According to 343 Industries, Halo Infinite's cheating problem is something "we anticipated"
In light of recent talk of cheating in Halo Infinite, we've got an update on 343 Industries' plans on the matter
If you’ve been playing Halo Infinite multiplayer over the past few weeks since its launch, you may be aware of a growing concern amongst the community regarding cheating in 343 Industries’ free-to-play FPS.
Following much discussion about its effects on the experience, we’ve gotten word from several members of the development team on what players can do right now to combat this issue, and future plans to tackle it further.
The first public statement came from Halo community manager John Junyszek on Twitter, who openly discussed the team’s approach to the issue through candid words.
“Unfortunately, cheating is a natural part of supporting a F2P PC game and it's one we anticipated. It'll never go away entirely, but we're prepared and committed to releasing consistent improvements to our game’s systems and taking action on bad actors.”
He would elaborate by stating that “Jumping in to clarify that the wording of "improvements to game's systems" includes not only our anti-cheat, but the rest of the game as well. It's worded this way because we don't take a "single feature" approach, but a game-wide approach to anti-cheat.”
Although this is John doing his job, letting the community know that 343 is aware of complaints and concerns around cheaters in Halo Infinite, it does peel back the curtain a bit on what we can expect to see moving forward. The clarification that they “don’t take a ‘single feature’ approach indicates that the team is willing to attack the issue from multiple angles, as opposed to betting the house on one big feature like Call of Duty’s new kernel-level anti cheat.
As a final addition, John pointed to the official player report system currently usable by those who fall victim to cheating in Halo Infinite. This was echoed by 343 Industries’ head of creative Joseph Staten, who urged players to use this feature for the time being to combat cheating via Twitter. As it currently stands, this is the only current tool players use to fend off cheaters.
It’s a turbulent time for 343 Industries following the massive success of the Halo Infinite multiplayer release. One one hand, they’ve been consistently improving the battle pass progression, recently making it so the number of games you need to level up has been drastically reduced. On the other hand, they also can’t seem to catch a break as the February 2022 event may have been leaked far too early.