Blizzard has announced a zero tolerance policy for cheaters on its forthcoming team shooter game Overwatch.
The company says there’ll be a permanent ban for anyone “found to be cheating—or using hacks, bots, or third-party software that provides any sort of unfair advantage.” There’s no word of any refund for a player banned in this way.
The game will include a direct cheater reporting tool in its menu system. There’s also a dedicated email address ([email protected]) for reporting cheaters.
Blizzard does note it won’t rely solely on in-game video recordings to decide if somebody is cheating. It points out that some recordings don’t look exactly as the “real” on-screen image when an incident happened, so this could change the apparent aiming ability of the accused player.
It also notes that some players are simply so good that their performance appears “unnatural (if not physically impossible)” even though they aren’t cheating. With this in mind, Blizzard says players should only use the reporting system and shouldn’t make any public accusations.