What two consecutive patches were building toward has happened: on 25 July the studio reported a significant ban wave through BattlEye in SAND: Raiders of Sophie. We covered the run-up on 24 July while breaking down Update #5, where the developers flagged anti-cheat hardening for the second patch in a row. A day later it landed.
What a ban looks like from the player’s side
The most useful part of the announcement is the symptom description, because the game shows no clear block message yet:
- You get kicked when entering an expedition. Everything before that works fine: the game launches, the menus respond, nothing feels broken.
- There is no explicit notification. The developers acknowledge this and promise to telegraph ban messages better in a future update.
- Appeals go to BattlEye, not the studio. If you believe the block is a mistake, write to the anti-cheat directly — the studio notes this specifically helps weed out false positives going forward.
Getting kicked on expedition entry while the menu works perfectly is not a broken build and not a connection issue. That is what a ban looks like.
Why this matters more than a routine ban wave
BattlEye is a third-party anti-cheat, and the blocking decision is theirs, not the studio’s. Two practical consequences follow. First, the ban lands under BattlEye’s rules rather than the game’s internal policy. Second, the studio physically cannot review disputed cases — the whole conversation runs through the anti-cheat provider.
The candour about false positives deserves a note of its own: the developers openly say they are possible and ask for appeals. For a small studio rolling out an anti-cheat in production, that is a normal tuning phase — but players pay for it.
Current line statuses are on the SAND: Raiders of Sophie page.
What this means for players running software
- Diagnose correctly. Before telling your software developer “it stopped working”, check the symptom: if the menus are alive and the kick happens exactly on expedition entry, the build is not the problem.
- Two patches saying “anti-cheat improvements” is a warning. Updates #4 and #5 both flagged BattlEye work. A ban wave a day after the second is a pattern, not a coincidence.
- A pause after a ban wave is mandatory. Right after a sweep the anti-cheat runs at its most aggressive, and software developers are only starting to collect detection telemetry.
- Do not use your main account. BattlEye bans on its own rules and its own timeline, and appeals go through a third-party service — that process is not fast.
- Wait for confirmed compatibility. No build “survives” a ban wave automatically: the confirmation has to come from the developer, not from a forum thread.
Bottom line
SAND has moved from “hardening the anti-cheat” to “enforcing it”. For a game at this stage that is expected; for players it signals that the grace period is over. The single most useful takeaway from the announcement is simple: a kick on expedition entry with a working menu means a ban, not a malfunction.
Dominate SAND: Raiders of Sophie with our software
Verified cheats and software — updates within 12–48 hours after major patches, with guarantees and 24/7 support.