Cheating has many names: stat padding, boosting, and even more extreme phrases like 'hacking.' But in DICE's eyes there's only one name for these types of people - banned. Over the Battlefield 3 twitter, DICE has revealed that they have wiped the stats of many accounts and banned hundreds of others.

It has been said that players have been using certain pieces of in-game equipment to increase their score, mostly for team actions. Anyone who has spent some time online knows how much this can affect everyone's experience, as they have to deal with a teammate who is more concerned with earning points than playing achieving team success. It also causes issues for the leaderboards as they no longer display skill, just whoever has enough friends to spend time inflating their particular score.

We at Game Rant feel as though we speak for the whole Battlefield 3 community when we commend DICE for taking cheating so seriously. Unfortunately, too many games these days seem to drop support after a number of months, and hopefully the amount of support DICE is showing now will carry long into the future.

The Twitter message itself got across just how much sympathy the developers feel for those abusing online systems:

"This week we’ve banned hundreds of offending accounts and have stats-wiped accounts for exploiting (such as boosting)"

Boosting is unfortunately something that will always plague online games. Even when games try their hardest to implement anti-cheating measures, you can bet that there will always be two people sitting far away from the action, killing themselves over and over again to try and grab some badge or medal.

Boosting does have it's place at times, though that's usually just reserved for when developers create some ridiculous trophies/achievements for their games. Since most of Battlefield 3's achievements center around skill, such as "Earn 10,000 Kills" and "Get all of the Awards", boosting is unforgivable in this case.

So, to any player who sees someone boosting, feel free to report them to DICE. Players like them aren't taking any genuine initiative to help the team, and in Battlefield 3, team work is important.

Now if only they could get rid of that online pass...

Battlefield 3 is available now for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

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Follow me on Twitter @AnthonyMole

Source: Twitter