Hello,
Starfighter General is Free To Play and I want to keep it that way for good. There is a chance malicious hackers could attack our server, clients and scam our players. If this becomes an issue, you need to make it so hackers lose more than they gain. Obviously player accounts found hacking proven by software will be banned. We have some flawless detectors and even will double check with game masters. Do not hack. Being able to say auto aim or auto dodge a few shots is nothing compared to the power you gain from a weeks worth of play, let alone years. Don’t lose years worth of playing honestly to throw it all away hacking, cheaters never win, not on Earth, not in the spirit realm. Be true to yourself.
Players are less willing to even TRY a hack in risk of getting banned. Let’s be clear, TRYING a hack, is USING a hack. If you TRY a cheat hack and get banned, you got banned because you USED a cheat hack. Do not even try it. Do not risk it. If you like a game or sport, you never cheat in it or it is no longer sporting. Some people use the “excuse”, they were just TRYING a hack, nah, that doesn’t fly. If you just wanted to see if you can get away with a cheat, and you get caught, you got caught cheating. Cheaters get banned. And everyone in the player base is happy, except yourself who gave in to evil selfish desires.
In addition to players being banned, hackers making new hacks will be sometimes caught in the process. If they are caught, hackers normally just VPN a new account and keep at it. The only thing that slows them is a pay wall or leveling wall. Part of discouraging cheat makers is having them lose more than they gain. I want to keep Starfighter General free to play always. But if we need to wack a mole these cheat makers, we may have to make new players pay to play. Old players with semi active accounts will not have to pay the fee, just new players to discourage hackers.
These two tactics of banning players and putting up a pay wall act together in tandem. Cheat hack makers realize it costs them money and a lot of work… And the players ain’t buying their cheat hacks it anyway because they’d rather honor the God of Love and Truth and enjoy a game. Once you take away all the rules, say everyone gets invulnerability, infinite resources and nothing is a challenge… It ceases to be fun. The reason you do not cheat goes further than it being the right thing or not. The reason you cheat is so you can enjoy your game or sport at all. Be moral. Be honest. Cultivate and encourage respect of rules in games.
Anti-Cheat is very important to me. I was #1 in the world at Starcraft in 1999, but quit because of the map hackers and win traders on Battle.net. The #2 guy went to Korea and won for 3 years straight. I would have loved to have had a chance to compete with him live for he never beat me online even once. Yet I was not aware of these tournaments for I thought Starcraft died because of the cheat hackers.
Cheat hackers have been ruining games for ages, and our gamer culture needs to be very oppositional against them. Some of these guys even send out spam emails pretending to be the company so they can get your password and take all your equipment and sell on ebay. Well I’m 100% for allowing you guys to sell on ebay! But I do not want evil slimeballs robbing little kids of their possessions. People used to go,”But it is just virtual items, it ain’t like real stealing.” If you’re selling on ebay then the stolen goods are of value and it is real stealing.
Look, I don’t mind if you buy or sell anything anywhere in game or out of game. My fellow devs are encouraging me to get my own crypto currency in game. We want to do lots of cool stuff for the community. If you want to make a living being a jerk pirate in game and sell people’s stuff you looted after you blew up their ships, go for, that is within the rules. If you cheat and have everyone blow up, make stuff on the server, or steal people’s accounts, this hurts other players and is not fair. We have a very aggressive anti-cheater stance, and this post is so players too understand they should take one too.
Cheaters never win. God sees all.