More on cheaters on PS4 s23

Console Discussion
1

So, the top 2 SC wizards are ALL primal. All rank 150 augments. All rank 150 lgems.

And, this is the real cop out, they have IDENTICAL gear for every item slot - every primary and secondary stat for EVERY item slot is identical.

What are the odds are:

a) getting all items primal

b) getting all primary stats identical on primal gear, for 2 completely separate players/characters…

c) getting all the secondary stats identical on primal gear, for 2 completely separate players/characters.

its is blatantly obvious that the top 2 players are using Save Wizard…

I’m about to report it to hacks@blizzard.com but given their track record of inactivity on consoles when dealing with cheats, I don’t expect them to do a single thing. They simply do not care about consoles.

Please do not give Blizzard anymore money for console titles. They do not deserve it when they treat console customers like crap. Punish them where it hurts - their wallets.

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Are they both still wearing the items? If not, they could be friends who swapped out gear for some rifts.

I play solo unless my wife wants to couch co-op, and when she does I drop her my DH’s gear so she can run at the same level I do. I’ve even done this to get her to solo GR70 so she could use primal pieces if i ever upgraded my dh.

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Its probably more the red tape they dont want to cross with Sony.

4

Give it a rest, fogie. OP is talking about seasonal play, none of what you said applies here.

5

Yup Dave spot on…they have used Save Wizard to transfer a save file to another PSN account thus duplicating that entire save.

But reality is Blizzard can’t do anything against a console exploit.

It is Sony you need to report it to. Sure Blizzard could simply ban them but how does Blizzard prove they cheated? Because whilst the odds are near impossible they still could have gotten the same gear.

Point is Sony nor Blizzard will do anything, time has shown us that.

D2R and D4 with online saves are the way forward, D3 is cooked and done.

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6

seasonal play, can’t swap items. Period.

I’d like to think that but nah.

The odds would be trillions to 1. let’s look at this logically.

Each build requires 13 items out of around 200 odd legendary items that can drop. So, getting an item for your build is roughly 13/200 or 6%.

Getting a primal is roughly 1/450.

So, getting a primal for your build is roughly 1/9000.

Getting all 13 item slots primal? By my maths (and I suck at probability btw, it’s One branch of math that I don’t seem to be able to wrap my head around). Probably 1/115000. That’s if I’ve done the maths right.

now with 4 primary stats and 2 secondary stats - the odds of getting all 4 primary stats identical, for all 13 item slots? My math isn’t strong enough to work it out, but I’d say it’s probably 2^4 (1/16) - that’s per item and for primary stats. For all 13 items? Rinse and repeat for secondary stats…combining primary & secondary stats into the probability calculation? There are a much larger pool of secondary stats than primary stats for most gear. This will increase the odds of getting identical secondary stats…

So, whilst yes, it is mathematically possible for it to happen, it’s probably trillions to one. The presence of save wizard, and a simple application of occam’s razor would show that they are using save wizard, and thus cheating, and thus breaking the PSN TOS.

I had a fun day with Sony Playstation support yesterday.

The first tech ended up putting me on mute and hung up on me.

2nd call - answered and immediately hung up.

3rd call - answered and immediately hung up.

4th call - finally got through to someone but after explaining the issue, he cannot help me.

Some notes - the moderation team is the team that you need to get the information to. They conveniently have no public facing contact. Funny that…

You can report a user, but only if you have:

A) added them as a friend

B) recently played with them

neither should be pre-requisites for reporting someone…

It is clear that Sony has made it as difficult as possible to report players for TOS violations. Sony has zero intentions of punishing people breaking the TOS because they want to keep the PSN subscription $$$$$…

I rang Sony Australia headquarters and spoke to the receptionist, she told me that Sony Australia can’t help with playstation issues as they are not the same company. I argued with her that Sony is the bloody well parent company but she refused to help. I asked her for the Sony Japan headquarters phone number but she told me she didn’t have that (yeah right lol!). I’ve worked for a large Japanese company in the past (Toshiba) and One thing I’ve learned is that the Japanese are indeed fastidious. They have details of everything.

