I don’t know why you feel that’s the case. Have some faith in being able to start a discussion, this isn’t a bad topic.
There is definitely a larger problem with cheaters than we have faced in the past. I encounter honest to goodness cheaters doing the full hardlock thing a couple of times a month.
I’ve also seen stacks of bots being run by multiboxers, as well as individual bots in duos, sometimes a real player with an AI bot on a mercy pocketing them (weirdest thing I ever saw.)
Now I want to see codes (I do not disbelieve you, I just love a good ‘spot the cheater’ replay.) Don’t name and shame (as that is against TOS), at most say ‘[XYZ character] Team 2’ for example.
If they’re very blatant I’ll even stick in a report on the offenders for you.
I don’t think I have ever seen people actually defend cheaters (unless they’re best friends and grouped up with them.)
Posted a thread with a replay code and immediately got derailed and buried. They say console cheats aren’t a thing but they most definitely exist. Blizzard has an opportunity to make this amazing game a bar to be aspired to in the genre if they want to. Give this beloved game what it deserves and the people a place to play free of cheaters.
Say nothing in chat, just report. If you suspect cheating, reporting them is the best thing you can do and if enough people report them, they will get suspended.
Where I took the time to watch your replay, calmly and politely explained to you why your assertion was incorrect, and then you replied by insulting me and calling me a bot, and then basically just saying “nuh uh” over and over again. Sorry that’s not “derailing and burying a thread”
Just because someone tells you something that you don’t want to hear or doesn’t align with what you want to be true doesn’t mean someone is derailing you.
You sure they weren’t just smurfs? Or just plain better? Im sorry to tell you guys this but most cheaters aren’t in games with diamond and below. When I switched to pc years ago, I came as a GM player from console. I got good really fast so when I started out in comp I started being accused of cheating game after after game. It was really annoying until I managed to climb to grandmasters on pc too. Moral of the story? Dont assume everyone is cheating, they could very well be better or smurfs
I hear what you’re saying, but I know how a typical GM plays like and a lot of these players that cheat are nowhere near the level of awareness and overall game knowledge. For instance, two of them didn’t even know the name of the characters they were playing, and didn’t use one or any of their cooldowns. They were just mindlessly shooting for the frags, giving little consideration to the actual objective.
Also, a lot of them weren’t taking angles or doing smart ult combos or setting on a specific target for a good pick — they were just chaotically shooting anything that was visible to their aimbot for a fraction of a second then moving to a totally different target across the field of view or turning precisely to targets approaching them from the sides or from behind. Look, you can’t always guess the exact angle to turn to even if you’re top 500, and I would argue with the speed of the games in that echelon of ranked you are quite likely to die quickly when out of position since players there not only react fast to everything going on, but actually hit their shots more consistently than say a Diamond or a Masters player.
Smurfs I can usually tell since they either have open profiles with the typical 8-12 hours of Unranked and then 10 hours Ranked with Plat or Diamond on all roles, or they have a private profile but one of the default or free battle pass earned player icons yet they play quite a different game compared to others in the lobby, and at a different speed.
With that said, I did encounter plenty of smurfs, too, and as I understand it a lot of them are just GMs that want to have queues of 5-6 min instead of 50-70. Still, the anti-Smurf protection that boosts players quickly seems to only be working for those at the very top of the ladder while letting countless low GM/Masters players roam around Gold-Diamond for quite a few games. I suspect this is one of the issues making ranked a mess of uncalibrated MMRs, but I digress.
TLDR: Cheaters often don’t have all the marks to make their gameplay look “high-skill,” and most aren’t that great at hiding it or simply don’t care to hide the cheating. Smurfs, whether they are paid boosters or disgruntled GMs looking for fast queues, are usually easy to spot since they stick out like sore thumbs right up until low GM.
I have had 1 confirmed cheater in my games within the last 2 or so months. I’m guessing you are on of those people that just assumes anyone with a bit of aim and awareness must be a cheater…
How about you post some replay codes?
