I would say there’s probably a cheater 1 in every 20 games, and you don’t even know.
Depends on the game - In OW, no. Everything he listed for both cheater A and B except for “100% flick shots” is not a cheat that can occur in this game short of exploiting some sort of very rare security issue that would likely get patched immediately. You can absolute run cheats on external hardware or a VM and whatnot, but it cannot actually do the stuff he listed.
OW is a server-authoritative game which means the client has absolutely no say in what actually happens, it can only make a request (e.g. aim here and shoot, try to activate ability 2, etc). It cannot adjust the size of hitboxes or “force no regs” or any nonsense like that because it has no authority over that data, and is physically incapable of making such a decision. All clients make requests and then the server replicates the legitimate result of those actions to clients.
That said, I think the broader point they are trying to make is the subtlety of the hacks. Someone rage hacking with a 100% hardlocking aiming is much more likely to be caught than the person who is just giving themselves a small edge.
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No we don’t have less. We have pretty much far more than in CSGO because people know they won’t be banned in this game, whereas in CSGO, everyone know they’ll get banned live if they cheat.
There’s more cheaters than most people let on. The amount of cheaters may differ a bit but it’s still a big enough of a number to cause serious concern.
Lots of players who are neturally good but not good enough to be the best of the best are the ones who are hardest to detect, because they have the most expensive cheats with all the bonus settings etc such as miss rate config, body/headshot config, lock-on strength config, wallhack strength config, tracking and leading strength config etc. These are actual settings in the most advanced cheating softwares and they also come with a built-in VPN and proxy setting.
It’s still possible to spot them though because most of them do the same mistakes, especially with wallhacks active, and by that i mean ‘glancing’ which means they’ll be looking slightly in the direction of where the enemy team is at all times to track them, but without making it too obvious.
As for their aimbot, the way to detect it is to see if their aim instantly returns to center screen after a kill. Though it is most noticable on Widowmaker/Ashe, it’s also noticable on other heroes. The reason for this, is that humans always overcompensate or overflick, thus our aim never returns to center screen, and instead moves past the target when we flick. Because of that, our flicks never stop dead on target. Only aimbots do that, before instantly returning to center screen from where it was activated.
When it comes to triggerbots, it’s easy. They never miss a single shot because as soon as the bot is activated, it’ll hit anywhere on the enemy hitbox the moment the crosshair comes in contact with it. This can be slightly manipulated with the miss rate configs and manual aim and fire (typically used to hide the cheat) though, because as with all these cheats, they have them bound to hot-keys that enable them to toggle them on/off at will.
Before some wannabe smart person jumps in to tell me i’m wrong. I’ve worked with Evenbalance, the team who made Punkbuster, back in the day before my pro player days. I’ve been part of running a large server park with 40+ Call of Duty servers and 40+ Battlefield servers. Back then, these cheats weren’t half as advanced, but we didn’t have an anti-cheat nearly as advanced as the stuff we see today, so to see a triple-A game like this, without an anti-cheat, being F2P to boot, really rubs me the wrong way.
It’s almost like Blizzard welcome the cheaters with open arms so they can make more money off of them. I mean why else do ban waves and let them ruin ranked for months, up to a whole year at a time? It certainly isn’t because live bans would tip off the cheat creators. They’ll be one step ahead regardless, because the update codes are leaked from within the company or the cheats are made by someone working for the company itself. These update codes are sold for quite some money i might add. Some people working for other devs back in the day did it as well but it’s only gotten worse over the years, and the issue is the same with all online games, not just Overwatch.
You can.
World of Warcraft operate on the same authoritative system as OW2.
There used to be a cheat called WoW toolbox back in the day that enabled cheaters to gain 99999 health and run at mach-speed as well as teleportation and way more, including bot scripts for professions. It is known as a multi-hack. It did get detected and dropped out of existence after being in use for over a decade, undetected. That is, until others managed to bypass the updated Warden with leaked update codes.
No they’re literally not.
People who’s been reported as spin-botting and their replay used in VODs from all the major content creators, have been cheating for months without getting detected and banned.
