June 2018 Anti-cheat Update!

Hi everyone,

We're coming up on nearly 30 days, and I am excited to announce that we will be releasing our first patch.

Just to set expectations there is one major outstanding bug, so I'm not 100% positive this will be ready, but with a little testing we should be ready to go. We expect to lock servers at 4am Pacific / 11am UTC, and there will be 6 hours of downtime for patching and testing.

One of our players provided these links to track the exact time in your timezone:

Server going down:
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=SERVERS+GOING+DOWN&iso=20180608T11&p1=1440
 
Server coming back up (expected):
https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=APB+UNBAN&iso=20180608T17&p1=1440

BattlEye:

This is the first big step in rebuilding this game as a fun, safe environment to play. Our new client-side anti-cheat is the biggest addition in this update. Our initial implementation should handle a majority of situations, but you can expect that we will continue tweaking this until we're happy with the results.

FairFight unbans:

In my Q&A I mentioned that I had done a lot of research into many of the FairFight bans, and due to a number of factors, I found many permanent bans that were either blatantly incorrect or too subjective for my comfort level. As of this release, we will be unbanning a significant of those players because it's impossible for me to tell who cheated and who didn't. For most players, you should be able to log in on Friday and access these older accounts. If you didn't get unbanned, you are welcome to send in a support ticket, but it will take some time for us to address these, so please be patient with us.

Stripping unbanned accounts:

The community has been very vocal about the fact that we will be unbanning known cheaters. This is unavoidable, even though we know those accounts abused the system and their opponents to their own personal gain. After some consideration, I have decided that all unbanned accounts will be stripped of the following:
- APB$
- Joker Tickets

I realize this will also penalize some of the honest players who were banned unfairly, but it's the only way I can see to make sure we don't flood the game with accounts that have unfair advantages.

Next steps:

I'll be collecting notes from the devs over the weekend, and I'll post the timeline and focus of our next update soon.

Thanks,
Matt