Dead by Daylight Devs Share Update on Cheating

DBD developers BHVR have always been relatively open with their plans for the game, but it feels like they’ve been sharing more and more of their future goals — and the reasoning behind them — in recent months. Continuing that trend, yesterday saw a developer update on a new gameplay feature, and today we got an update on cheating in Dead by Daylight. Whether you’ve seen a flying Ghostface flinging hatchets, or felt that a Survivor got just a little too far away after rounding the corner, almost everyone you talk to who plays DBD has had at least a couple of suspicious players in their games.

While cheating isn’t an obvious problem in a visible way (like in a game like Team Fortress 2), it’s clear that it’s widespread; today’s update included the data that 200,000 cheaters have been banned over DBD’s lifetime, with 50,000 of those bans coming in 2022 alone, and 2,000 in the last 7 days! Along with that info, BHVR explained their methods for dealing with cheaters:

Automated bans: We work with our anti-cheat partner, Easy Anti-Cheat, to report and track new cheats. If the anti-cheat detects one of these being used, they are automatically banned.

In-game countermeasures: We make changes to both the game client and dedicated servers to prevent cheaters from doing certain things. This lessens the impact of cheats and reduces the amount of damage they can do.

Manual bans: We investigate your reports and manually block cheaters. This is crucial when a new cheat has not yet been tracked by the anti-cheat.

They also shared a roadmap on their future plans for improving their anti-cheating efforts. They first plan on fixing player sniping — apparently, it’s currently possible to intentionally join a specific player’s lobby, presumably something cheaters do either to make sure their childish antics show up on streams, or perhaps to bully a player. Next, BHVR will add failsafes to commonly exploited game mechanics, such as decreasing max game time to prevent players from being trapped in a trial.

They also plan on implementing server-side validation where possible, which makes it harder for cheaters to cheat because more game data will have to go through a BHVR-controlled server. Finally, improvements are planned for player support tools like the in-game report system — players will get feedback when a cheater they reported was banned, for example. BHVR also hinted that they have other, behind-the-scenes plans for cheaters that they don’t want to share, likely because keeping them a secret will make them more effective.

BHVR plans to continue communicating their progress in their war against cheaters, so we can expect more updates like today’s in the future. Personally, I love hearing about cheaters getting banned — even if it just means they have to shell out for another copy of the game, it’s nice to know the devs are actively working to stop the script-kiddies from griefing.

You can help in that effort by always using the in-game report system if you encounter a cheater! BHVR reiterated that such reports help them find possible cheaters. If you capture video footage of a cheater, you can send it to their support team via this link: https://support.deadbydaylight.com/hc/en-us.

We clearly have at least a handful of cheaters amongst our readers, so if any of you would like to once again out yourselves and attempt to justify cheating, or if you want to share your experience with cheating in Dead by Daylight, you can do so in the comments below!