With Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road’s release just around the corner (Deluxe Edition adopters should already have full access), Level-5 decided to drop a ton of new information regarding the game, including an announcement about how exactly its anti-cheat system will work. As spotted by Game*Spark, in a special kickoff livestream, company president and CEO Akihiro Hino revealed that the penalties delivered to cheaters are not straight up bans, but rather work like a “malicious curse”.
When a cheat tool or data-altering mod is detected, the game will impose certain disadvantages on the player’s characters without their knowledge, akin to a shadowban. For example, players who join lobbies with suspected cheaters will be warned before a match starts, and will be given the option to kick them out. However, cheaters will not be directly notified that they were penalized. Additionally, those flagged by the anti-cheating system will have all of their parameters secretly debuffed and will receive a significant decrease in rare drop rates for characters and items.
Hino reveals that the reason Level-5 chose this “curse-like” anti-cheat system instead of a more conventional method was to increase the time it takes for cheaters to know that they have been found out. According to him, using a method like account banning would immediately tip off offenders, leading to a cat-and-mouse game of the developers implementing countermeasures and cheaters finding workarounds around the latest updates.
Instead, the “curse-like” anti-cheat system “gradually tightens the screws without being noticed,” disincentivizing potential cheaters and hopefully creating an even playing field for all. Hino adds that should cheaters detect that they are being penalized, Level-5 will simply devise new ways to punish them.
Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road is set to release on November 13 for the PC (Steam), Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PlayStation 4 and 5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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