Over 4,000 Rust players banned, claim anti-cheat program is busted

Facepunch Studios is as bold and decisive as its name would lead you to believe. Over the weekend, the developer of the popular PC game Rust sent a snarky “screw off” message to cheaters and rolled out an unforgiving anti-cheat program.

The studio announced its custom software, Cheatpunch, at the same time it claimed to have already banned 4,621 players. According to the message on the game’s website, Facepunch made the cheater-catching program just last week. In comments on video game forum NeoGAF and the official Cheatpunch web page, many Rust players expressed gratitude and relief that their sessions would no longer be ruined by hackers. At the same time, many others were skeptical about the reliability of the automatic bans. Some were angry, claiming that they’d been banned unfairly because of a glitch or excessive lag. One commenter, “Barracuda (ooo00)”, said he is refusing to play Rust until he is sure the system won’t accidentally ban him.