Aimbotters/hackers are ruining the game

[Zek-1623]

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::

Overwatch Bans: Long-term Mentality and Recent Action

Hey everyone, have a slightly different topic to post about today – Let’s talk hack-related bans. Over the course of Overwatch’s five-year history, we’ve been monitoring and taking action against software used to cheat the game. A number of teams are dedicated to not only actioning accounts found guilty of hacking, but also improving our systems to help with automatic detection. Overwatch developers, security engineers, cross-functional risk experts, and multiple customer service support teams …

Overwatch Bans: August 2021 Update

Hi folks, We’re following up on our thread from earlier this year where we discussed our long-term mentality towards cheating. Since we shared our last message in May, our ongoing efforts have identified and taken action against 24,003 accounts. During this time, our team has made progress against multiple pieces of software used to hack in Overwatch. Today, we’re rolling out a new ban wave, targeting an additional 18,003 accounts. This is all a part of our ongoing commitment to anti-cheat ef…

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.