Delta Force Ban Wave

It is the most wonderful time of the year unless you are one of the 1729 players who deserve a lump of coal after being caught cheating on the new Delta Force free-to-play game.

In the spirit of transparency, Team Jade has put out regular updates about the anti-cheat situation, with some pretty eye-watering numbers.

According to the latest report, covering the period between December 20 and December 26, the Delta Force security team handed out 1729 bans.

Of course, players are given a chance to atone for their sins: the bans in Delta Force are temporary, so after exactly 10 years of rethinking their life choices, reformed cheaters are welcome to come back if they’d like.

The bans covered 415 instances of direct memory access (DMA) cheats, and resulted in 1323 computers being blocked from connecting to the game in the future.

On top of the account and hardware bans, the Delta Force security team stopped 6331 cheating attempts in real time and disconnected 15608 for suspected cheating. It is unclear what Team Jade’s criteria are for issuing a ban versus terminating the player’s session.

Delta Force Anti-Cheat Controversy

While Delta Force currently sits on a Mostly Positive rating on Steam today, with 71% of positive reviews, the game received significant backlash in the beginning due to its usage of kernel-level anti-cheat.

The game uses Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE), with some users singling out the ACE-BASE.sys kernel module as not handling access control properly and thus leaving a backdoor open.

Some of the earlier reviews also focused on a bug where the uninstaller did not remove ACE when uninstalling Delta Force, though a developer stated that this was fixed as of December 6.

Despite using heavy tools to weed out cheaters, many players mention that they are abundant, especially in Operations mode.

Extraction shooters have a bad rep among players chasing a clean game, and many of those who moved to Delta Force for extraction are already burned from Escape From Tarkov‘s problem with cheaters.

According to the game’s official account, Escape From Tarkov banned over 28,000 cheaters between June 4 and October 25 this year, but despite regular purges, the problem persists.

In AAA land, Activision is also struggling with cheaters in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and the company has acknowledged disappointing results during Season 1.

Players hoping to have a quieter time will not have to wait long. Delta Force plans to launch the single-player and co-op campaign mode titled Black Hawk Down, inspired by the real events behind both Delta Force: Black Hawk Down and Ridley Scott’s 2001 blockbuster of the same name.