I will try and hunt down the Japanese number today and see if it is possible to get to talk to the secretary do the general manager/CEO. I’m not done rattling cages yet.

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I like the idea of having all perfect primals and maxed gems and crushing GR150’s in a few minutes. Think I’ll go get me a Playstation and save wizard my way to glory! No more legit PC grinding for me! When you do speak to the CEO, please be sure to let him know that save wizard is boosting sales of D3 and his console.

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and losing sales as legit players give up and no longer support the platform. I guess in this day and age, cheaters will outnumber legit players. Too many lazy players these days. They want to play a grinding game, but not grind. Must be the millennial mindset of “I want it all and I want it NOW”.

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What you think and what actually happens are two different things. Companies decisions not to get involved with non owned servers, hardware, firmware is normal. I’m still unsure why people are having this discussion. If Blizzard wanted to implement servers for seasons on console, they would have. As I said previously, red tape. As for locally saved files, people will always find ways to exploit when files are saved locally.

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The odds and maths can be billions and trillions to 1 but not impossible mathematically speaking…unrealistic but not impossible hence technically, and I repeat technically, you cant prove they have cheated.

We know they must have but a software company wont ban without concrete proof hence why banwaves on PC do not catch all. Blizz only ban PC with their Warden software when it has definitive proof not the fact they did 20+ hours a day.

Blizzard or Sony will never ban or adjust leaderboards for D3 on consoles. We have had 11 seasons of it with not one ban or adjustment.

But rattle indeed those cages!

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The Cheaters Subject here is like a broken record stuck thats been going on for years…sorry but you have a better chance raising a Dead Person or winning the Lotto versus getting anything done at this point…

Personally…anyone who is all or mostly about obtaining status on a Leaderboard…D3 is not the game to try and do it…play for fun, with friends, spouse or whatever, yea…but the “They’re Cheating!!!”…has been around far too long on a game that’s been around for a long time and what has ever been done…zero, zada, nada…

Right now, put our faith, hope and anticipation of D2…play D3 or not or like me, went to other games…Inquistor: Martyr on console has been a absolute freshner of a change…how many differnt Wizards, Necro’s, Barbs, DH or Templars can I run while getting a few seasonal trinkets running the same areas season to season…while hearing…“They’re Cheating…They’re Cheating”…over…and over…and over…

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Absolutely agree. I’m more sick of all the whiners, permanently opening threads about cheating on diverse platforms.

Play the game for fun or just quit. All points here have been reported several times.

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17

Respectfully, I disagree with this.

To have not spoken or to stop speaking on it gives Blizzard no cause to try harder.

Change happens by speaking out. It has been this way for eons. It may not be quick, however we note even in the last devconf, Blizzard addressed the topic in they way they saw fit and in so doing show their acknowlegement to the concerns expressed.

There is thing called “scroll by”. We all know how it works.

As you say, it’s your personal view and perfectly legit for that reason.

My personal view is if people wish to compete, they have the same merits to do so and to call for reform where it’s clearly warranted. After all Blizzard created the platform and enticed these people into using it. There is a responsibility that goes with that to take reasonable efforts. What is reasonable… well that enters the subject of debate. It is not to any of us to deny the debate taking place.

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18

Exactly. Posts go back years of this issue along with others. Blizzard knows. They choose to do nothing and why should they? It doesn’t help them financially in any way shape or form. They are focused on D4 and D2R.

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Save editors have been around a long time as far back as the game genie. Console companies have learned over time its pointless to try and 100% stop them. So they simply delay the onslaught through Encryption and even that wont stop people forever. Even the Sega Saturn eventually got cracked even though it took 20yrs, does Sega care…No not really.

