First-Week Alert-Only Anticheat Rollout Plan

What the first week should answer

The first week of an anticheat rollout should answer one question: which alerts come from real rule breaks, and which come from normal play on your server. Keep punishments disabled, review every alert type at least once, and write down what you decide. Judge the rollout by the quality of those answers, not by the number of alerts on day one.

Set roles before day one

Assign roles before the first alert arrives. Unclear ownership is the most common reason an alert-only period ends with no review at all, or with a punishment that nobody approved.

• Rollout owner: one admin who decides when the week ends and signs off on the exit criteria.
• Alert reviewers: two staff members per shift who open alerts and label each one real, unclear, or false.
• Config editor: one person allowed to change settings during the week. Everyone else files a request.
• Player contact: one staff member who answers player questions, including questions about any message a player may have seen.

Run the seven-day calendar

Each day has one focus and one output. Do not skip a day because the alert volume is low. Quiet days are often the best time to check how the anticheat behaves outside of peak traffic.

Use a fixed daily review routine

Spend the same block of time each day. Thirty focused minutes is enough for a small server with a short alert list. Long review sessions at the end of the week lose context, so reviewers label alerts from memory and the labels get weaker.

• Copy the day's alerts from the review channel into one list.
• Sort by alert type, then by player. Count repeat alerts from one player once in the first pass.
• Open each unclear alert and check any recording or replay your setup provides.
• Label each alert real, unclear, or false. Add one sentence of reasoning for every unclear or false label.
• Post the daily summary in the staff channel using the format below.

Day <n> | alerts: <total> | real: <n> | unclear: <n> | false: <n> | top type: <check name> | action: <tune, watch, or none>

Set exit criteria before enabling punishments

Do not enable automatic punishments because the week is over. Enable them only when the rollout owner can answer yes to every item below.

• Every alert type has at least one labeled example in each label that the server produced.
• Reviewers agree on the labels for the sampled alerts, and each disagreement has a written resolution.
• Known event hours, teleport-heavy areas, and custom plugin features have been checked against the alerts they produced.
• Each check you plan to punish on has a written tier of warn, mitigate, or ban, and the owner has approved it.
• Staff know how to reverse a punishment and how a player appeals one.

Worked example: one noisy check on day 2

Suppose day 2 shows 120 alerts from one movement check, and 90 of them come from players crossing a boat dock near spawn. Do not disable the check or rewrite its threshold yet. Pull five alerts from the dock area and five from the rest of the map, then label all ten. If the dock alerts are false and the rest are unclear, the next step is a documented exemption or a tuning note, not a change that applies to the whole map.

• If most sampled alerts are false, record the pattern and wait for the day 3 comparison before changing anything.
• If real alerts cluster around one player, hand that player's alerts to the rollout owner as a separate case.
• If two reviewers disagree on a label, settle the disagreement before you count that check as clean.

Common mistakes in week one

Most failed rollouts make one of the same four mistakes. Check your plan against this list before day one.

• Enabling punishments after day 3 because alerts look quiet. Quiet days after a weekend are not evidence of accuracy.
• Letting one reviewer label everything. That reviewer's habits become the team's definition of a false alert.
• Changing config during the week without a log entry. The exit decision then cannot be traced back to its evidence.
• Using total alert count as the success metric. Totals rise and fall with traffic, while labeled samples show what the alerts actually were.

What this plan does not establish

This plan does not show how accurate your anticheat is, how often it alerts on legitimate players, or how it performs under load. Those results depend on your server, your players, and your plugin stack. Only your own staging and review records can show them. Record any exit decision as a judgment based on the evidence you collected.