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Ubisoft has a plan to stop cheaters in its games - by boring them to death (and it's working)

QB tech is far from fully explained, but we're told it's effective, and aims to make life so tedious for the developers of cheats that they just give up.

Ubisoft has a plan to stop cheaters in its games - by boring them to death (and it's working)
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Cheaters are an ever-present thorn in the side when it comes to online games, but Ubisoft has a seemingly effective way to tackle the menace they present called 'QB' technology - plus the company has been honing another feature (MouseTrap) to weed out mouse and keyboard players on console.

First off, let's look at QB, and as PC Gamer reports, this is attacking the problem at its source - namely the developers of cheats, and making life so difficult and tedious for them that they just give up.

We know very little about this QB tech, which is for the PC platform only, with Ubisoft kicking off with the idea back in November 2022, as part of a raft of anti-cheat initiatives.

Ubisoft explains it has witnessed great results from QB and that the system has already been involved in the banning of over 10,000 cheaters.

We're further told that several major cheat operations have waved the white flag and are no longer making cheats for Rainbow Six Siege, which is good news.

As to what QB does, Ubisoft is remaining very tight-lipped on that, which is understandable given that the firm doubtless wants to give away as little as possible to the enemy, as it were.

But as PC Gamer theorizes, what seems to be involved - at least in part - is making tiny adjustments to the EXE file of a game, several times daily, which renders cheat systems constantly incompatible. Meaning if cheat devs aren't willing to keep up with these meaningless micro-tweaks of the EXE, then their product will be useless.

Ubisoft hasn't confirmed any of this, but with no other reason for making these constant alterations to the executable, this seems to be the only explanation of what's going on behind the scenes here. Although QB may have other moving parts happening elsewhere to thwart cheaters.

MouseTrap success - but it currently has a catch

As well as this QB tech, Ubisoft also boasts about its new MouseTrap system, which detects the use of a mouse and keyboard on a console. Those found to be using these peripherals rather than a game controller get a penalty in the form of increased latency (ping) to put them off.

According to Ubisoft, this has been a pretty successful campaign too, with a 78% reduction in those using the mouse and keyboard in Rainbow Six Siege after three months of MouseTrap having gone live.

But there's a catch here, in terms of a recent development with mouse and keyboard players quitting as soon as the match ends, and apparently avoiding the penalty this way - an exploit the devs are working on a fix for.

Another positive step forward for Ubisoft comes with addressing in-game toxicity, with those who are abusing others in voice chat getting two warnings, and if a third incident happens, their chat is muted for the next 30 matches.

All of this should help to make Rainbow Six Siege a fairer and more enjoyable environment online, and other Ubisoft games besides.

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Darren has written for numerous magazines and websites in the technology world for almost 30 years, including TechRadar, PC Gamer, Eurogamer, Computeractive, and many more. He worked on his first magazine (PC Home) long before Google and most of the rest of the web existed. In his spare time, he can be found gaming, going to the gym, and writing books (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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