Off The Grid’s Kestrel anti-cheat bans its first wave of cheaters on Teardrop Island

In Brief:

• Kestrel, the anti-cheat Gunzilla Games built in-house, has completed its first ban wave in Off The Grid (official site) on Teardrop Island.
• Of the bans, 55% were for macro and recoil scripting, 27% for hardware and input remapping and 12% for automated aim assistance.
• Kestrel will stay active in every match, the studio said, with rolling bans to follow as its models are refined.

Off The Grid’s proprietary anti-cheat system, Kestrel, has delivered its first round of bans, according to developer Gunzilla Games.

The game’s official X account announced it with the line “Kestrel just ran its first ban wave on Teardrop 🛡️”. On Steam News, the studio published a developer update under the title “Kestrel Executes First Official Ban Wave.”

Gunzilla said the accounts caught in the wave have been permanently removed from the game.

The cheats Kestrel caught

The biggest category was macro and recoil scripting, at 55% of bans. Gunzilla grouped automated recoil compensation, rapid jitter firing scripts and automated movement loops under this label.

In second place, at 27%, was hardware and input remapping. The studio put unlawful controller converter remapping and third-party mouse macro configurations in this group.

Automated aim assistance made up 12%. That covers rotational aimlock, silent aim and automated targeting systems.

Input manipulation dominated the wave. Between them, recoil scripts and converter remapping were 82% of the bans, far more than aimbot-style tools.

Over 15 billion data segments before the first ban

The bans didn’t start on day one. According to Gunzilla, Kestrel began with a passive data-collection phase, assessing more than 15 billion gameplay data segments from across Off The Grid’s match network.

From that data, the studio said, it mapped movement curves, server-side data and signatures to set a baseline that tells genuine human play apart from artificial assistance. The ban wave was triggered only after that work was done.

Gunzilla is selling Kestrel on behavioral detection. When the system was introduced, the Off The Grid account said: “It learns how real Zeroes move. It adapts when cheats try something new. It knows the difference between a cracked player and a script.”

In an earlier post, the account said Kestrel “watches how real hands move and flags what no hand can do.” It went on: “New account, new machine? Same movement, the ban still finds you.”

The GUNZ account shared a clip of Kestrel in action during a match, captioned: “A 5 second warning, then Kestrel anti-cheat in @playoffthegrid 🦾”

Rolling bans ahead

Kestrel runs 24/7 in every match on Teardrop Island, Gunzilla said. The studio plans to keep refining the system’s models, and bans will keep coming on a rolling basis.

Gunzilla hasn’t said how many accounts were banned in the first wave.

Background

Off The Grid has struggled with cheating since it opened to a wider player base, and some players have called matches unplayable. Before launching its own anti-cheat, Gunzilla had already upgraded its detection systems.

The game is in Early Access on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Kestrel’s debut came with a brief post on the game’s X account: “Actively hunting on Teardrop, built by @GunzillaGames.”