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A mix of both.
Is not particularly hard to find unwanted softwares or specific patterns, due their anti-cheat measures and how much access they have on the player’s machine already. What is hard is to filter what is false positive, what is one time thing and collect data on it.
By example, if they detect unwanted/peculiar software or behavior of specific software. Is really likely to monitor that software and some flagged players for some time and gauge it’s deviation between the date of that software and prior to it. While tracking if is a common improvement or simply the tool. At same time humans aren’t robotic creatures so heavy changes can throw stuff off or actually highlight it.
I would say, that the game have a ton, but diluted on specific brackets. The vast majority would be around Bronze-Gold due how less punitive the usage would be, but due how big that said bracket is . While at higher ranks their numbers would be lower.
Most games have huge cheater issues, most folks just doesn’t iterate with it too much. Due how each of them manages it. Some creates specific pools for it, others monitor actively, others simply ban it, while others requires some additional steps to link specific person for that said account, increasing risks of punishment if the said person uses it.
Unless your overall performance is inconsistent or were flagged, the odds of having a match against cheaters aren’t that high, is not impossible, but if your performance are within particular range you’re pretty unlikely to be matched against a cheater or at least multiple matches against/with it. Due folks cheating are often tied to performance spikes or really noisy data.
The same spikes and noisy data makes it easier to enter in the “review” phase of it. While some can try to mask trying to make it difficult to be detected. They can trace comparisons between softwares and players behavior/performance.
Is not hard, but achieve a good confidence on the detection is complicated. Due the need to filter false positives and intentional/non-intentional usage of it, can be time consuming and a slow and steady process.
When they consolidate a pattern, doesn’t matter if the said player tries to mask it. Is a matter of time and how many times that said player used it. Report can help to speed up the process.
It obviously isn’t, then. It is literally impossible to do the things you describe in a server authoritative networking model. Like I’m not suggesting it shouldnt be possible. I’m telling you it is not.
The entire concept behind a server authoritative model is that the entire game simulation is run exclusively on the server and the clients cannot do anything other than predict what will happen. The game state on the client is immutable and holds no value other than to display to the user. Server replication constantly overwrites this value, and there doesnt even exist a command for the client to ask the server to change these variables. Changing the values client side does not get replicated back to the server, and therefore its impossible for the server state to ever change it to the requested value.
I dont see how what you just said has anything to do with proving what I said incorrect. Just because there exists a cheat that hasn’t been detected and is obvious doesnt mean it provides a blanket nullification of the idea that obvious cheats will be easier to detect. By definition, they are not only easier for humans to see and report, but their behavior will produce results that are heuristically easier to detect. Detecting the number of people with 100% crit shot accuracy that hit multiple different targets within literally frames is a lot easier to detect than someone who has a very subtle magnetic pull at the end of their flick shots that simulates real mouse movement.
Simple hacks like spinbots are typically less sophisticated just by their nature. Someone who develops a cheat that simply locks on to a target has almost certainly put less work into their cheat software than the person who has gone all out on a nearly indetectable one.
It’s difficult to detect a well written cheat or a careful cheater with current day methods.
Probably under .5% of players. I think the perceived amounts are greatly inflated by people who don’t want to believe others can be so much better at a game than they are.
The revolution will come when detection becomes a matter of feeding gameplay metrics and data into an “AI” who will analyze human VS manufactured input and be able to mark those who have “inhuman” gameplay.
You can write an undetectable system, but ultimately the desired results will show the fingerprints of cheating.
The cheater problem is blown waaay out of proportion by people that have no idea what cheats actually look like or how they work.
Just grab a couple codes from streamers discord that have been submitted with the posters saying that these people are “blatantly rage hacking” and it’s just a Soldier smurf steamrolling a silver lobby…
Hacks are waaaaay worse in other games. Just give Apex a try and enjoy getting mowed down with pin point motion sickness inducing accuracy from miles away over and over lol.
OW players are so paranoid. I have been called out because “your Hanzo only hits headshots, must be cheating, report” or their Echo saying “your junkrat is hacking” because I flick shot her out of the sky.
