We wanted to give everyone an update on some of the efforts we’ve got underway to address hacking and cheating in Rec Room. Any online game will always be a target for hackers. It is a constant cat and mouse game. We will never be able to make the game 100% secure. Hackers are always finding new and creative ways to exploit vulnerabilities, and we’re always trying to respond to them as quickly as we can.
For a long time now, our first line of defense has been a system called Easy Anti-Cheat or EAC. EAC is made by Epic Games, it is used by numerous teams across the industry to prevent hacking. It’s a great tool, but it’s not one that we control directly. EAC is designed and developed to prevent the most prevalent hacks across the gaming ecosystem, not to solve the individual idiosyncratic issues that might only affect Rec Room. Adding new detections to EAC could also be a time consuming process where much of the delay was out of our control.
Additionally, if an exploit was specific to Rec Room, we wouldn't expect EAC to block it. It’s our job to fix those issues with a client update. All client updates need to go through certification processes with various stores like Apple, Meta, Google, Nintendo, etc… and that could create a significant lag between players noticing the issue and Rec Room getting a fix deployed.
The community would be feeling the pain of the exploit for the weeks in between "find" and "fix." Not good!
Over the past year, we decided it was time for us to take more ownership of the problem. We’ve built a new tool called Referee. Referee does many of the same things that EAC does, but it has two unique features.
First, it’s built by Rec Room and focused solely on Rec Room. Because we own the development, we will be able to modify it to address the most active issues we see in the Rec Room community at any time.
Second, Referee can be updated without a Rec Room client update. This means the lag time between exploit, investigation, fix and deployment can be much shorter. We should be able to detect and prevent several classes of issues much much faster than we could in the past.
It’s important for us to note that Referee isn’t a panacea for every hacking issue out there. You won’t instantly see hacking stop. There will always be hackers and cheaters in Rec Room. The cat and mouse game will continue… but we now have a faster, better cornering cat that we’re investing in for the long term.
More to come. Stay tuned!