14 DAY TRIAL // Bungie is looking to really improve the online experience in Halo: Reach by having a tough stance regarding players who break the rules. In a recent interview, Brian Jarrard, community director at Bungie, explained that company's new black list included rage quitters alongside the usual cheaters. He promised that the developer would take serious measures to prevent and punish early quitting from multiplayer matches in Halo: Reach.
Xbox 360 Achievements asked Jarrard what Bungie was doing to deter bad behavior in Halo: Reach's online matches. He mentioned, among other things, those who quit a match before it finishes and debalanced the whole game. “I think one of the new things people will be excited about too, is how we’re going to be able to penalize people who are habitually quitting out of games, which isn’t exactly cheating, but it creates a really negative experience for everybody else in the game. We actually have new tools now to detect that and eventually, people who do this habitually will actually be penalized. We want to be able to remove them from the population so they can’t make everyone else keep having a bad time.”
Jarrard also described Bungie's battle with cheaters as an arms race, say that the recent open beta testing phase was key to discovering potential exploits early and fixing them before cheating players were able to take advantage of them “Suffice it to say, we’ve continued to evolve our banhammer tools, our detection tools; we work very closely with the Live team on the platform side – they take cheating extremely seriously as well.”
Despite all of Bungie's efforts, though, players will attempt to use various game breaking exploits anyway. Jarrard explained that, “Unfortunately, there’s just a lot of really smart people out there with a lot of spare time who keep finding new ways to break things that weren’t supposedly able to be broken.” Halo: Reach will be launched on the 14th of September exclusively on the Xbox 360. In celebration of this launch as Limited Edition Bundle featuring a Reach-themed Xbox 360, controllers and headset will be released by Microsoft.