If the behavior is strange you can report it. That’s the thing. It is their job to investigate it.
Majority of players aren’t expert. If the said player is reported by others they will look on it. Either as AI, Machine or Human.
If you report as cheating and you suspect that was a cheating. More often than not, you will receive a message that actions were taken if your report was valid. While if not you will not receive it.
I know how understand stuff that can be tied to latency variance and what isn’t. But most players don’t. When I was right actions were taken, when I wasn’t didn’t. I done it since the Report system introduction and on situations I wasn’t sure but was strange, sometimes actions weren’t taken but in situations that I was sure actions eventually were taken.
If you actually think that folks should only report actually knowing about cheat. Instead of suspicion of it. I want to be clear, most cheating stuff are pretty good to fly under radar and requires multiple passes looking for signs, while the pretty bad ones are easier to notice. If you report on anything strange, the checking behind the scenes would improve by a ton. Due can use historical data from that player, cross reference common softwares and even if not a single human look to it, would make it easier to find outliers.
Just to make it clearer:
They have a base test to check cheating, as cheating tools improve and change overtime their base test often become re-active way more than pro-active. That way if you stack “suspect reports” on top of it, you start to see a trend of what is running on client side that got reported and cross reference those reports. Which leads to ban waves.
I’m not saying false reporting is okay, but at same time I’m saying that if something is off, your report will enable the said base get a flag to cross reference with other items and speed up the process by a ton if others do the same in similar situations. The confidence and trust of the result of the check would increase or decrease. In cases that confidence reach a set value, will either trigger a human review or trigger the automatic action. Due them, more often than not, using ban waves to do so. That means that they don’t take lightly those reports.
So, instead of enabling cheating by omission you should use the report function if you have suspicions of it. Similarly to situations of other reports, a single report will not held that said player guilty of anything, but multiple reports will.
I know that are some false positive cases, but even on those cases were tied to a software in the machine even if wasn’t cheating, the software itself was suspect and until that said software got some validation the ban would harm a minority considering that on most cases would work as intended. You can look towards several anti-cheat systems and you will notice the pattern on how the industry works towards it.
Look Anti-lag 2, got folks to be banned on CS. When the said software was validated those bans got lifted. Those “false-positive” can happen, but also how many bans were done towards malicious softwares between those false-positives? There’s a ton of cheating software are used on daily basis even more in a Free to Play model.
Only requires a few percentile of folks disrupting matches to the game start to get problems. Because the perception and those problems scalates in a way that if nobody reports it would take years for someone notice it. Reports are tools to gives them a warning is not a tool to actions be done at that moment, is a tool to make them look in that direction and search patterns/repetition.
Similarly to reports for other stuff, would require multiple reports to actions being taken.
Sure, folks can weaponize reports, but in reality a really low amount of folks are hurt by it comparatively to a way bigger portion. Also, nothing can actually prevent devs themselves to punish folks who weaponizes reports, they had in the past account tiers of confidence/trust based on the veracity of those accounts reports. Dunno if they still use the same system for that.
Unless folks playing the game are expert on the field the trust on their report would be pretty low, which is why reports uses multiple weights, matches and accounts as form to get more confidence/suspicion.
A single report will do way more good than harm, due the harm would be limited to false positive if a specific number of reports are sent, while the good would punish appropriately the reported one. Again, I’m not saying folks mindlessly report everybody, I’m saying if you see something suspect you should report, there’s a field to type why you’re reporting, you should be clear in there. More often than not you’re providing a valuable data for a possible future ban wave or simply start a counter somewhere that would end doing nothing if not reaches the set threshold.
There’s no perfect system, but lack of actions will do way more harm than actually good. Even more in a game that most of stuff are tied to it is dependent of a trigger/action from the playerbase.
From blizzard:
https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/30371
Our in-game policies are designed to foster fun, fair, and safe game environments. If you see another player violate these policies, report the incident to us for investigation.
Due to the volume of reports, you may not receive a response from our team; however, we take all reports very seriously. Thank you for your vigilance!
Continuing the discussion from [Overwatch Retail Patch Notes – May 19, 2020](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/overwatch/t/overwatch-retail-patch-notes-%E2%80%93-may-19-2020/500828):
From GDC Video, from a group that blizzard and other companies participate (Fair Play Alliance):
https://gdcvault.com/play/1025805/Dispelling-Common-Player-Behavior-Myths