Do you think it is hard to detect cheaters or do you think it is easy?
How prevalent do you think is cheating in Overwatch? Especially compared to other titles, which we know have a huge cheater issue
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we have less than csgo at least
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Nowadays? Much more than OW1 thats for sure. F2P has created an influx of cheaters.
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Thereâs def cheaters., but not as much as people let on. I dont think the amount of cheaters is as severe as people claim, thereâs def some bad apples where itâs the same person cheating on multiple accounts, but iâm pretty sure all of the ones in masters/gm where I play have been banned.
Really though they would need to ban ip addresses for same culprit/different account situations but I think there frankly scared to do that.
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It all depends.
Cheater A:
â Boots his brand new h4ck3r#6969 cheat he bought for $666 on his PC, root OS
â Boasts those flick-shots 100% of the time
â Goes to the ult in 3 seconds every time
â Runs around at Mach-10
Cheater B:
â Launches a proper VM box
â Has his cheat program that only works there
â Adds himself stuff like 5% move speed, random 5% chance for enemies at âno regâ, 5% faster ult charge, 10% less fall-off for damage, 10% longer fall-off distance, 5% wider hit-boxes on enemies, 5% tighter hitbox on self, etc, etc
Who do you think will be caught and how likely is it for a retry to happen?
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dunno man, i remember seeing a lot o cheaters or a couple o seasons in ow, not so much in ow2
does cheater B like actually exist, that sounds insaneđ, then again the only cheaters I see are the rage hacking aimbot ones.
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It really depends on the type of cheat being used. Some are easy to detect, some arenât. And some become easy to detect once found the first time. But the cheating companies are always adapting. Itâs a war.
Less. I see less cheating in Overwatch compared to many other titles. Some like Apex are just overrun with Cheaters. Even despite their best efforts at anti-cheat, Deadlock already has a cheater issue even in alpha.
That isnât to say there isnât cheating in Overwatch. There is. But itâs not as bad as some games have it or as bad as some people here want you to believe. The biggest issue with Overwatch is that they take a long time to deal with it. They do ban waves which is good because it makes it harder for the cheat companies to adapt, but the waves are too far apart which allows some people to get away with cheating for a very long time before finally being banned.
I think it depends how good the cheats are, and how much the player tries to hide it. Ppl who just hardlock are super obvious. But ppl around here often think anyone with good aim is cheating. And pretend that each match has cheaters and other delusion.
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The lot of aim-bots do it with some manipulation on the client, so some of the stuff I mentioned would be possible - but it depends on the architecture of course. Still - what I mentioned is just an example that goes to show that itâs not a one size fits all. If thereâs some sort of a tournament thatâs not LAN nor in person, but via the Internet - then Iâd wager it would make sense for someone to invest couple of thousands of $$$ if that helps them to win. Those â5% here, 10% thereâ could make it or break it at high skill tiers.
Normally, though - itâs unlikely to have this happening because there just isnât enough reason. The âtiny differencesâ that are really hard to detect even on a pro level would have the most impact in the high skill tiers - and there people just ⊠donât cheat as often? Maybe if itâs some streamer that wants watcherâs count to rise, but then heâd risk a lot since everybody could re-watch and spot things. And for âmortal tiersâ those small things wonât change much anyways, so angry kids usually go for a heavy-handed approach.
A lot of people seem to think that because a cheat is âobviousâ, it must be instantly detectable by an anticheat system. If a human being can see someone spinning at mach 4 and headshotting people three maps away, it must be easy to insta-ban those people, right?
Unfortunately, it doesnât work like that. A lot of anticheat systems work on recognising software signatures from a pre-defined âlibraryâ of known cheats. If code turns up that doesnât match a known cheat, it wonât be automatically clocked, even if that code makes someone spinbot.
This means devs are reliant on reports for a lot of cheaters. New cheats are being developed and released all the time, it is a lucrative business.
One idea I see being floated around is âthere should be ways for devs to prosecute cheat developers directly. The moment cheating stops being a money-making industry, the faster it will diminish.â
But that relies on the devs knowing exactly who is behind the cheating, which isnât going to happen. If youâre scumming off someone elseâs IP, youâre at the very least going to remain incognito and host your cheats somewhere the local government isnât going to pull them down.
And, let us not forget, the cheat industry is built on a giant loophole: it is not illegal to make cheats for videogames. It is only against ToS to run them.
People would be a lot less likely to cheat if they thought theyâd face criminal prosecution⊠but is that the road we want to collectively go down?
I donât think Overwatch has a greater cheating issue than any other online multiplayer game. Itâs not âTF2 Sniper botâ levels of bad yet, but I donât think devs can afford to be complacent about the issue. As draining as it is, they have to keep up with banning cheaters.
EDIT: wow, I apparently had Opinions 
on this TL;DR: âcheating is an issue, tackling it is a can of worms.â
How prevalent is cheating? Well considering Blizz has banned in upwards of 500k accounts for hacking and grouping with hackers, Iâd wager that 60% or more of the general OW community are using hacks.
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They are not scared to do it, it just straight up doesnt do anything (and in fact is detrimental). IP addresses are leased out by your ISP and can change over time. An IP ban will only temporarilly ban the cheater, but then that IP address will get leased out to a legitimate player and they will get banned instead.
Many ISPs may also allow leasing out different IPs over periods of time, so in some cases the cheater can just ask for a new one and continue playing. Then of course there are also VPNs which would completely mask your real IP address from the server.
As a side note, banning hardware IDs has different but similar issues that make it not realistic without causing way more collateral damage than it solves.
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Depends on the complexity of the cheat. Some are super simple and can be detected with very simple algorithms. Others can be extremely complex, running on separate hardware or as a hypervisor that make them completely invisible to even the most sophisticated kernel level anticheat measures.
It is not as prevalent as you think it is, Iâll say that much.
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its always the cat and mouse effect. Cheating will always advance, and the detection methods have to be made better.
the problem is false positives i would think
some people have bans triggered by mouse macros or mouse/headset softwares, and in games like csgo u used to be able to get banned if u did funny mouse spinning after getting a kill
id assume the hard core rage hackers and spinbotters should be the easiest ones but soft lockers and aimbot flicks and whatnot are a lot tougher to catch, cuz sometimes normal people will do those flicks also
could also be due to cheat ban waves as to why they arent immediately banned
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thatâs kind of like saying Burger King gives you less diarrhea than McDâs
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I have been doing my fair share of reporting and almost every time Iâve logged on recently Iâve gotten thank you for reporting. So, there are for sure cheaters out there, how bad who truly knows but it sure got worse after f2p happened and the numbers donât lie when they ban waved 500k and thatâs probably not even all of them at the time. the thank you for reports also confirm to me that yeah they do ban waves for a chunk of them, they also seem to do manual bans too.
That good aim with the constantly changing sensitivity that HARD lock on the edge of the hitbox that âfightâ between the players aim and the machine trying to auto lockon, yeah good aim, they have good aim but dog water movement mechanics makes sense, makes a whole lotta sense.
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Option A because option B doesnât exist in a meaningful way, lol.