ChuChu Rocket Cheating Crackdown?

Sonikku of Sonic Team Junior sent me this interesting bit of information.  Finally, someone within Sega is trying to crack down on cheating in the CCR World Rankings.  Unfortunately, it’s only Sega of Europe:

Cheating has reached the European Chu Chu Rocket shores. Kind of. Firstly a CCR player was booted after excessive cheating. I can’t remember the exact win/loss scores, but the ‘Wins’ were somewhere in the thousands and the ‘losses’ were in about the 10s region.

Also, fancy your chances at the Stage Challenge? Go ahead if you can get minus times. No, this isn’t a typo, the top two times are in the MINUS realms. -11 minutes, huh? I wonder how the posters of these times would claim this is possible…

Flooding too, is becoming an increasing threat to the ChuChu rooms. This is great when you don’t want to use the main chat feature, but occasionally a particularly persistent idiot tries to send you private messages, making anything virtually impossible to do.

Have Sega Europe gone to sleep? While the flooding is more forgivable as it’s not exactly easy to control (though implemennting a limit of 1 line every 3 seconds or so isn’t exactly hard to enforce, or to kick off anyone who types 20 lines in 5 seconds) at least they should realize that it’s not possible to get minus times in the Stage Challenge. So much for their booming warning on the main DreamArena page warning you that “We’rewatching cheats!”

After the Sonic Adventure WR Cheating exposure, perhaps Sega is finally waking up to the world of GameSharks and other Action Replay devices.  Maybe future online games will be more cheater proof–we’ll have to see.