The Finals: Top Players Allegedly Caught Cheating

The Finals is a free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter game developed and published by Embark Studios. The game first gained popularity in November last year, and in December with its full release, The Finals became one of the most popular games on consoles and PC.

Despite its rapid rise in popularity, the game has been plagued by cheaters ever since the game came out. This is widely common in online competitive multiplayer games.

However, The Finals’ in-game leaderboards are allegedly filled with cheaters. These are supposedly your best players in the game and most of them are cheaters. This isn’t a good sight for new players who want to commit to this game.

The cheating topic has reached the mainstream media after YouTuber, “ItsJustSneaky”, released a video talking about the glaring issue. We’ll cover all the details here as well as how Embark Studios can counter the cheating problem in The Finals.

Top Players Caught Cheating in the Finals

Recently many players have been noticing a new form of cheating that has plagued the higher ranks of the game.

To explain how these players are cheating, here’s a quick rundown of the system they are currently exploiting.

The Finals has crossplay, which means players from PCs and consoles can play with and against each other. Generally, in first-person shooter games, PC players will have an advantage over console players. So, the game offers aim assist and recoil assistance for controller players to make the playing field a bit more fair.

Cheaters have been exploiting this system and using it to their advantage. They do this by using a mouse and keyboard but making the game think that they are using a controller. This allows them to utilize the aim assist and recoils assistance available to controller players while using a mouse and keyboard.

Cheaters do this by using third-party software that configure your mouse and keyboard as a controller.

This isn’t a hidden mechanic or tip in the game intended by the developers. This is flat-out exploitation.

The exploit in using a third-party software was highlighted by the YouTuber “ItsJustSneaky” in a video posted on his channel on the 4th of January.

Here we can see the layout of the software used by cheaters where it shows how the mouse buttons can be configured as controller buttons. The arrows indicate the left click being configured as the shooting button and the right click as the aim-down-sights (ADS) button.

The two images above showcase the differences in recoil. The first picture is the normal recoil without any recoil assistance and the second one is with recoil assistance. The bullet holes on the wall showcase how recoil assistance makes it much easier for the player to use the gun.

How Can Embark Counter the Cheaters?

The top spots of the leaderboards dominated by cheaters led people to quit the game. The Finals is slowly losing its players. So, how can Embark tackle this issue?

Since the video by “ItsJustSneaky” came out, the issue has been gaining a lot of traction on sites such as Reddit and X. On it, users have suggested multiple solutions that might be viable.

The most popular one suggested was disabling assistance for controllers on PC. This won’t impact players on consoles, but players wanting to use controllers on PC won’t have access to this feature. Another solution is to improve their anti-cheat system, but this is sometimes easier said than done.

It remains to be seen how Embark addresses this problem. Cheaters have been the downfall of many popular and promising games over the years and it would be sad to see such an innovative and unique game fall prey to this.

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