to humiliate cheaters and delight honest players. Valve has also rewarded players for playing fair; Team Fortress 2 players who didn't take advantage of idling programs to unlock hats in that game were rewarded with a hat of their own, the Cheater's Lament.
Cheaters gonna cheat, but I appreciate any effort to make them suffer some embarrassment on their way out the virtual door.
Previously: A "brief history" of cheating at video games
