Data basis: the four “Fair Play Penalty Announcement” posts on the Mistfall Hunter Steam news feed, dated 3, 12, 21 and 28 August 2026, read in full 2026-08-31. Each announcement publishes its penalised accounts as a list of redacted handles, one per paragraph. The counts below are taken by parsing those paragraphs directly out of the announcement bodies returned by Steam’s news and partner-events APIs, and were cross-checked against each other on both endpoints. Where a post labels a list “(Partial),” that qualifier is reproduced.
🔴 Correction, 2026-08-31. The first version of this page hand-counted the name lists and reported 137 entries for 3 August teaming and 396 for 21 August intentional teaming. Parsed programmatically from the same source, the exact figures are 135 and 395. Every other figure in the original table was correct. This page has also been extended from three announcements to four.
For a PvPvE extraction ARPG, cheating and illegitimate teaming aren’t a side nuisance — they are a direct tax on every player who loses a run to someone who didn’t play by the same rules. Mistfall Hunter’s developer, Bellring Games, published a dedicated Fair Play Penalty Announcement four times in its first 30 days on sale. Read individually, each is a redacted list of banned handles. Read together, they show a policy that changed shape three times in four weeks — and, in the fourth week, one that stopped and restarted.
The four announcements
| Date (2026) | Cheating | Intentional / illegal teaming | Frequent temporary teaming | Post total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 3 | 15 (partial) | 135 (partial) | — | 150 |
| Aug 12 | 438 | 232 | — | 670 |
| Aug 21 | 630 | 395 | 76 | 1,101 |
| Aug 28 | 500 | 500 | 74 | 1,074 |
| Published across all four | 1,583 | 1,262 | 150 | 2,995 |
Two properties of this table are worth stating before anything is read into it. The 3 August counts are explicitly labelled partial in the source, so they are a floor rather than a count. And the category labels themselves move: what 3 and 12 August call “Illegal Teaming” is renamed “Intentional Illegal Teaming” on 21 August, when a second teaming category is split out beside it.
The round number on 28 August
The 28 August lists do not stop where a count would naturally stop. Cheating ends at exactly 500 entries; intentional illegal teaming ends at exactly 500 entries. No earlier announcement produces a round figure in either category — 15, 135, 438, 232, 630, 395, 76, 74 are all arbitrary — and the odds of two independent enforcement totals landing on the same round number in the same week are not good.
The likeliest reading is that the 28 August post publishes a capped excerpt rather than the full week’s enforcement, and that the real totals for both categories are ≥ 500. The announcement itself does not say so, which is why this page reports 500 as what was published, not as what was enforced. It also means the apparent week-over-week fall in cheating bans, from 630 on 21 August to 500 on 28 August, cannot be read as a decline: a capped list and an uncapped list are not comparable in either direction.
The rule that was paused
The most concrete thing in the 28 August post is a sentence about process rather than about numbers. Bellring Games writes that it “made some optimizations to the penalty algorithm for Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches,” that the principle behind the rule is unchanged, and that “as of yesterday, we have resumed issuing penalties” in that category.
Resumed implies stopped. The Frequent Temporary Teaming category was introduced on 21 August with 76 entries; by 28 August it had been suspended, retuned, and switched back on the previous day. Its 28 August list holds 74 entries — a figure that, on the developer’s own account, covers roughly one day of enforcement rather than a week, and therefore is not comparable to the 76 that preceded it either.
