Monster Hunter Wilds just finished up its first limited-time challenge quest, where hunters could compete on a worldwide leaderboard for the fastest clear time in a hunt against a Doshaguma to earn bragging rights and cosmetic rewards. Unsurprisingly, those leaderboards were quickly flooded with cheaters posting impossibly fast hunting times. Today Capcom said it's beginning a "review" of the leaderboard, so that it can "take action" against users who posted illegitimate times.
"The final rankings results for this quest will be confirmed during a 1-to-2 week review period from today," Capcom said in a Steam news post. "Event rewards will be distributed after any fraudulent clear times have been investigated and excluded."
Before the Doshaguma of the Hollow quest kicked off, Capcom had said it would "take action against accounts participating in fraudulent ranking activity." Given how easy it is to hop on Nexus Mods and grab a few mods that let you kill dinosaurs just by breathing on them, it wasn't clear how much of a deterrent Capcom's declaration would be.
Considering that players were immediately posting kill times of zero seconds, the answer seemed to be "not very much at all." While Capcom might not have been able to prevent the tainting of its leaderboard, it said it'll be purging the rankings of illegitimate clear times and punishing the accounts responsible. In fact, it says the punishing has already begun. Hooray!
"When we exclude the fraudulent clear times, we will also place restrictions on those accounts. The user's clear time will not be registered in the rankings from that point, and they will not receive the event rewards," Capcom said. "In addition, we have already taken and will continue to take action to ban accounts that our reviews have found to be cheating."
What's interesting is Capcom said that in addition to judging clear times, it will also conduct its "own investigations." What those investigations might look like is anyone's guess: In past PC releases, Capcom has turned a blind eye on Monster Hunter modding, so it's hard to say what kind of telemetry the studio is able to collect about what software modifications the player might be running.
In a page warning against unauthorized Monster Hunter Wilds data modification, however, Capcom said it plans to "implement additional countermeasures in future updates to detect users who have engaged in unauthorized modification of game data."
That warning against data modification seems primarily directed at players who are modding quests to provide extra rewards. But if you run afoul of Capcom's efforts to root out cheating, it sounds like you won't have any opportunity to appeal the punishment. "As we take action based on play data and history, we will not respond to any requests regarding the reversal of these measures," Capcom said. "We urge all players to refrain from engaging in fraudulent activities."
Hopefully, Capcom is able to differentiate between purely cosmetic mods and add-ons that alter quest rewards and player damage output—especially when some players have to turn to mods to alleviate Wilds' still-iffy performance. At the very least, if you're going to be posting times during the next challenge quest, my advice would be to turn off all mods, cosmetic or otherwise.
