Community Guidelines: Cheating, Exploits, and Harassment

Hello again! Welcome to our guidelines on cheating, exploits, and harassment. In this post, we discuss different levels of abuse and how our community members can help us in dealing with these issues.

Cheating

We have partnered with Easy Anti-Cheat to help us find and ban players who use cheat software, hacks, or custom scripts to disrupt our players’ experiences in Insurgency: Sandstorm. We take cheating very seriously, so we appreciate all of our fans who help us in combating this issue.

If you come across a player that you suspect is cheating or if you find a cheat available for Sandstorm online, please fill out a Cheat Report for Easy Anti-Cheat to investigate. If you’re reporting a cheat for sale/download, please include a link to the relevant site. If you encounter a player who you think is using hacks or cheats, grab the replay ID of the match from the History section of the main menu and it include it in your report. Be sure to watch the replay first and include the approximate time that the player can be seen using a cheat in the report as well.

How to find a replay ID and Steam ID:

  • Go to the Main Menu
  • Select “History”
  • Mouse over the replay, then click “Copy ID” and paste it in your report.
  • Start the replay and go to the scoreboard
  • Click on the suspected player’s name and “Copy Steam ID”. Then paste it in your report.

Click here for the EAC Cheat report: EAC Cheat Report

For more information about EAC, including bans and appeals, check out our EAC post here: Community Guidelines: EAC & Cheating

Exploiting Design Issues

Our team has been working very hard to get Insurgency: Sandstorm to where it is today, and we are still developing improvements and new content for the future. That being said, we have seen some players exploiting bugs in design. Examples of this include:

  • Hiding in rocks/walls
  • Exploiting Out of Bounds areas
  • Glitching into unplayable areas
  • Spawn camping

If a player is exploiting these mechanics or does something that feels unfair (but they’re not necessarily using hacks), please take a screenshot or video along with an explanation of what is happening, and send it to support@newworldinteractive.com so that our team can recreate and address the issue.

Harassment/Trolling/Griefing

We have received some community feedback on issues with toxic players, offensive language, and trolling in Insurgency: Sandstorm. New World Interactive does not condone this type of behavior and we’re taking steps to ensure players are able to effectively deal with this whenever it is encountered. Some of these fixes and additions include:

  • Fixing the mute function so it carries over between rounds.
  • Adding toggleable profanity filters to text chat.
  • Adding spam protection to text chat.
  • The ability to vote to kick players on community servers.

It may take us some time to implement these features, but we are working on various plans to discourage toxic player interactions. We recognize that players intentionally harassing others can be pretty annoying. Whether they’re yelling something racist on the microphone, repeatedly (and purposefully) standing in the line of fire, purposefully teamkilling, or taking other actions that can be considered trolling or griefing, we get that it can be very frustrating or offensive. No matter how irritating this can be, don’t try to confront these players. Shooting them in retaliation or shouting back at them will not solve the issue. Hold Tab, hit that mute button, put those blinders on, and don’t feed the troll.

To see the full list of what’s coming next, check out our Community Update post. We have a ton of content planned for Insurgency: Sandstorm so keep the feedback coming! To report bugs in Sandstorm, check out our Technical FAQ. Having performance issues? Check out our Performance Tips.

You guys are adding votekick? That's awesome, does that mean you'll remove the damage reflection early April fools joke too? Or at least make it toggleable?

Great, now we can get kicked by the same toxic people you guys are crying about.

last edited by MLB7

How many votes are going to be required to kick people out of the game they paid for?

Before, NWI said to report harassment through EAC. I've done that a number of times and have never received a response (when you hit submit, it displays a message to expect a response within 14 days). Does anything happen with these reports? Should we continue to report harassment through EAC until the new features are implemented?

@chaton said in Community Guidelines: Cheating, Exploits, and Harassment:

Exploiting Design Issues
Our team has been working very hard to get Insurgency: Sandstorm to where it is today, and we are still developing improvements and new content for the future. That being said, we have seen some players exploiting bugs in design. Examples of this include:

Hiding in rocks/walls
Exploiting Out of Bounds areas
Glitching into unplayable areas
Spawn camping

Hi NWI team, can you elaborate on these?

I've found some spots where you can either vault or crouch jump to places that I could only describe as cheeky. Is this a bannable offense?

For instance, on Push/Insurgent attack/summit, you can straight vault out of barricade on the left of security spawn, and walk around and see unfinished buildings. Is that cheating?

Another instance is push/security attack/crossing, on first objective, if you run to the far right on insurgents, near the mountain/rocks, you can easily see all of the trail leading up to the security spawn, but cannot see the spawn directly. You can easily kill any one who pushes down their spawn on their left (approximately 1-2 seconds of running for them). Is this spawn camping/ bannable?

I run some macros on other games I play but has come in handy in COOP (Since its 99% of what I play). Is there a possibility of getting banned because of macros?

