Earlier today, the Tower of Fantasy developers promised to shame cheaters publicly, and they’ve already made good on that promise, providing a full list of the 1,706 accounts targeted by the game’s first major ban wave.
The targeted accounts were found to be “using cheating software and the violation of using scripts for initializing account data,” according to the official announcement.
You can see the full list at the official site (opens in new tab). The account names are lightly censored, but you’ll still get the gist of names like P***EEPOOPOO, E***emelyNoob, and B***ASSMUNCHER. Affected accounts include 295 in the Asia-Pacific region, 343 in North America, 442 in Europe, 156 in South America, and 470 in Southeast Asia.
Several players have been publicly complaining (opens in new tab) about being banned for “no reason,” showing screens of an in-game message notifying them that there was “rule-violating behavior detected” and that they’d been banned for 5,256,000 minutes, which is about ten years.
Many of the bans seem connected with modifying the ‘ksophon_x64.sys’ file in the game folder. This file handles the game’s anti-cheat system, so tampering with it has obvious results. Unfortunately, it seems that some players were altering the file to bypass blue screen crashes believed to be connected to the anti-cheat system, even if they had no intention of cheating.
The devs say some sort of “improvement of the game’s anti-cheat mechanism” is on the way, so hopefully that will mean nobody’s encouraged to tamper with it in order to evade crashes.
Check out our guide to Tower of Fantasy characters if you’re looking to get a cheat-free head start.