Palworld devs acknowledge rampant cheating, pledge to introduce countermeasures

Part of the open-world survival crafting formula Palworld employs (and introduces legally distinct Pokémon into) is online multiplayer. Nothing feels better than taming the wilderness with your friends at your side or even competing with them for precious resources—in theory, at least.

In practice, Palworld‘s public multiplayer servers have been slammed with a massive influx of cheaters, to the point that developer Pocketpair has had to publish an official statement on Feb. 16, acknowledging the chronic issue and promising solutions at some future junction.

Palworld‘s reliance on low-security peer-to-peer connections in most cases and its lack of external anti-cheat software, like BattlEye or Easy Anti-Cheat, mean that it’s been extremely easy for the game to become a breeding ground for cheaters. Other games with these same oversights have experienced similar problems, perhaps most infamously GTA Online.

A primary complaint of players on the game’s official subreddit and beyond has been the prevalence of cheaters, blowing up bases, wiping progress, killing Pals, and even outright denying access to the game’s dedicated public servers. Even Pocketpair has admitted that it’s not “able to keep up” with the tidal wave of cheaters. These problems have been persistent since launch, but now it seems Pocketpair has a plan to combat them.

In its post about the subject, the studio laid out its strategy: “First of all, we plan to release a player list function for servers in an update at the end of February. Through this, we will strengthen the identification of players who engage in cheating and the suspension of their use by the development team. Following this, we plan to introduce an external anti-cheat solution to take measures against particularly frequent fraudulent activities and cheating.”

Pocketpair went on to describe further, far more vague “thorough measures” it will take against cheaters and clarified that the anti-cheat software would only be mandatory when playing in dedicated public servers (so mod to your heart’s content if you’re sticking to singleplayer). Ultimately, a player list function seems like a fairly basic feature that probably should have been included at launch, but the game introducing external anti-cheat sounds far more promising. Hopefully, they’ll spring for one of the good ones.

Given that the first of these anti-cheating measures will arrive toward the end of this month, players—and perhaps more importantly, Pocketpair itself—won’t have to wait long to see just how effective they are in use. Hopefully, you’ll soon be able to get back to farming Lamballs without worry.