The one I have used is basically a repeating left mouse click. Asking so I dont get myself banned since I rather enjoy the game.

@plppln

When you make a macro that is handy or makes the game easier, it would be an unfair advantage in pvp, since the other players don't have the same option by default, and therefore considered cheating for most people and developers. Why not just learn to play the game as intended or play on servers with no anti cheat if that is your ballpark?

You may be interpreted as asking what kind of cheats you can get away with, even if that was not your intention. They normally use same anti cheat system on both pvp and pve servers - Which answers your question: It is not okey for most of us.

It would be cool with servers where some of the game input is automated for players who are into that I guess. Celeste (another game) made an option for player who wanted to play the game their own way with great success, because they managed to do it without making the player feeling inferior and creating ease of access for people who needed it for legitimate reasons.

I hope the eac detects most macros for the rest of the playerbase sake.

@mlb7

If the toxic players are in such a majority that the vote-kick gets passed, you can be pretty sure its nicer to change server. The "pros" of votekick are definitely more important than the "cons". I am sure getting vote-kicked will not be a common experience if you try to play the game as intended. Just remember to not be last man standing on the other side of the map and don't repeatedly shot at your teammates, then normal people will have no problem.

Glad NWI decided to implement votekick as it will definitely lead to less toxicity overall.

@pacalis

Like I said man I dont play PVP. If youd read my entire comment youd know that. In COOP im not hurting other players at all. Often times, if I have used it (rarely) its been in a last ditch attempt to cap solo or def a point. Nothing I cant do on semi auto either. Since the ROF is capped and considering its about half as fast as using automatic.

@pacalis That's what I thought about RB6S and I got kicked here and there. I knew how to play and was pretty decent too. Sometimes a dude would have a problem with me for whatever stupid reason and would start the vote and the morons would vote yes without even knowing why. If you pay for the game you have a right to play. The game should kick you if you are team killing and you should be able to block the mic and chat of anyone who bothers you. That is all that is needed.

@plppln

I do know that you only do pve, and my post is written with that in mind. I can explain it again: For the anti cheat system there is no difference between pve and pvp most likely. Therefore asking for macros for use in pve is like asking for macros in pvp.

@mlb7

Yeah, I agree it happens from time to time for no reason. Still I mean if someone just votekick you by agreeing without thinking, they are probably very young or very ignorant, so it would be no reason to take offense except it’s annoying to change server right. System is not perfect in any case, and the official servers would be without votekick it seems as votekick would be implemented in community servers.

@pacalis Your post read like it had nothing to do with PVE. Why even bring up PVP if thats not what I play? Makes no sense to me man.

@plppln

I get you my friend and that’s why I said you probably had the best of intentions. I can definitely see reasons for wanting macros in pve for reasons being legitimate and in most cases people would probably not be bothered by it because it is coop after all. I would not have any problem if someone used some quality of life macro in PVE since they would not use it to kill other players more effectively. Though I can only speak for myself.

So what I am saying is that the anti cheat software is probably not separating if you are on a pve or pvp server, so playing on servers with anti cheat enabled would be a problem with macros even if you only play pve - That is why I say it would be cool if NWI can do something like the developers of Celeste game did. They made options for players who wanted to play the game with tweaks. This could be done on pve servers in Sandstorm so you could use your preferred macros, but that would mean the anti cheat software would need to be made with exceptions for those servers. So unless the devs make such a feature it is probably not viable today, and if they answer your question they also expose weaknesses in the anti cheat software for those who want to cheat in pvp. A comment from the devs was not given to your question, and that may be the reason why, if that makes sense.

Update from another game I enjoy to adress votekick and other abuse. Just some ideas for NWI:

We are addressing these toxicity issues with the following changes:
Players’ ability to initiate vote kicks has been restricted to 3 vote kicks every 24 hours
Players are restricted to changing teams once per minute to prevent players from switching teams, initiating a vote kick, and then switching back (this also applies to spectators)
When a vote prompt appears (to kick a player) there is additional information related to the reason for the kick, including the number of unforgiven team kills, number of minutes idling, or the number of kills attained by a player accused of cheating.

Spectators can no longer use any voice chat channels

WebAdmin
Better logging has been added to Webadmin to give server admins more useful information.
Added a log to record admin logins
Added a log to record any settings that have been changed by an admin on the server
Added a log to record players who have initiated a vote kick or role kick along with the selected kick reason
Added a log to record players who have had a vote initiated against them

last edited by Pacalis

@pacalis Disabling voice chat for spectators (or dead people, for that matter) is just annoying, really. If someone cares at all, they can just make a discord server

@cyoce
Depends if its player controlled or enforced by server. I agree that it is sometimes serves a purpose to keep on deadchat, in other case some random guy starts backseat driving telling the guy what to do and shouting commands so it drowns out all enemy sounds, making it impossible to gain intel on enemy presence, which is really important for me anyway. I prefer teammates being able to write text or use a discord as you mention.