Ensemble bans AoE players

By Tom Bramwell Published 3 April, 2006

But offers right to appeal.

Age of Empires maker Ensemble Studios has "done a Blizzard" and banned "a batch" of players from playing its real-time strategy game online due to cheating.

In an update to its website on Friday, Ensemble said, "Today we have banned a batch of players from ESO for a variety of cheats, including hacked decks, point trading, as well as for racist chat channels and comments. If you have found that your ESO account has been disabled and would like to appeal your ban, please e-mail age3.abuse@ensemblestudios.com."

The developer also asked players to submit screenshots and recorded games when reporting suspected cheaters via email.

While developers take all sorts of measures to stamp out cheating in games before they're released, it's always been a problem nonetheless, often prompting first-person shooter developers to rely on third-party server security solutions like Punkbuster, while developers in other genres are often forced to divert resources to policing their own games.

Most frequently in the headlines for doing so is Blizzard, whose World of Warcraft, Warcraft and Starcraft RTS games are often the target of unscrupulous oiks. It's not always as simple as having super-duper swords and hacking people's pants off though - Square Enix also acted recently to cut out people who were farming in-game resources to sell on to players for real money via dodgy websites.

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (6) Latest comment 6 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • wayn3h #1 6 years ago

    This is only a good thing. But you will never eliminate all of them. Which is a shame, because these are the people who really bring down the online gaming community.

  • Artemis_Matsas #2 6 years ago

    Yeah... you have to be a REAL loser in order to get any fun out of cheating in online games.

  • redneon Verified Programmer, SUMO Digital #3 6 years ago

    On the whole, I agree, it's an arse. We play UT 2004 every lunch at work and I once wrote an aimbot. It was hilarious but I was found out straight away due to my utterly faultless performance =o)

    The thing is, these people don't care about getting banned. Usually, they write these cheats as a challenge, not because they have any interest in the games. It's just a shame they don't consider the people who do care about playing these games online.

  • YourMessageHere #4 6 years ago

    Maybe they ought to ban them, then offer them jobs? Anyone interested enough in the technical side of a game to write a cheat for something that keeps being updated and protected must potentially be a pretty skilled and dedicated asset if they were on your side.

  • redneon Verified Programmer, SUMO Digital #5 6 years ago

    "Anyone interested enough in the technical side of a game to write a cheat for something that keeps being updated and protected must potentially be a pretty skilled and dedicated asset if they were on your side."

    It really isn't THAT difficult, believe me.

    Think about it, every time a piece of software gets updated new code is added. Most of the time this new code fixed old bugs but, potentially, with the same hand introduces more bugs which can be exploited.

    People seem to have an opinion that virus writers and such are extremely skilled programmers when in reality, they aren't. They tend to just hack away at coded mess.

    It is much more difficult to keep people out of a system than it is to break into a system.

  • YourMessageHere #6 6 years ago

    It certainly seems that difficult to me, but that's probably because I'm not remotely talented at coding. Even VB periodically makes me turn the air around me blue for 50 paces. =P Perhaps that's the key, actually; I envy people who actually like the process of coding. As far as I can see it's the modern form of alchemy; but you clearly know more about it than I do. I just play 'em.