The Sandbox Considers New KYC Rules After Cheaters Threaten Its Future

After recent complaints by speedrunners in the gaming community, The Sandbox (TSB) is finally considering KYC rules to curb cheaters. Accordingly, the cheating incident happened at one of the speedrun contests run by Metalympics, an official partner of TSB.

According to Metalympics, TSB failed to look into bug reports and proof of cheating submitted by the community. As a result, The Sandbox team ended up rewarding one of the fraudsters with 1000 $SAND (about $1889) worth of prize money. However, this may change soon as The Sandbox is looking into KYC to crack down on cheaters.

Background on the speedrunners’ complaints

For those unaware, speedrun is a playthrough of a video game, with the aim of finishing it ASAP. In fact, speedrun is quite common in The Sandbox games. Several external parties like Metalympics will organize speedrun contests regularly for TSB players. Given that, many of these contests offered huge prize money — sometimes more than $15,000 worth of $SAND, to eligible winners.

But clearly, there were no proper anti-bot measures to spot cheaters in The Sandbox games. At least, that’s according to Twitter user @Lugicc, who wrote that one of the players who used Cheat Engine with 100% proof against him ended up winning 2nd place in the Metalympics Originals #3 contest. And if that’s not outrageous enough, The Sandbox team rewarded the cheater with 1000 $SAND of prize money as well.

Now The Sandbox is considering KYC rules to curb cheaters

Given the number of disgruntled voices in the community, The Sandbox co-founder, Sébastien, commented that the team will come up with more radical solutions soon. For example, The Sandbox participants might need to submit KYC before receiving prizes in the future, dealing with cheaters along the way. But will this help resolve the issue? Most of the TSB fans think it will.

How about the winners of the past The Sandbox games?

Speaking of this, the Metalympics incident has raised more questions as well. If cheaters can win in the Metalympics so easily, wouldn’t it be easy for them to win in other TSB games in the past? For instance, winning multiple raffle spots in Alpha Season 1 and 2. With so many big brands entering The Sandbox lately, it’s time for the TSB team to build a level playing field for all of its players.