Electronic Arts Inc.
Promoting fair online game play through disadvantaged interactions with online gaming

Abstract:

A cheating enforcement system and method determines if a player profile that is to play an online game is linked to another player profile that had been identified as cheating. If such a link is found, then one or more penalties may be imposed on the player profile, so that penalties for cheating cannot be averted by a player by opening a new player profile to play the online game. If a certain period of time has transpired since cheating was detected for the other player profile, then the one or more penalties may be removed from the player profile. The penalties imposed on the player profile may include server-side hit detection, latency penalty, damage scaling, and/or dropped moves. In the case of a chain of linked player profiles, severity of penalties may increase based on the number of linked accounts where cheating use was detected.