Penalties for Quick Deaths Due to Cheaters—Can We Add a Retroactive System Check?

NeedBloodPoints

Hi everyone,

I understand that cheaters are an unfortunate reality in online games, and I’m not expecting a miracle solution to stop them all. They’re probably always going to be around in some form. However, there’s one aspect of this situation that I think could be improved to make dealing with them a little more fair.

Recently, I’ve had matches where cheaters took out all four survivors almost instantly—within the first minute. Afterward, I was penalized with a matchmaking lock, which I assume happened because the game thought I quit or intentionally lost. But in these cases, I didn’t even have a chance to play. If there were some way to recognize that all players died unusually fast, perhaps the system could prevent penalties in these situations.

One idea could be a retroactive system check. After the match ends, the game could analyze what happened. If it sees that all survivors were eliminated in an unusually short time, it could flag the match as suspicious and automatically skip any penalties for the affected players. This wouldn’t necessarily stop cheaters, but it would protect players who have no control over these situations.

Looking forward, maybe AI could even be trained to analyze matches for suspicious patterns and flag problematic games automatically. I know this might be a longer-term vision, but it could be a powerful tool for creating a fairer experience for everyone.

Thanks for considering, and I’d love to hear if anyone else has thought about similar ideas. I think this could be a small but impactful way to make things better for players dealing with cheaters.

NeedBloodPoints

Just an update on my situation—I’m now facing a 30-minute matchmaking lock because I ran into the same cheater again. This time, I tried everything I could to avoid an instant death, even struggled on the hook as long as possible, but they still managed to kill me within seconds. Now I’m locked out of matchmaking for half an hour, all because I’m being repeatedly targeted by the same person and the system keeps penalizing me for “dying too fast.”

This is exactly why I think we need some kind of retroactive system check or an exception for cases like these. I don’t mind the occasional cheater as much, but being effectively banned from the game because of repeated targeting makes it really hard to enjoy playing at all.

I hope this message helps illustrate why a solution is so important—not just for me but for anyone else who may find themselves in this situation. If the game could recognize when something suspicious happens, it would prevent legitimate players from being unfairly penalized.

Thanks for listening, and I really appreciate any additional thoughts or support on this issue.

JPLongstreet

As far as I know there is nothing checked by the servers as far as impossibilities in DBD, such as flying around or extreme speeds or far too short hook times. Things like that.

When it comes to any kind of match replay option I thought they said it's too late now it would have had needed to been originally coded back in 2016. That its nearly impossible to add it in now.