I see a lot of bots: Two or three “players” moving in tempo like they are choreographed, barely doing anything, just leaving spawn and dying repeatedly.
If we’re missing them, the cheats aren’t noticeable enough to be giving some massive advantage to complain about honestly.
Cheaters are super rare. Always have been, always will be.
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But the average SR will be the same at the end of the day…
ok, so 2 amateur boxers vs Mike tyson during his prime is “Balanced SR” to you, understood…
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I think that’s some one botting low elo bronze smurf accounts to sell it to other people on some shady website.
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yep oddly enough it is the s76’s that are sus lol
YA aimbotters are plenty, odd wall hacker.
Diams vs masters are not amateur boxers vs Mike Tyson due come on, stop with the cope.
you’re really not understanding the skill difference between one bracket and the next…
So if a gold level player downloads some cheats and climbs up to diamond you dont have a problem because “theyre not noticeable enough”?
Id like to know what you base this on. Surely something more than personal observation?
Friendly reminded that the last time blizzard openly announced a ban wave we saw them literally remove hundreds of thousands of players, and that roughly 20% of the Top500 leaderboard got wiped out.
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I do.
I presume you mean from this blog post from February:
Since the launch of Overwatch 2, we have identified and banned over 380,000 accounts that were found to be cheating. In addition, we have suspended or banned over 35,000 accounts that have knowingly grouped up with cheaters. Remember, if you encounter a player in your games that you suspect to be cheating,
But as mentioned, this number is since OW2 launched – that’s almost a year and a half’s worth of bans. Now granted I realize this is certainly far from accurate number. I’m sure many cheaters never get caught, and at the same time that’s actioned accounts which also includes people who cheat more than once on multiple free accounts.
I just want to be clear they’re not regularly banning hundreds of thousands of people in each ban wave.
Top500 will also always have a larger percentage of cheaters than other ranks by nature of how cheating works – you gravitate upwards in rank, and depending on how high you crank up the cheats, you are more likely to end up in higher ranks or even top500. Even a silver/gold player can probably land a spot in top500 if they can get away with cheating long enough on Widow if they crank up the aimbot to 100% hard locking crit rate + trigger bot + wall hacks. So I don’t think 20% cheating in top500 is indicative of 20% of the playerbase cheating or anything like that.
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you quite obviously don’t
I do.²
i know 76 has a aimbot in his out outside of that he shouldnt have auto aim at all i wish i knew how thte stuff worked but tbh i dont even want to play…im no hero im pretty much a failure…i havent touched the game since monday which is rare like im not the most skilled but there isnt pride right now
Actually I was talking about an initial ban wave in 2023 that banned a couple hundred thousand cheaters. Hadnt seen this article. Interesting to know it was nearly 400k accounts earlier this year.
Though its worth noting Ban waves / cracking down on cheaters will often see quick reductions in numbers for a few reasons. Ban waves typically get the easier to detect cheats- which tend to be more rampant early on. The harder to detect / better cheats will always remain more difficult.
This doesnt touch on how many modern cheats are quite literally impossible to detect- as theyre often stored/utilized remotely. Even with kernel access (which overwatch doesnt have) these cheats can and do bypass detection (And this is going to be a problem until companies start utilizing/adopting machine learning based cheat detection)
NGL, i question this- a lot. A silver widow is going to get farmed hard by a T500 Dva/Winston. Even if the player has 100% perfect aim, they wont be able to kill a dive tank before that tank lands on them and deletes them. God aim with silver game sense isnt going to get someone near top500. Their ability to prioritize appropriate picks, understand ability interactions, and biggest- dynamic positioning requirements throughout the course of the match is a massive disadvantage, even with god levels of aim.
But realistically, this isnt how many cheaters actually attempt to use cheats. A lot of cheaters will use cheats to give themselves an advantage, not make themselves a god. A lot of modern cheats generally employ soft aim advantages, automated triggers or specific abilities, and even allow tuning for specific accuracy/headshot rates (Ie these programs will intentionally miss. again, subtly is the word)- and then some combination of all of the above, an example would be using sojourn with an automated right click / headshot mechanic but it intentionally only hits 30~ % of those right clicks as headshots and intentionally misses x% entirely.
