The survival-crafting game Palworld has had a very strong start. Releasing on January 19, 2024, for PC, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and Xbox One, the game quickly racked up over 19 million players. It seems that players really can’t get enough of this Pokémon-inspired open world title, but its huge popularity has come at a cost.
In addition to some issues with server capacity, which were preventing players from diving into the game around the launch period, there are plenty of ongoing problems being caused by unscrupulous players who are taking advantage of various cheats and exploits.
In a recent Steam Blog post, the developer Pocketpair states that such behavior has been affecting server connection, leaving “some users” entirely “unable to connect to official servers” in their games.
“As a company, we do not tolerate any fraudulent activity or cheating, and we are working on measures to deal with it strictly and as a priority,” the post continues. “First of all, we plan to release a player list function for servers in an update at the end of February. Through this, we will strengthen the identification of players who engage in cheating.”
It certainly seems like this will expedite the process of tracking down and manually banning players who are misbehaving, but the post also says that a more permanent countermeasure is in the works: “Following this, we plan to introduce an external anti-cheat solution.”
The post then goes on to apologize to players for the disruption, explaining some of the reasons why Pocketpair has taken longer than it would have liked to address the concern: “Although the development team is dealing with each issue on a daily basis and taking measures, there are many cases where we are not able to keep up, and we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
Thankfully, it seems like Palworld players won’t have to wait long as the “entire [development] team is working hard to get everyone back to a state where they can enjoy the game comfortably and with peace of mind as soon as possible.”
If you’re currently playing Palworld, visit our guides to Palworld coal locations and Palworld ore locations to learn all the best places to mine new resources.