For the second time in 2009 CipSoft banished more than 5000 Tibia accounts for cheating.CipSoft continues its effort to eliminate all cheaters from Tibia. After a first wave at the beginning of February, CipSoft now banned another 5163 accounts for the use of unofficial software.
“Cheating is a nuisance for any multiplayer online game.” says Florian Eckert, responsible Product Manager at CipSoft. “For Tibia it is exceptionally annoying as its community has grown for over 12 years and during that time established a well balanced equilibrium.” Eckert continues. “We cannot and we will not tolerate any unfair interference to this.”
The use of unofficial software - generally referred to as ‘cheating’ - gives players an unfair advantage over others by automating tricky tasks or even controlling the whole character in game. Identifying players who use such programs can be a hard task as the used software is designed to imitate natural behaviour.
CipSoft relies on a home made tool in order to identify the users of unofficial software automatically. “We are 100% confident about the accuracy of our tool.” says Matthias Rudy, Lead Programmer at CipSoft. “We now know exactly who is cheating, how they are cheating and when they are cheating.” Rudy reveals.
Once identified, cheaters have to face severe consequences. Depending on their ‘criminal record’ some of the cheaters are only excluded from the game for a certain period of time. The accounts of other more intractable cheaters will be deleted completely.
When asked about CipSoft’s future plans and policy concerning cheating, Eckert admits “We’ve already pulled the trigger once, now we’ve pulled it a second time. It seems like we start to get the hang on it.”
Tibia is one of the oldest MMORPGs worldwide. It is online since 1997 and currently has a subscriber base of 120,000 players.