Customer Introduction
Founded in 2015, Hero Games is a leading global game developer and publisher focused on competitive and esports-driven experiences. Its survival shooter Last Island of Survival combines sandbox building and post-apocalyptic survival gameplay, supported by continuous content updates to drive long-term player engagement.
Challenges & Goals
As a third-person shooter (TPS) title, the game operates in a constant high-risk cheating environment.
Security Challenges in TPS Gameplay
TPS mechanics inherently expose visual perspective and targeting logic, making them especially vulnerable to cheats such as wallhacks (ESP) and aimbots. By reverse-engineering camera rendering pipelines, target detection, and hit-calculation logic, cheat developers can rapidly bypass protections and break core security boundaries.
Advanced Cheating Evasion and Detection
Customized cheats by black-market operators continuously bypass static signature and rule-based detection, causing traditional anti-cheat systems to degrade rapidly. It significantly increases the difficulty of sustained defense and requires a shift toward dynamic, behavior-driven, and adaptive security mechanisms to maintain system effectiveness over time.
Rising Operational Cost for Anti-Cheat
As cheat developers continuously modify exploits, the iteration speed of cheating tools far outpaces manual analysis and strategy updates. Security teams are now forced into reactive, high-frequency rule updates, driving exponentially rising operational and manpower costs.
Why Tencent Cloud
End-to-end Protection Framework
Tencent Cloud Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) delivers a fully integrated anti-cheat protection system that unifies client hardening, client-side and server-side SDKs. By combining live cheat data parsing with API-driven automated banning, the system significantly improves response speed and enforcement efficiency, minimizing the window in which cheats can cause damage.
Cheat Intelligence and Propagation Monitoring
Powered by 100+ cheat intelligence channels, ACE continuously monitors the cheat distribution ecosystem. This includes tracking cheat propagation paths, underground communities, and public sentiment related to cheat usage. By proactively collecting and analyzing cheat samples, it allows early identification of emerging exploit techniques.
Dynamic Cheat Response
To address highly customized and rapidly evolving cheats, ACE supports expert-led real-time response service, remotely deploying protection modules to identify and suppress tailored cheat variants without requiring new version updates.
Highlighted Benefits
By shifting from manual, rule-based responses to automated, intelligence-driven, and dynamically updatable defenses, Tencent Cloud’s Anti-Cheat Expert (ACE) transforms anti-cheat operations from a high-cost, reactive process into a scalable security mechanism.
After deploying ACE, Last Island of Survival’s game security has significantly enhanced. Cheat bypass incidents reduced to 10% of previous levels, with player cheating complaints dropped by 50%. In addition to in-game detection and enforcement, the security program supported multiple offline crackdowns on cheat development and distribution groups, further disrupting cheat supply chains and reinforcing long-term ecosystem protection.