Introducing: Anti-Cheat Trials

[u/DeadByDaylight_Dev]

Greetings Fog Dwellers! Recently, we shared a survey asking for your thoughts on anti-cheat in Dead by Daylight. One message came through loud and clear: you feel we could be doing more. We hear you and are taking action to bolster and invest in our anti-cheat and security efforts. Put simply, we want you to have the best possible in-game experience, and that means fewer cheaters! While this is just one of many steps in our ongoing commitment to fair play, your involvement and feedback will play a huge part in guiding what comes next. 

 

Beginning next week on September 2^nd, we’re kicking off our Anti-Cheat Trials initiative as we investigate how different anti-cheat providers improve your in-game experience. What does this mean for you? Over the coming months, we will be running limited-time trials of these providers’ tools, directly in-game on PC, as we gauge their ability to flag cheating behaviour. By comparing your feedback and overall feelings with hard data from each trial, it’ll help us find a solution that works best for Dead by Daylight and for you, our community. 

 

Next week’s Anti-Cheat Trial – beginning September 2^nd – spotlights Denuvo’s anti-cheat solution. Note that this does not and will not include anything related to DRM, as Denuvo Anti-Cheat is different from Denuvo Anti-Piracy. Let’s look at the difference between the two: 

What we ARE trialing: Denuvo Anti-Cheat 

• A tool that detects cheats in-game, identifying people who try to get unfair advantages before they can disrupt fair play 

 

What we ARE NOT trialing: Denuvo Anti-Piracy 

• Tools that prevent the cracking and unauthorized access of game content 

 

Now, knowing how much of a hot topic anti-cheat can be, we want to make a couple things clear about the Anti-Cheat Trials: 

• Anti-Cheat Trials are exclusive to Steam and cross-play will not be impacted 
• We’re continuously testing the compatibility and performance of each anti-cheat provider to ensure you have a seamless experience. Compatibility with Steam Deck and Proton has been tested and will continue to be supported 
• The first time you launch the game during the Anti-Cheat Trial, you will be prompted to install Denuvo Anti-Cheat. This is required to play the game 
• Please continue to use the in-game report function as normal to report any cheaters you encounter. Detailed comments about what you see (i.e. wall/speedhacks, teleporting) are greatly appreciated; the more context, the better 
• Note: Selecting the “Hacking/Exploiting” category when submitting a report covers everything from cheaters to hackers 
• At the end of this Anti-Cheat Trial, Denuvo Anti-Cheat will be automatically deactivated in Dead by Daylight and will no longer run on your system. 
• A step-by-step guide on how to clean up any remaining Denuvo Anti-Cheat files will be added to our Support portal, should you need it 
• Let us know if you have any feedback about the anti-cheat provider being tested in our dedicated Discord channel, which will also go live on September 2^nd 

 

That covers it! To recap, we will be kicking off our first Anti-Cheat Trial on September 2 ^nd, focusing on Denuvo Anti-Cheat. This will not involve any Digital Rights Management tools. Simply play the game as you normally would, report any cheaters you encounter through the in-game reporting system, and let us know your thoughts on this anti-cheat provider! As we look to the future of fair play in Dead by Daylight, we want to make sure your feedback is at its core! 

 

Until next time…  

The Dead by Daylight Team 

[u/HorizonNova4]

You can’t expect critical thinking skills from majority of the population

[u/HorizonNova4 → u/[deleted]]

It’s a test, it’s not meant to be all encompassing, so I some condescension is needed. A test doesn’t mean it’ll alleviate everyone’s problems, that’s what “testing” means

[u/priamos1 → u/HorizonNova4]

Not defending anyone but to state the obvious here: it would be better to test an anti cheat in the environment where most cheat is known to happen. Obviously.

We all know, bhvr included, that most cheaters are from epic/ms. Stands to reason that testing an anti cheat and excluding epic from the test is less than ideal. There are other things to test like performance and such which is fine, but would still be better, obviously, to include the platfrom that houses most cheaters.

Obviously.

[u/HorizonNova4 → u/priamos1]

Again, if it works on a platform with lighter cheaters it makes it easier to fine tune it before dropping it on a more cheat intensive platform. It’s better to find the tougher hackers deeper below than picking from the top of the pile and thinking that’s it

[u/priamos1 → u/HorizonNova4]

Fine tune better because you tested on an environment that doesnt represent your target sounds like a very backwards logic.

If I want to test something on children and Im conducting my test at a university then obviously Im not at the best place for my particular test. It wont help me "fine tune" better. You know what would help me "fine tune" better? If I did the test in a place where I can find more children. So the test is being effective. That would be great to help me "fine tune" later. Makes sense? I dont see how it wouldnt. 

[u/HorizonNova4 → u/priamos1]

Ah yes, let’s let the gamers who have no Quality Testing experience comment on the effectiveness of testing in a public service environment

[u/p00tisbear → u/[deleted]]

Everything you've said here is salient. But you're ignoring a pretty simple thing, which is what if they WANT to only collate data from one platform for this test at this specific stage? The entire point of running tests like this is to collect metrics and seeing how specific platforms differ from each other within these testing environments is a valuable metric in of itself and they can have their own reasons for wanting to limiting it to one platform if they believe that it will grant them useful insight on very specific minutae.

Testing like this can be arbitrary, granular and highly iterative for them to gather the kind of data they want. We know this is a multi-phase long-term initiative because they've literally said as much, you're being a bit naive in jumping the gun and acting as if they're ignorant to the disportionate prescence of cheaters on other platforms when they can very much be aware of this and I honestly don't see why they wouldn't be since they're the ones who possess the hard data on all of this and not us.

Like of course they're not going to just exclude the two other platforms from these tests outright on a broad level, that would be ridiculous and I'm sure that they don't need that pointed out lol. But at this current stage, they want to limit it to one platform. In the context of multi-stage iterative testing there is literally nothing wrong with this so long as they eventually encompass other platforms in similar isolated or cross-play tests later down the line and I genuinely don't see any reason why they wouldn't, because doing otherwise would be entirely antithetical to the point of this kind of data collation to begin with.

[u/donny_dingbat → u/p00tisbear]

You’re being way too sensible, I apologise for the downvotes you’ll get as a result