Aimbotters/hackers are ruining the game

General Discussion
149

This game is absolutely full of cheaters. It wasn’t bad at first, but now it is so prevalent that I am surprised if I don’t have a lobby with a cheater in it, this is for FFA warmup and Competitive play.

More than likely Blizzard is waiting to do a ban wave because a lot of the cheats I see are obvious garbage quality. I don’t doubt they will do a large ban wave soon, but the real question is: how easy will it be for the banned people to make new accounts and start cheating again?

I won’t be sticking around to find out, but I hope the best for anyone who is.

150

lol cheaters dont even matter at this point a third of hitscans are cheating and another third of genjis are scripting

151

its a free to play game now, its over for carrying about hackers. itll be over run and ill leave. gg

152

I think you are downplaying how often you will run into cheaters even if they are rare.

Here is a great post about it, the math is outdated because OW is 5v5 instead of 6v6 now, but it’s a great post that explains this.

Talai

Jan '19

What people don’t realize is just how commonplace cheating actually is in gaming.

If you believed 99% of players don’t cheat, then, statistically, 10.5% of all your games of Overwatch would contain at least 1 cheater.

What? That seems crazy! How can that be true?!

Simple: Probability. Imagine you flip a coin 1x… what are the odds you get Heads? Easy: 50%. What if you flipped the coin 11 times instead… now what are the odds at least one Heads popped up? 99.95%

This is exactly the problem with cheating: even if only 1% of players cheat, there are still 11 other players in each and every match you play. Therefore, the odds that no one is cheating is 89.5%… which means the odds at least 1 person is cheating would be 10.5%.

This is why game developers never release detailed information about cheating in their games. Instead, they make purposely-vague announcements like: “Hey guys! We banned 20,000 players over the last 6 or 7 months.” - This gives the impression the developer is ‘doing something’ without actually allowing us to figure out how big the problem is. Is 20,000 players over 6 months a lot? How many games were affected? We don’t know because they don’t tell.

There are a few studies on the internet of how many players cheat in video games. One such study - a poll of 9,436 adults (5,911 of which were gamers) - discovered that 1 to 5 percent of players admit to “Always” using cheats when playing multiplayer games online. If true, it would mean that 10.5 to 43 percent of your Overwatch matches contain a cheater.

Some people would say that number is too high, but the fact is most cheats are designed with the intent of being extremely difficult to notice, and most gamers are not well-versed enough in programming to detect signs of cheating… and that just scratches the surface of what anti-cheat has to contend with.

Blizzard can’t stop all types of cheats on their own. Many programs don’t interact with the game, and developers don’t have the legal right to inspect every program running on your PC (that would be an invasion of privacy). This is why Player Reports are so critical: in many cases they are the ONLY thing that can stop some cheaters.

And for those non-believers out there who just don’t want to accept that cheating is rampant in gaming, I’ll leave you with this mathematically-correct statistic:

For there to be a 99% chance that a match contains zero cheaters, you would have to believe that only 1 person in every 1095 players cheats.

… and that would be ridiculous. Estimates are that 6 people in every 1000 is a Kleptomaniac. Obviously Kleptomania and cheating are two different problems, but to believe that cheating in video games is 600% RARER than one of the most rare disorders is simply ludicrous. If, for fun, we pretended that 6 people in every 1000 cheated in video games, it would result in 6.4% of all your games containing at least 1 cheater. That’s about 1 in every 16 games.

So the next time you see a Widowmaker with 65% accuracy, or a Hanzo who gets headshots 80% of the time, don’t be afraid to make a quick Report. If you’re wrong, nothing bad will happen to anyone. If you’re right, you’ll help flag a cheater.

The first step in fighting this problem is for people to recognize how big it is.

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153

I don’t know, I’ve seen some posts on reddit that show some very obvious cheaters. I’ve seen a few myself where people are clearly tracking through walls with no way they should be able to, or whipping around 180 to headshot someone. Sadly I don’t have game codes either, but there are examples on the subreddit for the game.

154

I looked up the study, but I think it’s of limited use because it’s game-agnostic:

https://resources.irdeto.com/media/irdeto-global-gaming-survey-report

Some games are pitifully easy to cheat for free and others are fairly robust and require making shady payments. So I looked up info specific to Overwatch. Last year they talked about cheating a number of times::

In these posts they mention a total of 52k bans from May to August, spread out in ban waves of 10-20k apiece. I think it’s reasonable to guess that quite a few of those bans were repeat offenders making new accounts with new cheats after they got banned. Let’s just call it 30k distinct players. That number is roughly 0.3% of OW1’s monthly active users. For the sake of argument let’s say Blizzard isn’t doing that well and actually 1% of users are cheating.

