The Finals might be a bit less sweaty now it's cracking down on cheaters
Technical issues caused Embark "a ton of headaches" when dealing with dodgy players.
Embark Studios' The Finals is one of the most interesting multiplayers to come along for a while. It's also a brand new game from a new studio, and it unsurprisingly has some issues at launch. Alongside its underwhelming AI-assisted voiceovers, weird bugs, and questionable balance at the start of Season 1, as Morgan has pointed out, it's a sweaty beast, placing major emphasis on multi-way competitive shooting that can overly rely on being the twitchiest trigger finger, and neglecting the tactical potential of its fantastic destruction tech.
Last week, Embark released an update aimed at improving the game's skill-based matchmaking, and what followed was a cavalcade of complaints from players on Reddit, claiming that the SBMM changes had ruined the game. Par for the course, then. Mods ended up clamping down on these threads.
However, it's possible that the issues weren't entirely due to the game's skill-based-matchmaking or dog-eat-dog structure. It could also be that we've simply been playing against a bunch of big ol' cheaters. In the wake of the game's surprise launch during the Game Awards, reports of cheating over on Reddit have spiked enormously, with many of these cheaters believed to originate from China.
The Finals uses Easy Anti-Cheat by default, but according to the game's community lead Dusty Gustaffson (what a name), Easy Anti-Cheat "isn't our only anti-cheat measure". Speaking with the game's community on Discord, Gustaffson explained they have further anti-cheat measures in place. However, this system had "a technical issue that prevented us from banning cheaters efficiently".
Gustaffson doesn't explain what exactly this system is, nor the nature of the bug that has caused it to apparently fail. However, he does say that Embark is "now nearing a solution to this bug, and we've already begun re-upping our anti-cheat measures again". He then adds. "I hope your experience is about to get better. Please give us time to fix things. We're new and fine-tuning. I have faith in the team."