Five “Fair Play Penalty Announcement” posts went out on the Mistfall Hunter Steam news feed between 3 August and 8 September 2026, naming 3,789 penalized accounts across cheating and teaming categories. The store page’s DRM notice names the underlying system: Mistfall Hunter “Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat” and lists it as Bellring Anti-Cheat, read on the Steam store page on 13 September 2026 — none of the five penalty announcements themselves names it. Each announcement publishes its penalised accounts as a list of redacted handles, one per paragraph, recounted from all five in full on 2026-09-22; where a post labels a list “(Partial),” that qualifier is reproduced below. This page is checked through 2026-09-22, the most recent date the Steam news feed was pulled; no Fair Play Penalty Announcement has been published after 8 September.
🔴 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 five.
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 five times in its first 40 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 the first four weeks — stopping and restarting mid-fourth-week — before the fifth post, on 8 September, ran under the resumed algorithm without a further shape change.
The five 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 |
| Sep 8 | 353 | 389 | 52 | 794 |
| Published across all five | 1,936 | 1,651 | 202 | 3,789 |
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 other announcement produces a round figure in either category — 15, 135, 438, 232, 630, 395, 76, 74, and the 8 September figures of 353, 389, 52 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 8 September post returns to arbitrary numbers in every category, which is consistent with 28 August being a one-off capped excerpt rather than a new normal, though Bellring Games has not said so either way.
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 |
| Sep 8 | Fifth announcement published under the same resumed algorithm and the same three category definitions; no new policy language | Steady |
The policy definitions, compared directly
Because the categories aren’t static across the five 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 five 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 3,800 published penalties in 40 days sits against the 1.5 million players Bellring Games reported in DevNote #8 on 20 August. That is about 0.25% 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 Bellring Games hasn’t said
- 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.
- How Bellring Anti-Cheat actually detects cheating or teaming. The Steam store DRM notice names the kernel-level system and confirms it runs, but none of the five Fair Play Penalty announcements describes a detection method, and no separate technical write-up of the anti-cheat itself has been published.
- 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). All five posts’ name lists were recounted directly from the live announcement text on 2026-09-22.
- 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)
- Fair Play Penalty Announcement, 8 September 2026, re-read on 2026-09-22 — Frequent Temporary Teaming (52 entries); permanent cheating ban list (353 entries); intentional illegal teaming (389 entries); no “(Partial)” qualifier on any list; no new policy language
- DevNote #8, 20 August 2026 — over 1.5 million players since the 30 July launch
- Mistfall Hunter Steam store page, re-read 2026-09-22, unchanged since 13 September — DRM notice: “Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat,” named “Bellring Anti-Cheat”