Combating cheaters in the Builders’ Challenge was one of our top priorities and also one of our greatest challenges.
The SAND rewards we allocate to the Builders’ Challenge is meant to reward our talented and passionate creators based on performance and skill. Thus, we are adamant to ensure to the best of our ability that these rewards do not end up in the hands of bad actors.
Along with other undisclosed measures, we used a combination of similarity patterns and anomaly detection. The anti-cheat filters detected suspicious activities with over 2000 players, resulting in a 20% decrease in total playtime across all affected experiences.
For the upcoming Builders’ Challenges, we seek to improve our filters to better investigate the links between suspicious player activity and the creators behind the Experiences. During this event, we were unable to determine with enough accuracy if a creator had attempted to cheat or if the players were engaging in suspicious activity independently. Thus, we aimed not to punish creators in an effort to avoid eliminating anyone’s hard work wrongfully. Instead, players and their playtime were removed from the Experiences.
These measures reduced the earnings of affected Experiences by roughly 75,000 SAND, which was returned to the overall prize pool distributed across all participating Experiences.
We look forward to launching another successful Builders’ Challenge with you soon, and will continue to improve upon our anti-cheat measures to ensure a fair playing field for all.