This is the third shape change to fair-play policy in four weeks, and the second reversal:
| When | What moved | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 3 | “Illegal Teaming” had been mistranslated in some languages as the far broader “cooperate with others” | Narrowed — the corrected definition requires deliberately entering the same match |
| Aug 21 | A new “Frequent Temporary Teaming” category, added after a poll in which “over 80% of Gyldhunters agreed this behavior should be penalized” | Widened — behaviour that had not previously been named became punishable |
| Aug 21–27 | That new category’s penalties were stopped and its algorithm retuned | Paused |
| Aug 27 | Penalties resumed under the revised algorithm | Restarted |
The policy definitions, compared directly
Because the categories aren’t static across the four posts, here is what each one actually means, as stated by the developer rather than inferred:
| Category | First appeared | Definition as published | Consequence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cheating | Aug 3 | Not separately defined beyond “using cheats”; treated as self-evident | Permanent account and device ban, zero tolerance, no escalation tier — first offense is terminal |
| Illegal Teaming / Intentional Illegal Teaming | Aug 3 (corrected wording); relabeled “Intentional” on Aug 21 | Multiple players deliberately entering the same match to work together against other players or otherwise ruin the match experience for others | Matchmaking suspension; repeat offenders face increasingly severe penalties, up to and including a permanent ban |
| Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches | Aug 21 (new) | Players who repeatedly team with players from other squads over a period of time, refrain from attacking each other, and jointly attack third-party players — occasional/one-off temporary teaming is explicitly exempted | Matchmaking suspension; “repeat offenders will face progressively longer suspension durations” |
Across all four posts, one thing does not move: cheating carries a permanent, first-offense ban with no escalation ladder, while every teaming-related category — however it gets defined, subdivided, paused or retuned — is handled through a suspension system that gets harsher on repeat offenses rather than terminating the account outright. Bellring Games also states it will not disclose the detection thresholds for the teaming categories “to ensure the effectiveness of this policy”: the rules are named, the triggers are deliberately withheld.
What this is worth to a player
Roughly 3,000 published penalties in 30 days sits against the 1.5 million players Bellring Games reported in DevNote #8 on 20 August. That is about 0.2% of the player base named in public — and the published lists are, at minimum on 28 August and explicitly on 3 August, excerpts rather than totals, so the enforced figure is higher by an unknown margin. Neither number tells you your odds of meeting a cheater in a given raid; what the sequence does tell you is that the teaming rules are still being written, and that a behaviour which was legal in week one and punishable in week four may be retuned again.
For how these announcements fit into the broader post-launch communication pattern — including how much of Bellring Games’ total output was fair-play related — see the post-launch update cadence dataset. For what else shipped or didn’t during this window, see the roadmap-vs-delivered tracker. For what players themselves said about the launch build, see the review playtime breakdown.
What we could not confirm
- Whether the 28 August lists are capped at 500. The post does not say so. Two independent categories ending on the same round number is the evidence; the developer’s silence is the reason this page treats it as a strong reading rather than a fact.
- How long the Frequent Temporary Teaming pause lasted. The 28 August post says penalties resumed “as of yesterday” — 27 August. It does not say when they stopped, so the pause is bounded by 21–27 August and no more precisely than that.
- The specific detection method or anti-cheat technology used. None of the four announcements names a product, engine, or driver-level mechanism. We do not claim a specific anti-cheat architecture anywhere in this piece.
- Appeal process or false-positive rate. No announcement in the feed describes how a banned or suspended player appeals, or what error rate the detection carries.
Sources
- Fair Play Penalty Announcement, 3 August 2026 — mistranslation correction; permanent cheating ban list (partial, 15 entries); illegal teaming penalty list (partial, 135 entries)
- Fair Play Penalty Announcement, 12 August 2026 — cheating bans (438 entries); illegal teaming penalties (232 entries); feedback-email feature announced
- Fair Play Penalty Announcement, 21 August 2026 — new “Frequent Temporary Teaming” category from an 80%-approval poll (76 entries); cheating bans (630 entries); intentional illegal teaming (395 entries)
- Fair Play Penalty Announcement, 28 August 2026 — penalties for Frequent Temporary Teaming resumed after an algorithm revision (74 entries); cheating (500 entries); intentional illegal teaming (500 entries)
- DevNote #8, 20 August 2026 — over 1.5 million players since the 30 July launch
