Earlier this week, EngineOwning was slammed with a $15 million payment order from a California court in a landmark cheating case against Activision Blizzard. For the longest time, EngineOwning has been one of the most popular cheat providers in the gaming market, specialising most commonly in the Call of Duty space.
However, following the judgement, EngineOwning’s leadership team swore to appeal the settlement order, making some rather out-there threats against Activision Blizzard that included releasing cheating software free of charge.
Making it Worse
Activision Blizzard saw success in the Californian court when a judge ruled that EngineOwning’s unlawful conduct had made the firm liable to pay AB a whopping $15 million (including legal fees). Not only that but the court demanded that EngineOwning surrender its domain identity to Activision. This warranted immediate backlash from EngineOwning, who went on record saying:
We hope and think that our domain registrar will not defer to this bogus claim, that would not have been approved by any clear headed judge with even basic democratic values in a proper jurisdiction.
By way of an inflammatory response, EngineOwning vowed to create new software to further circumvent Modern Warfare 3 and Warzone’s anti-cheat systems. The company also pledged to offer a free-to-use cheat system if AB continues down this path. In a report published by IGN, it was suggested that the owners of EngineOwning have prepared to keep the business flowing by setting up a series of backup domains.
Call of Duty has had a problem with cheaters for years – and it’s getting worse. As the anti-cheating systems become more intelligent, so too does the software that cheat providers are designing.
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Instead of wasting money on something that will happen regardless of what they want, wouldn’t it be better to train AI to flag players interactions for human revision to effectively catch and ban cheating players?
They are losing money to cheaters for sure but they aren’t really hiring people to moderate the game and even with the best undetected cheating software, you can still easily catch the offending players because their aim is too good or they track players through walls. This is a problem AB has let fester and didn’t seem appropriate to allocate a budget to.it has always been the same time and time again.
Just get the FBI onto them and cease all their assets
Unfortunately, going for the source will not solve anything. These guys know what they’re doing, they’ll back everything up, this will never go away. Plus the threat of releasing it for free is something that is believable because they have nothing to lose.
The only real thing AB can do is focus on their anti-cheat and just hardware ban those that use it. Force them to get a new console/PC if they want to cheat so badly.