Bungie bans 15,000 Halo: Reach cheaters

Bungie has banned a whopping 15,000 Halo: Reach cheaters – and promised more is to come.

Some sneaky Reach players (not you, we hope) had found a way to earn cheap in-game credits via an exploit.

It's all to do with something called "network manipulation and other easily detectable workarounds that fall well outside of standard gameplay".

The developer's answer? Wipe their credits out and ban them from obtaining credits for one day.

"Specifically, we targeted an exploit that allowed players to complete a Challenge 20+ times via intentional network manipulation (i.e., disconnects)," Bungie said.

"Spot checks have revealed the tell-tale signature of this behaviour on every denier so far, so don't be fooled by the protests of innocence. We aren't.

"We are in the process of applying credit resets to approximately 15,000 users who we have identified as the most egregious Challenge Reset abusers.

"A one day credit earning ban has also been applied, mostly to ensure that recipients receive an in-game notification of the action taken.

"As with any such measure, we have taken the time to carefully select our criteria to eliminate false positives.

"A more comprehensive pass will be occurring in the coming week as our automated Banhammer mechanisms grow accurate enough to satisfy our high bar for burden of proof. If you are thinking about getting an easy 50k credits by using this exploit, I would strongly advise you to reconsider."

You have been warned.

Halo: Reach generated $200 million in its first 24 hours on sale, and is the biggest Microsoft published game ever. It's also pretty good.