Sure. But im not actually saying 20% of the player base cheats, nor did i mean to imply it.
In fairness i didnt overly get into it here (but have elsehwere in other posts)- but my reasoning for bringing up the T500 is because many players often have the “Im a good player and id recognize if someone was cheating! And since I dont recognize it!..” mentality. Amusing how no one ever noticed/realized/complained about the “Rampant” cheating youd see in T500.
Something to emphasize with 20% of the T500 disappearing, with 10 players in a game, that was an average of 2 cheaters per game.
Lets be real on all this though: What do you think is a realistic number for cheaters in a competitive / free to play FPS game?
If we saw an average of only 2~ out of 100 players cheating across the ranks, with 10 players per game, youd see “on average” 1 cheater every 5 games.
If you actually find this concept interesting, and of course “Take it with a grain of salt”,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkmIItTrQP4
But this video has a lot of interesting information (Predominantly because they wind up talking to a company that is actively working on machine learning detection for AAA level gaming. Fun note to catch what % they think is cheating in the game theyre currently working with. Especially when you relate that back to what were seeing in overwatch)
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You make fair points, though it’s worth noting that cheating should only make players better (I suppose theres the odd case where someone misconfigured their hacks and it hampers their ability to play the game, but i suspect thats a rare enough scenario to ignore). So at very least cheating is weighted upwards. Even if it only makes you marginally better, I would expect to see the highest percentage of cheaters higher up (percentage here meaning ratio of people in their rank, not that most cheaters are actually clustered at the time).
Maybe my silver/gold widow player is a bad example, but I suspect its certainly not impossible. Remember that some people may be low ranked because they completely lack mechanical skill, and not that they have no awareness/positioning. It hasn’t been uncommon in the past to see GM/top500 players be plat on other roles.
But yeah, it’s certainly much more nuanced than that.
My personal opinion, is probably about 5-10%. But that’s me.
I may have a bit of a bias because I get accused of aimbotting a fair bit, so that’s why I’m typically quite skeptical of people on the forums claiming cheating is rampant. Heck, I once had someone who was so convinced I was cheating in their match that they went and created a thread here with the replay code accusing me. Another person replied to me in another thread claiming he’s seen me in game and knows I cheat “for sure” and told everyone to report me.
And then of course there’s the occasional person here making some pretty wild claims. I’ve seen everything from “Literally everyone above plat is cheating, except me who is a masters player, i just learned how to juke the aimbots” to "5+ people in every match are cheating.
So between all that, it’s really hard to say, tbh.
I’ve also seen that video before, and its an interesting watch for sure. Without having hard data, though, it’s a bit hard for me to just take them at their word. What was their data set? How did they confirm their results? I’m not saying it’s wrong (and in fact I actually have really high hopes for AI-based anticheat), but I’ll remain a bit skeptical until I see more.
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lol that would be amusing. Its way more than fair to assume that cheating tends to only swing players “up”- Its highly unlikely someone is going to play/do worse with cheats
A huge portion of the context of this conversation is going to fall on “how far” up players would tend to go with cheating. The overwhelming majority of players will tend to fall into silver, gold (Especially gold) and then plat. Pretty much any time weve seen rank distributions, these ranks account for roughly 3/4 the population (With gold often bein the single largest rank, with rouhgly 25-30~ % of the population).
I dont think its unfair to conclude that “most” cheaters (by actual numbers) would tend to “come” from these ranks.
So back to the whole “how far up will they go with cheats”- This is of course the big one. If (and heres where we start making big assumptions) cheating brought players up 2~ whole ranks, wed expect to see most of the cheaters in diamond, with the relative “broad” range of “most cheaters” being in plat/diamond/master.
Again, modern cheats tend to be “subtle” cheats, and make you play a bit better- Instead of making you a straight up god (What with the whole “its blatantly obvious” thing when someone does this). Id gladly argue you take a gold player and give them slightly better aim, theyre not going to play the game at a master/grandmaster level.
