As cheating in The Finals swells, FPS dev shuts down the idea that region locking Asian servers is the solution: “Cheaters are in all regions”

The Finals developer Embark Studios has shut down a frequent request from its community to introduce region locking to combat cheating in the hot new FPS. 

Following myriad posts on Reddit, Discord, and other platforms calling for separation between Asian, European, and American servers to reduce the frequency of cheater interactions, a community manager has made the studio's stance clear.

"We don't want to region lock," they explain on Discord. "[This] isn't a personal opinion, it's a company decision." The community manager goes on to say that assuming cheaters hail from one region is xenophobic, as "cheaters are in all regions." Plenty of them use Chinese names not because it represents where they come from but because it makes them "harder" to report by non-native-speaking players.

Not long after the community manager's comments, someone from Embark Studios provided an update on what The Finals team is doing to counter cheating in the FPS. As per community lead Dusty Gustafsson, a "technical issue" has prevented the team from banning bad actors efficiently. 

"We're now nearing a solution to this bug, and we've already begun re-upping our anti-cheat measures again," he said. "Thanks for your patience as we continue to sort through issues. Keeping the game a smooth, safe, and fair space for players is our biggest priority. We're in this for the long haul."

While some community members are still frustrated over the situation – citing that the FPS may go the way of PUBG soon enough if nothing is done – others are getting inventive. This Finals wizard has discovered that you can stick a turret on a plant to make a cheater-killing machine.

"So I was playing with friends and noticed, when the hacker in the enemy team tried to attack the APS system, he had a hard time killing it," they say. "I figured: 'What if he can't aim lock on turrets?' So I took a plant (something that can't explode in my hand) and put an APS on it. I basically was invincible to him then, as long as I would face in his direction."

So there you go, until The Finals sorts the cheating issue in the meantime, grab a plant and an APS system and you're good to go.

The Finals isn't getting a content roadmap because the FPS' devs only want to "make promises we can keep."