The makers of the popular social app Rec Room filed a lawsuit in Seattle this week against a teenage user of the service, alleging that he has a long history of harassment and has created multiple cheat tools to enable bad actors on the platform.
Rec Room, created and run by the Seattle-based company of the same name, bills itself as a platform for virtual games and user-generated content.
Users can log into Rec Room, build customized avatars, and create virtual rooms on the service. These rooms can range from simple social spaces to fully playable games, many of which are created by Rec Room’s community. Rec Room has more than 100 million users.
The lawsuit targets a Canadian minor identified as “M.Z.” who has played Rec Room for the last six years, and in that time, has been banned repeatedly for “posting racist content, bullying and harassing other players, and refusing to abide by the community standards, all at excessive levels,” according to the suit.
M.Z. has evaded these bans, according to the suit, by creating at least 61 alternate accounts, stealing other users’ credentials, and writing programs that allow for workarounds.
In addition, the suit names M.Z. as the creator and seller of a particular set of cheats for Rec Room. According to the suit, these cheats allow users to have a significant advantage in any of the competitive games on Rec Room, by letting their avatars pass through walls, possess infinite health, or take weapons from one Rec Room game into another.
At one point in July 2022, M.Z. allegedly used a hack that allowed the posting of unauthorized content in Rec Room’s high-traffic Rec Center area in order to put up a Nazi flag, which was quickly taken down by moderators. Rec Room also credits M.Z. with a hack that crashed Rec Room’s servers in May.
For a platform like Rec Room, hackers like this can cause significant harm to its bottom line. Many of the individual activities in Rec Room have some competitive element, like team sports or paintball, so even one player who’s cheating to win can harm the experience for everyone. It’s an endemic problem with massively multiplayer online games.
Since M.Z. became a player on Rec Room, “he has been a largely toxic player whose regular violations of Rec Room’s Code of Conduct resulted in escalating consequences,” the company says in the suit.
According to Rec Room, M.Z. is approximately 16 years old. It previously sent a cease-and-desist letter and tried to engage M.Z.’s parents, “imploring them to properly supervise their son as the law requires them to do.” They refused, according to the suit.
Rec Room declined to comment on the suit when contacted by GeekWire.
The company’s suit requests that M.Z. be legally prevented from continuing to play Rec Room and developing or selling cheats for it, and be required to delete all copies of the Rec Room app and related hacking software in their possession. It also seeks to extract court costs from M.Z, along with whatever damages the court sees fit to award.
Rec Room’s suit follows a recent history of similar actions taken by Bellevue, Wash.-based game studio Bungie, which has spent much of the last few years systematically cracking down on cheat services that affect its online shooter Destiny 2. Its most recent lawsuit was filed in Seattle in August, against 56 individuals associated with the subscription-based cheat service Ring-1. Bungie previously won $6.7 million in damages against a similar company, Lavicheats.
In July, Bungie also won a suit against Jesse James Comer, who pursued a Destiny 2 community manager with a campaign of racist harassment. Comer was found liable for nearly $500,000 in damages. This could set a precedent for cases like Rec Room’s, where companies seek legal recourse against serial online harassment.
Rec Room was valued at $3.5 billion when it raised $145 million in December 2021. The company has more than 300 employees, according to LinkedIn.
