The War Z devs consider corralling cheaters and experimenting on them

The War Z developer Hammerpoint Interactive has a unique response to the inevitable problem of cheaters - lock 'em up and exploit them right back.

In a post on the MMO's forums, Hammerpoint asked for feedback on its latest "little idea" for dealing with the cheaters who plague every online game - locking them up in "jail" servers.

"If you've been banned from the game, you won't be able anymore to create or join clans, participate in leaderboards, or play the game with the general population, but you'll be able to play among other banned players on special set of jail servers. Since you've already been banned from the game, you can keep using all of your cheats there, but you may expect that all other players are using them too," the developer suggested.

The reason Hammerpoint would like to retain cheaters rather than simply ban them altogether is that by corralling them together, it can observe what cheats are in use and experiment with anti-cheat technologies.

"We're talking about one or two physical servers. Cost of hosting those are much lower than having completely separate dedicated game setup and servers and paying thousands of dollars to testers to play against each other using cheats on dedicated servers to be able to perform anticheat development and testing. So doing this will free uo resources for an actual game development," it added.

Naturally some players feel a little umbrage that cheaters should be allowed to continue playing, even in special servers, so Hammerpoint has opened a survey asking for feedback. According to an update to the post, most players have voted against the idea.

Thanks, Massively.