Over the past month, space espionage game Among Us has gotten astronomically popular. Too much so for its own good, it seems, after facing overloaded servers and now the unavoidable rash of cheaters and hackers known to arrive in even the most mildly competitive games. Innersloth say they’re working on multiple solutions to combat jerks and hackers.
Among Us is a space-y spin on games like Werewolf or Mafia. You know, where you and your pals all have roles and you’ve got to ferret out who among you is the imposter trying to kill everyone else. It’s the sort of game that’s supposed to be fun whether you win or lose because the real reward is screaming at your mates. And yet there are folks who cheat. Alas, it comes as little surprise when equally lighthearted Fall Guys has battled cheaters recently as well.
Naturally there are your standard little sibling style cheaters who rat out the imposter when they’re meant to be keeping their months shut. If they’re your own pals, you just tell them what happens to snitches. If you’re teaming up with randoms through one of Among Us’s online lobbies, you’ve got bigger issues. Players say they’ve experienced tomfoolery such as having the entire crew instantly killed, having their nicknames edited, and cheaters making themselves an extra imposter—issues likely chalked up to third-party cheat software.
Innersloth had actually been working on Among Us 2 when the game exploded in popularity, so to say they were unprepared for the tribulations of cheaters and hackers is an understatement.
“We’re rushing to get an account system in place so we can have better moderation and reporting systems built around that,” Innerlsoth programmer Forest Willard tells Kotaku. “Also getting help with making the servers better at detecting and blocking hacks. And investigating client-side hack prevention as well. I’m sort of scrambling to get all the right people in place, but I’m attacking it from multiple angles so it can get better in many ways hopefully all at once.” Given that Among Us is crewed by a small team, these solutions will likely take time.
While Innersloth rally their resources to boot out the bad imposters, your best bet to avoid hackers is probably rounding up your own pals to play if you can. You can find Among Us over on Steam for a relatively breezy £4/€4/$5, which certainly assists with reeling friends in.