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Fair Play and Anti-Cheat
August 17, 2026 at 10:19 PM
Initial version covering the cheating and illegal teaming policies, the August 3 translation correction, published penalty rounds, chat blocking, and the Family Sharing ban rule
Mistfall Hunter is a PvPvE extraction game where the loot you carry out is real, so the value of a match depends on the other hunters in it playing by the same rules. Bellring Games treats enforcement as something to publish rather than something to do quietly: penalty rounds go out as public announcements, and the rules behind them have been restated and corrected in the open.
The stated policy is zero tolerance. Any player confirmed to be using cheats receives a permanent ban on both the account and the device, which is the part worth noting: a fresh account on the same hardware is covered by the same penalty. Detection runs on backend data analysis by a dedicated security team as well as on player reports.
The second offence is illegal teaming, and its exact definition matters because the penalty attaches to intent rather than to cooperation as such. The developers define it as multiple players deliberately entering the same match in order to work together against other players, or to engage in other unfair practices that ruin the experience for others. The core test they give is "multiple players intentionally joining the same match to team up and ruin others' experience", and they have said only cases that strictly meet that definition are penalized.
This needed a public correction. On August 3, 2026 the developers acknowledged that some language versions of an earlier announcement had mistranslated the offence as the much broader "cooperate with others", dropping the required precondition of deliberately entering the same match. They apologised for the confusion, confirmed it was a translation error rather than a change in the penalty criteria, and restated the definition above. Alongside it they made a point about design philosophy: the appeal of an extraction game lies in complex split-second decisions and varied playstyles, and they do not intend to tell players how to play, but they rank a fair PvP experience as the higher priority.
The penalty is a matchmaking suspension rather than an immediate ban. Repeat offenders face escalating penalties, up to and including a permanent ban.
Reports are submitted through the in-game reporting system or the official community channels, and the developers have repeatedly said reports are the fastest way for them to identify offenders. From mid-August 2026 they began rolling out a feedback email that notifies a player when one of their own reports results in a penalty, so the outcome of a report is visible rather than disappearing into a queue.
Enforcement results are published as named announcements. The table below records the rounds published since launch.
Date | What was published |
|---|---|
August 12, 2026 | 438 accounts banned for cheating and 232 accounts penalized for illegal teaming, covering the previous week. |
August 3, 2026 | A partial list of permanent cheating bans and a partial list of illegal teaming penalties, published together with the translation correction and a full restatement of both policies. |
Both lists are published with player names masked. Earlier rounds ran during the test phases, before the July 29, 2026 release, and the practice has carried into the live game as a weekly cadence. The updates that carried each round are listed on Updates and Patch Notes.
A separate problem showed up in the first week after launch: advertising accounts spamming the world chat channel. By August 7 the developers reported banning nearly 30 of them and promised a block feature for the following week. It arrived on schedule in the August 12 update as an "Add to Blocklist" control inside the World Chat window, which suppresses a blocked account's messages for you.
One rule reaches beyond the offending account. Steam Family Sharing is supported for the base game, but the developers attached a condition to it: if a shared account is caught cheating, both the borrowing and the lending account are permanently banned. The purchase and sharing rules are covered on Editions and Game Pass.