Ubisoft’s new cheat capture tool is very effective – a 70 percent reduction

Barely three months after Ubisoft added a new anti-cheat system to Rainbow Six Siege on Playstation and Xbox, the number of cheaters using a mouse and keyboard with tools like XIM, Cronus Zen and Reasnow S1 in a console game has dropped by 73 percent.

The anti-cheat system is called Mousetrap and has also been added to many other online games from Ubisoft, resulting in a 78 percent decrease in mouse and keyboard cheating, the game publisher wrote in blog posts. In the graph, they show how the number of cheaters detected fell sharply after the introduction of the mousetrap on April 11, and has remained at a much lower level since then. It’s much more effective than Ubisoft expected: early tests indicated a 30-50 percent drop.

Instead of kicking out cheaters entirely, Ubisoft chose to add an artificial lag for players who are caught using a mouse and keyboard in console games. Thus the degraded gaming experience seems to have the desired effect – gamers give up and use a console instead.

In late June, the Mousetrap developers discovered a bug that allowed players to bypass the penalty mark and play normally with a mouse and keyboard, and quickly released an update to fix it. In the blog post, Ubisoft writes that it is a game of cat and mouse between the company and the cheat hardware developers.