The two offences, and what each actually costs
Bellring separates cheating from Illegal Teaming and punishes them differently. The gap is large enough that treating them as one thing will mislead you about your own risk: one is permanent and hardware-wide, the other starts as a matchmaking timeout.
- 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.
- The teaming penalty is a matchmaking suspension rather than a ban, 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 |
| Illegal Teaming | Matchmaking suspension | Repeat offenders face “increasingly severe penalties, up to and including a permanent ban” |
Confirmed cheat use
- Stated penalty
- Permanent account ban and device ban
- Escalation
- None stated — the post says zero tolerance and names no appeal path
Illegal Teaming
- Stated penalty
- Matchmaking suspension
- Escalation
- Repeat offenders face “increasingly severe penalties, up to and including a permanent ban”
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.
- It calls the current rules what it “believes best balances freedom and fairness” and explicitly invites feedback on them — so this is a stated position that may move, not a settled boundary.
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: the 12 August post names 438 accounts banned for cheating and 232 penalised for Illegal Teaming, published as two separate lists.
- 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.