Rockstar sentences Max Payne 3 cheaters to cheater's purgatory

Rockstar announced today via a new blog post on their community site that they are introducing a new measure designed to gracefully deal with cheaters and people who take advantage of exploits inMax Payne 3.

"Anyone found to have used hacked saves, modded games, or other exploits to gain an unfair advantage in Max Payne 3 Multiplayer, or to circumvent the leaderboards will be quarantined from all other players into a "Cheaters Pool", where they'll only be able to compete in multiplayer matches with other confirmed miscreants," reads the post on Rockstargames.com.

This is the latest in a trend of developers using their creativity to deal with bad players while leaving honest ones alone. This calls to mind the awesome method used by From Software in the weeks leading up to the release of Demon's Souls. If anyone was caught playing an unauthorized copy of the game pre-release, the devs would roll an immensely powerful character and just obliterate the offender.

That's the hatchet to Rockstar's scalpel. This method will allow Rockstar to continue serving their paying customers (cheaters are customers too) while keeping them separate from the masses who don't know how to exploit the code. In fact, we'd be interested to see some of the matches these people play together. It might actually create a bizarre meta-game if every one of the players is abusing an exploit.