After monitoring cheaters in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout and gathering data for over a month, Cheater Island was launched to put all of the hackers in one place, but the event was short-lived.
Coming as a response to ridiculous hacking measures taken by players, Mediatonic's goal was to pair up cheaters in Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout only with other cheaters. At launch, Mediatonic had built its own cheat detection into Fall Guys, but instead of banning folks who used hacks, the developers carefully gathered data to make sure that the software wouldn't tag any innocent gamers accidentally. But once the detection threshold for cheaters was opened, hackers who noticed they had been flagged would tell other cheaters.
"Cheaters are very smart," the official Fall Guys Twitter says, "they'll work out what caused them to be tagged," after realizing they had been tagged as a cheater by Fall Guys' software. Mediatonic was hoping this would show the sore players that it kills the fun by not instantly blocking them from the game, and in return, would make them organically stop implementing cheats. But "most continued," the Fall Guys Twitter said.
Before there were enough cheaters to populate matches, they would "fall forever," which acts as a loading screen for matchmaking. At some point, cheaters began to realize this was the case and found a workaround: they would team up with friends who weren't using hacks and could continue matchmaking. Cheaters were also able to use family sharing to share a game to another account and use it to bypass Mediatonic's cheat detection threshold.
It wasn't until last week that there were finally enough Fall Guys players to populate Cheater Island. However, at this point, Fall Guys had not made it known to the public that it was implementing this feature to deal with cheaters. So when players began uploading videos of the chaos that ensued but possibly featured players who weren't cheating, Mediatonic became weary that its threshold was detecting innocent players, or that it wasn't catching nearly everyone cheating.
Soon after, Cheater Island came to an end and cheaters are now simply unable to log into Fall Guys. Still, Mediatonic is continuously working on its cheat detection and improving the system. It announced it will soon add Epic Games' Anti-Cheat, which is required to play games like Fortnite, and "will be a huge step forward as we continue to improve things!"
Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout is out now for PC and PS4.