If 1% of users are cheating, with 9 other players in your game, that’s an 8.7% chance of having a cheater in your game. 5/9 of those are on the enemy team, that’s a 4.8% chance of a cheater being on the enemy team. That’s assuming every role has an equal chance of having cheaters, even though I’d guess it’s mostly DPS.

Now the question is, how many of those games are you going to actually notice the presence of said cheater? We’ve discussed that these people are trying their best not to be detected. Even if you’re pretty good at identifying cheats and are always paying attention, I think you’re likely to be fooled sometimes. I would guess that most established cheaters are relatively stable in their rank and don’t dramatically stand out on the scoreboard. If you’re really vigilant let’s just say you find half of all cheaters, so you see one in 2.4% of your games.

So back to the original question, can this ruin the game? I would argue no. Even if you are of the mindset that detecting a cheater will ruin that game for you, it does not happen very often. I think what’s actually ruining the game for the people in this thread is the hyper-sensitivity to cheats that leads them to see them everywhere.

I’m not trying to defend cheaters in any way, I want them hardware banned as much as anybody. I just want to be objective about the scale of the problem.

155

That’s a lot of leaps in logic just to defend aimbotting lmao.

Your math is assuming Blizzard is catching 100% of the aimbots in each ban wave, which is ridiculous.

It’s 2022, aimbots are realaly good and really subtle. They literally have AI aimbots that are 100% undetectable.

This cuts both ways. You probably won’t notice most aimbots. It’s hard to catch a good player who only uses a toggle aimbot in a clutch situation.

156

Leaps of logic are all we’ve got. I’ll take it over gut feelings any day. My math assumed Blizzard only caught 30% of cheaters. Cheating is an arms race, both the cheats and the detection get more sophisticted with each passing year.

157

A leap in logic and a gut feeling are effectively synonyms in this context. You just said nothing.

You are in denial at the idea that the game you play is filled with aimbots. It’s a free online FPS. It’s going to be infested, it’s unavoidable, sadly.

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158

They’re not synonyms at all. I’m making an attempt to measure the problem with real data measured in this game. You’ve contributed nothing of substance whatsoever.

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159

Had a couple widows with potg’s with cursor snapping to heads. So yeah it’s def out there atm.

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160

In this context, they are. Your leap in logic is just a gut feeling because it’s based on data so incomplete that it’s entirely useless.

There is no way to effectively tell how many people are cheating based on the number of people banned. You can’t know how many people weren’t banned.

161

Fine, so we know nothing. Why are we even talking about it? You can’t honestly tell me that you actually do know how many cheaters there are based on the killcams you’ve seen in your games.

162

Your low estimate that is all cherry picked biased data, says 0.3% of MAU are aimbotting.

Logic would dictate that aimbotters are more invested in the game. I’d say they probably play at least 3x more than the average person, bringing it right back up to my low end estimate of 1% of the playerbase.

That being said ,the game is free, it’s probably closer to 2-5%. PUBG, for example, another free game, is estimated that 25% of the playerbase is cheating.

163

People who are cheating aren’t spending money in-game. The idiots who cheat on their main accounts will spend money, get banned, then cry to the cheat devs that the cheat is detected and their main account is banned. Know what they say? Never cheat on your main account. It’s one of the first rules for cheating in a MP game. They’ll probably even open a ticket to Blizzard and say their pet rock was playing and it wasn’t them cheating. Know what they say? Account security is your responsibility. The ban stays.

Boosting the account in a ranked ladder to then sell off the account, boosting other people in ranked matches, etc.

If you haven’t seen a cheater in 6 years, you definitely don’t know what to look for. I’ve seen tons of cheaters in those 6 years. Not so much in the very early days but as the game got older, the cheats started to get more prevalent.

And that’s the logic everyone runs with. If it’s not a rage hacker, there is no cheat problem.

I know this one cheat dev said that HWID do appear to be in place so if you’re getting banned for cheating, definitely expect one of those bans.

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164

EDIT-replied to wrong person

I agree with almost everything you said, but minor correction, the best aimbots tend to be custom made and very expensive.

165

Game uses same engine as OW… same code… same cheats work lol.

Magic Bullet is expensive now though.

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166

Oh I mean spending money in-game, they’re not going to be buying cosmetics or the battle pass or anything. The hack or accounts, vpn stuff, spoofing stuff, sure.

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167

if you are a good player, you can just use ESP and no one would ever know you are hacking. Don’t even need aimbot.

ESP is already such of an overwhelming advantage where you will never get flanked and always outflank. Also if you clue your team in on enemy locations its even stronger.

I’ve never seen any evidence of a genius cheater so its just a scary hypothetical.

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168

Oh ya that I agree with, nevermind.