The three enforcement buckets, and what each actually costs
Bellring separates cheating, Intentional Illegal Teaming and repeated temporary teaming in matches. The gap is large enough that treating them as one thing will mislead you about your own risk: cheating is permanent and hardware-wide, while the teaming penalties start as matchmaking suspensions.
- The cheating penalty is a device ban as well as an account ban, which is the part most summaries drop. A new account on the same hardware is inside the stated scope of the punishment.
- Both teaming penalties are matchmaking suspensions rather than immediate bans, so a first offence does not remove the account — it removes your ability to queue.
| Offence | Stated penalty | Escalation |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed cheat use | Permanent account ban and device ban | None stated — the post says zero tolerance and names no appeal path |
| Intentional Illegal Teaming | Matchmaking suspension | Repeat offenders face “increasingly severe penalties, up to and including a permanent ban” |
| Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches | Matchmaking suspension | Repeat offenders face progressively longer suspension durations |
Confirmed cheat use
- Stated penalty
- Permanent account ban and device ban
- Escalation
- None stated — the post says zero tolerance and names no appeal path
Intentional Illegal Teaming
- Stated penalty
- Matchmaking suspension
- Escalation
- Repeat offenders face “increasingly severe penalties, up to and including a permanent ban”
Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches
- Stated penalty
- Matchmaking suspension
- Escalation
- Repeat offenders face progressively longer suspension durations
What Illegal Teaming means — and the mistranslation still in circulation
This is the single most misunderstood rule in the game, and the misunderstanding is Bellring’s own fault. Several language versions of the original announcement rendered the rule as cooperating with others, dropping the precondition that makes it a rule at all. The publisher apologised for the error on 3 August and restated the definition.
- The corrected definition: “multiple players deliberately entering the same match to work together against other players or engage in other unfair practices that ruin the experience for others.”
- The load-bearing words are deliberately entering the same match. Bellring states that “only cases that strictly meet this definition will be penalized”.
- The mistranslation said “cooperate with others” and omitted that precondition, which is why players concluded that any in-match truce or non-aggression was bannable.
- Bellring’s own framing of the limit: “we won’t try to tell you how you should play our game”, while calling a fair PvP experience its top priority.
- The 21 August rule expansion adds another boundary: players who repeatedly team up with other squads over time, avoid attacking each other and jointly attack third-party players can be punished for Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches.
- The same 21 August post says occasional temporary teaming in matches will not be penalised, and explicitly says targeted filters are meant to avoid catching attempts to stop ongoing fights and multi-party engagements.
- Bellring calls the current rules a balance between freedom and fairness and invites feedback on them — so this is a stated position that may move, not a settled boundary.
- The 28 August update stopped showing enemy player names above their characters in a match, and the patch note gives the reason outright: to reduce cross-teaming violations. That is the first change to this rule that is not a rule — it makes the arrangement harder to carry out rather than punishing it afterwards, because two squads that cannot identify each other on sight cannot reliably agree to leave each other alone.
- Read the three dates together and the direction is legible: define the offence (3 August), widen it after a poll (21 August), then remove the affordance (28 August). Enforcement moving from punishment towards prevention is our reading of the sequence and not something any post states.
The weekly penalty lists
Bellring publishes a Fair Play Penalty Announcement naming penalised accounts with their names partly masked. The lists are a cadence rather than a one-off, and they are large: 353 accounts banned for cheating, 389 penalised for Intentional Illegal Teaming and 52 penalised for Frequent Temporary Teaming in Matches, in the list published on 8 September 2026, published as separate lists. Those figures are counted from the official post by the same four-hourly sync that reads the patch feed, so this paragraph moves when the next list does rather than freezing on the day it was written.
- Names are masked (first and last characters only), so the lists confirm scale rather than letting you look anyone up.
- Earlier lists were explicitly labelled partial, so the published count is a floor and not the total actioned.
- Detection is stated as backend data analysis, in-game reports and community reports together — not reports alone, so an unreported cheater is not automatically an unactioned one.
Reporting, and the feedback feature that closes the loop
The long-standing complaint about reporting in this game is not that it is missing but that it is silent — you report, and nothing ever tells you whether it mattered. Bellring announced the fix on 12 August.
- Report in-game during or after the match; the official community is named as a second channel.
- Announced on 12 August for rollout “this week”: an email that notifies you when your own report results in a penalty. Treat the date as announced rather than shipped until it appears in a patch note.
- The 12 August update also added an “Add to Blocklist” control directly inside the World Chat window, which is the adjacent problem — chat harassment — rather than match conduct.
- The 28 August update raised the Blocklist cap to 100. Worth knowing if you had hit the old limit and assumed blocking had stopped working.