Mechanical skill is definitely a part of overwatch- But IMO the bulk of the skill for overwatch falls hugely on game sense. Overwatch is a notoriously difficult game to step into. 40 heroes with complext ability interactions, a lot of unique maps and concepts. We very regularly saw content creators who were top of their mechanical-based FPS game come and try overwatch, only to land themselves in plat or lower because their mechanical skill alone just wasnt enough to overcome their lack of understanding for the game. Fun time to remember that bliz had to dramatically lower the assumed initial MMR of new players down to like bronze because the initial hidden MMR equivalent of like gold was seeing these players get utterly destroyed (Might be off a rank of so- but it was laughably bad).
With 5-10% youd expect to see a cheater ever game / every other game (To be upfront with you, i dont think youre wrong. Or at a minimum, i dont think the reality is below this).
But you bring up another good point- Players are fricken lousy as visually “Detecting” cheaters, outside of straight up “rage” hackers.
Ive been accused numerous times (And i playdoomfist 99% of the time. Ive lost count of “Looking kinda sus there doomfist!” or straight up “Wow, that doom is blatantly hacking”. I always laugh it off and take it as a huge compliment)
I think this is part of the problem as well. Again with cheats being “subtle”, theyre intentionally hard to detect. Anyone who thinks they can regularly spot “the cheater” i highly question. Likewise when people go “Well i never see it so…” i question that as well.
I always advocate skepticism.
But take a few things into consideration- They have to be low key because of the NDA theyre working with for the game theyre connected to (And by all means, cheating is an info war).
They were saying they saw roughly 20-30% of players getting “Flagged” as cheaters in their initial tests.
When we saw a ban wave we also coincidentally saw 20% of T500 go bye bye.
Ever seen this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LfGcDB7Ek
This video blew up awhile ago. TLDR on it, guy downloaded cheats himself to investigate cheating in Tarkov. His general “method” for detecting a cheater was using something known as “the wiggle”.
Tarkov allows players to lean left/right, typically to peek around corners.
He would “wiggle” left to right, while remaining completely behind cover (so not actually peeking out- just completely behind a wall) at players. There is absolutely no way for someone to know youre doing this through walls (ie no audio), unless they themselves have wall hack of sorts- And he found he could bait other cheaters into “wiggling” back at him.
He tested this for quite awhile (I think 100+ matches), and he was able to confirm cheaters in something like 60% of his games. Emphasizing, this is predominantly based on cheaters who would “wiggle” back at him through walls. Its not like hes able to go check everyone, not everyone who cheats is going to wiggle back anyways- so the “actual” number of cheaters would be undeniably higher than what he observed- But that would also relate back to a high % of players cheating.
Pretty much every time were ever able to get some concept of “how” many people are cheating, especially in “competitive” games / fps games- The number of cheaters is much higher than people ever initially realize.
Now the question is, do we honestly believe the “integrity” of a free to play game like overwatch, which has already shown itself to have a problem with cheating in the past, is somehow “higher” now, or that blizzard anti cheat has somehow actually gotten way better?
My end take TLDR on this: Cheating is probably more common than many players realize.
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Same here. It seems like the cheaters appear around 8 PM EST every day, and they come in full swing. Almost every game, I see at least one cheater and Blizzard doesn’t do squat about it. It’s time to put something like Easy Anti-Cheat in the system rather than Defence Matrix. Most useless piece of software ever.
Yep I’ve seen that one as well – also an interesting watch too. I’m willing to believe their estimated number was accurate, though my primary concern over this video is whether or not it can actually be compared to other games. How bad cheating gets depends on a lot of factors, such as how much effort is actually put in by the devs to catch it, what type of game it is, how popular the game is, etc.
For example, I think its fair to say that blizzard has more resources at their disposal to combat cheating than the Tarkov developers have – and they can also lean on other studios within Activision blizzard (e.g. call of duty) to share information on effective strategies. Slapping an anticheat like Battleye or EasyAC in your game doesnt automatically make it effective, so we dont know how much effort they’ve actually put into combatting cheating in Tarkov.
I concur with this conclusion. I’m willing to bet I even fall into that group.
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