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Yes, it’s fully 100% a cost/benefit decision. If Blizz takes away someones’ paid license to play the game, they better be damn sure 100% that that person was breaching the TOU. Because if they’re wrong then there is no shortage of lawyers willing to take a case for reinstatement and compensation. And even if they are 100% in the right, and the player wants to challenge the decision, then that takes time and money to respond to as well. Bottom line, it’s not worth the risks and costs associated with enforcing bans vs the benefits gained by doing so.

Maybe the only way to truly change the situation would be to flip the situation on its head and take legal action against Blizzard for not enforcing it’s TOU. Make the cost/benefit analysis change so that doing nothing about botting cost them more than taking action.

But who want to be ‘that guy’ who took a legal case because other players were higher on a leaderboard than he was? Because whatever the rights and wrongs are, that’s how it would be portrayed.

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If you read the agreement:

You also agreed to not hold them accountable for any financial damage that may have occurred.

And this is pretty much true with any game, including outside of Blizzard.

I mean, let’s take a casino. Most states in the USA allow the casinos to kick you out and bar you for pretty much any reason (NJ being an exception). As long as you’re losing, they don’t care. But if you start winning, you might notice you’ll become persona non grata. So, if you were the casino, someone comes in, and wins at roulette 10x in a row. On the American Wheel, that’s roughly a 1 in 6.3 quadrillion chance. Not mathematically impossible, but any casino will assume you’re cheating, and actions will be taken. And this occurs all within the span of roughly 10 minutes.

The point being, it doesn’t take long honestly to become super obvious that you’re cheating if you’re blatant about it. Cheating is also getting to the point where it’s so sophisticated, no software will be able to catch you running it. All it will take is for a bot to have some form of image processing, and that will be 100% impossible to catch via Warden, because it’s not running on the device the game is running on.

That’s why some forms of cheat protection are now relying on AI. They can’t technically prove you’re running using cheat software. But because you’re doing stuff that has worse odds than winning the lottery multiple times in a row, you will get banned. One of the FPS games started doing this awhile back, checking to see if you were using a mouse/keyboard adapter, where they were testing to see if you moved in perfectly straight lines, because that’s near impossible with a gamepad. (It was only a temp ban, until the adapters started putting in slight errors into their movement that would be imperceptible to you, but would throw off the cheat detection algorithms.) There was another PC game that checked to see you weren’t using a bot by once again, checking to see if you moved the mouse in a straight line. When humans move the mouse from one spot to another, it’s in an arc motion. These were simple fixes, that while technically not mathematically impossible, are good enough that you’re not going to be able to argue about being the sole human being in history capable of pulling off such a feat, especially when there are thousands more like you doing these superhuman feats too at the same time.

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The bottom line is if you create a game and allow people to cheat, there are those who will. Some making industry out of it.

This turns legit players away.

If you manage the cheating in a partial or an effective way, it will turn away the industry makers and to a lesser degree, some of the others.

Swings and round-abouts.

It’s simply up to Blizzard to be who they want to be. They’ve declared their intent in relation to new releases… thus it just becomes a matter of doing the work when it’s obvious for D3.

The line for obvious / indisputable is clearly drawn when there are modded items as we’ve seen in some instances where nothing was done. For other cheats, there would be more work that would need to be done.

There’s an alternative to these buyer swings and roundabouts which is to build in some time saving to the game which is accessible to all, but this is theoretical until implemented and proven.

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Hell CCP has been trying their damndest to get rid of bots in EVE Online, but more pop up every day.

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It’s a challenge to be sure… I’m not familiar with the approaches being taken with EVE, or whether the bots are altering memory or not or both.

Rhykker gave a bit of an outline in a vid some months back… a bit of whackamole as he described and explained why they wait a little before acting each time too.

This is part of the reason I consider turning the table over and just building the functionality into games in future and give everyone access to it. Just takes a bit of creative thinking on game design.