Machine learning can detect cheaters by analyzing replays. But blizz are not smart enough to apply this tech.
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The same can be said for the people who say that cheating isn’t a thing or is extremely rare…
The problem with this is that it’d take a very, very long time before the AI learn everything it need to learn. It’s like trying to teach a toddler to crawl, then walk, then run, before it finally starts doing advanced 200+IQ level math formulas…
There are at least two projects in development though, but it’s gonna take a long time before they’re reliable/accurate enough to be of any use.
The people who say cheating isn’t a thing are generally just trying to get a rise out of people or they are part of the same group that believes cheaters are in every game. The truth is that it’s somewhere in the middle.
We see a ton of people accusing people others that are clearly not cheating. The tricky part is we don’t get to see the inverse because how do you tell how many players cheating without being noticed.
Cheater C:
-Launches a proper vm box on the second pc
-Pours cheats directly into the RAM through a cable he made 2 days ago.
Cheat detection, at least in the current situation, is very difficult and as it seems cheat makers won the war. There are new tools being developed and I am hopeful they can push back, but when they will arrive is a big question mark
Major concern are the subtle cheaters, who just want to get an advantage, maybe be a rank better. Unlikely they will get reported because it is really hard to identify them as a player.
That also begs the question how many are there?
People said Tarkov wasn’t infested, yes there were issues, but not that bad and then it got exposed how bad it actually was.
I don’t say that OW is overrun, but that we are biased and easily overlook the issue
Even 0,5% of the population is problematic
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the subtle one’s are the worst too because they are intentionally trying to hide it so that they get higher up then try to blend in with normal people, what’s sad is a lot of people don’t even realize when they run into some of them which is crazy because I can tell within a fight or two if someone feels “off” in a lobby that I’m in, so then I will basically at that point check them and test their game sense and what they do by constantly going after them to the point they get spawn camped if they dont crank it. I was talking about this a bit ago in some older posts of mine and some people were trying to say I was making stuff up about cheaters, how a lot of them are nowadays and the fact most are not your normal spin botters, etc.
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I know exactly what you mean
I have so many hours in the game, you feel it when something is off. Oftentimes it gets confirmed when you check their profile and their skill just doesn’t match with their rank at all
Cheats got very subtle, the landscape changed
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Less prevalent in overwatch just due to the nature of the game. Cheating doesn’t really help that much if I’m playing reinhardt or mercy for instance.
What do you mean by this? As a player is it difficult to tell if someone is cheating? Well, it depends on how good they are at hiding it. I wouldn’t say all that hard to detect usually, but I will say a lot of people think others are cheating who aren’t actually cheating.
Also, the only statistic we know is that 500k accounts have been banned for cheating, and over 100 million accounts have been made. So, that gives you a rough idea of the number of cheaters.
that 500k I believe is just the recent ban wave, not total overall, even if it was the total “over all” the math behind 500,000 of them is how many games or SR was lost by cheaters? it would still be extremely high amount since they do most through the “ban waves” which again this isn’t the first one, nor the last. Maybe it was the first in “Ow2’s” life span but I am pretty sure it’s much higher including ow1.
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It is the total as of a few months ago.
When a cheater is detected that game is cancelled. But yeah, I mean who knows how many games were played before they were detected.
Again though, it’s 500k out of 100 million.
I’m only saying numbers from OW2. I don’t know OW1 numbers regarding cheaters
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the only problem is most of the time this does not occur and if they get hit with the ban wave instead of the quicker detection than the sheer amount of games ruined is just astronomical if we use previous examples of how many games some top 500 could do before they got banned for hacking it was close to 130 games ( doesn’t sound too bad till you add the amount of players per match ) which the # just sky rockets.
it would basically be 500,000 x 130 games(9 players) =
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Not really though. If everyone who made an account was playing at the same time, it would be about .5% of all games are being ruined. Which means not even 1 in 100 games.
I can guarantee it’s higher than that because in the last 3 days I’ve gotten multiple thank you for reporting and I only report cheaters even got one right after a match ended yesterday.
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