Call for the Developers to Take Action on Widespread Cheats and Hacks on America's Army Official Servers

We, the undersigned, call on the Developers of America's Army to start today a meaningful effort to combat the widespread use of hacks and cheats that takes place on the Official Servers, and which is getting worse by the day.

While we acknowledge that some newly-emerging hacks will always be hard to wipe out, we cannot understand why the Developers just stand by whilst in nearly every game people use age-old, common-knowledge, easily-downloadable, easily-detectable, well-known standard cheat programs to aim, rapid-fire grenades, kick fellow gamers out of the game and so on.

Using these programs is beginning not only to ruin America's Army for the whole of the community but also totally contradicts the whole concept of 'Honor' on which the game is built.

We cannot understand how a game that has no mods, community-created maps, addons or user-created files (i.e. a game which should be indentical on every single computer) cannot be safeguarded with a simple effective anti-cheat program. We would draw the Developers' attention to Unreal Tournament 2004, which has a massive number of user-modded files but which is still made comparatively cheat-proof using Anti-TCC, a simple program put together by a community member.

Given that the US Army (and by definition every US resident) pays a team of people at Even Balance to provide America's Army an apparently non-existent service which can be bypassed almost at will using easily available hacks, we cannot understand why the Developers or the US Army are not upset at the level of service they are receiving from Even Balance.

We therefore call on the Developers to:

1. realise the damage that cheating does to America's Army, and the concern it generates in the forums and in-game chat

2. change the game code or cheat-prevention software to AT VERY LEAST stop the existing well-known cheats from functioning on Official Servers.

3. put in place a method for reporting/recording new cheats and hacks so that they can be quickly tackled

Failing that, presence of community members in Official Servers to manually remove persons running hacks and cheats.

Our request is a very simple, straightforward and purely technical one, which could be easily rectified if the Developers had the motivation, and we make no attempt to enter the debate on bans, accounts, and so on.

Hooah!