Among Us: Server updated to catch hackers

Last night, Innersloth rolled out a server update meant to help catch hackers in Among Us. Forest Willard announced earlier on Twitter that this update took a while to release because he was attempting to cut down on the number of false positives.

evergreen tweet https://t.co/xvdpgnYzlN
— Forest (@forte_bass) October 23, 2020

Among Us has a hacking problem

It would be fair to say that the sudden and massive success of Among Us brought along problems that Innerloth likely didn’t imagine they would have to face. Among Us began as a party game that was meant to be played over Wi-Fi, but later had online servers added so players could play without being together in person.

When just a handful of people played Among Us, there was no point in hacking. If you were ever identified as a hacker, you’d be kicked from the group and there would be almost no one to play with. Additionally, anyone who played Among Us back when there were so few players likely cared a good deal about the health of the game’s community.

But now the game has hundreds of thousands of concurrent players. Such a small game was never meant to deal with anyone who wanted to use hacks to break the game’s fundamental rules, and for a while hackers were able to ruin games with near impunity.

So yeah. I'm rolling out the server update. I'm using a faster method than I've done before, but it'll impact players more. Trying to be careful, but also, you might get booted. It's for the greater good at this point. Consider it an "emergency maintenance for ??? hours"
— Forest (@forte_bass) October 23, 2020

Also worth nothing that the reason I didn't roll this update out sooner is that I was afraid of false positives:

You totally might see the game think you're hacking when you're not. I've done my best to find this kind of bug, but my hand is forced this time.
— Forest (@forte_bass) October 23, 2020

How Among Us has been addressing hackers

To try to stem the tide of hackers and other problematic players ruining the game, Innersloth has begun developing and testing anti-cheat mechanisms. Most recently, this has shown up as some hackers being kicked from their games and being presented with a simple message asking them to stop.

But until a real anti-cheat mechanism is introduced on a wide enough scale, Among Us will suffer under the deluge of hackers and cheaters in the game. Hopefully, the changes made by Forest on the server side of things will, at the very least, deal with the most blatant and obvious cheaters around.

However, it should be mentioned that cheaters will likely persist in Among Us, especially if they should find a way to cheat without being detected. Additionally, Among Us will continue to struggle against anyone who cheats without using hacks or altering the game’s code.

If you want to help keep cheaters out of your game, you should consider organizing a group on Discord, and learning how to use the kick and ban functions.