If people want to watch a hacker getting rolled here is the hacker I mentioned. R2JJWX (wilson).
I see, you are one of those people. Well, I’m not paid to be a professional persuader but mind you that I get several “Thank you for reporting, action was taken” messages every single time I log on, and I’ll add that this happens on multiple accounts. But don’t let me ruin your naïveté, free to play titles are so clean you get a tear in the eye.
I’m one of those people that is actually perceptive enough to understand that just because someone is better than me, doesn’t mean they are cheating.
I get a lot of those as well. Mind you that is not proof they are cheating. It means they have been reported multiple times. The fact that the report feature is heavily abused by people such as yourself I’m not surprised that we are getting a lot of these messages. I usually report players for throwing or being toxic etc.
Listen, I’m sure you are a wise old man that has been playing this game for years.
But as soon as you say things like “Oh, my whole gaming session was filled with cheaters” you just lose all credibility.
I see you aren’t providing any replay codes eh? Maybe because perhaps you are exaggerating for attention?
You don’t recognize them BECAUSE they are so good now.
They don’t hard lock your head. They can “rage” and toggle that on if needed. But instead they use a aimhack that is just equivalent to really really good aiming.
Which means that the average player that is not in the top 20% mechanical skill is basically throwing now, if they use an aim intensive hero.
I can’t post the links in the forums due to rules, but if you search for the reasons people cheat you are greeted with forum threads and Reddit discussions where people offer you their justifications for cheating. Leaving aside the viral investigation done on Escape from Tarkov, cheating is now more accessible than ever and demand for it has been surging. There are moms and dads that don’t have time for the grind anymore so they cheat to “keep up,” there are people who cheat because they like to feel powerful despite their lack of ability in the game, there are griefers who cheat because they want to take “revenge” on cheaters by…cheating on legit players (sounds dumb but that’s their thought process), there are people who (quite rightly) believe that cheating is so widespread nowadays that not cheating seems to them like a handicap so they use cheats to “level the playing field”, there are people who cheat because they want to see people rage in text chat, and so on.
The problem is that some cheats are quite obvious while others can be tuned to look really normal. Usually, the obvious, rage type cheats are so-called “free trials” which are usually really bad and result in quick bans (according to those who have tried them and complained on public forums). The “premium” ones are subscription-based and there are even some cheats dedicated to a small group of streamers or pros that cost a small fortune but require so much background check to get that developers have trouble fighting against them since they’re so difficult to acquire for disassembly and reverse engineering. Anyway, premium stuff is usually a few dozen dollars per week but can be cheaper or more expensive depending on various factors like how reliable they are against popular anti-cheat solutions and how quickly they get updated when games get patched.
If you want more info there are various sources on the web, but if you want an overview you can listen to the Darknet Diaries episode 115.
Side note: to the guy who thinks I need attention, I am anonymous for a reason, and my only stake in this is seeing this game that I am passionate about improve so that we may all start enjoying it again. One of the issues plaguing it is cheating, so of course I want to raise awareness around the issue. Call me a cautious hopeful.
I understand what you mean, Truly. I just don’t know if there are as many cheaters as people want to believe. The game going free to okay definitely invited more cheaters, probably more than ever but are they in almost every single game? I highly doubt that. Blizzard does gotta get a better anti cheat though, free to play games have always been plagued with cheaters.
Blizzard say they have banned 250,000+ accounts for cheating since OW2 began. They also stated 25million people played at launch, current estimates (no official blizz figures) put the current player base around 23 million.
So that suggests at least 1% of the player base that have not only cheated but actually been caught. Plus an unknown number who haven’t been detected.
So on average with 9 other random people each game, you will be playing with or against a cheater on average every 11 games at a minimum. That’s not rare.
( I realise this is a very simplistic analysis and there’s a lot of other variables like what ranks cheaters are likely to be in etc, but still I think it makes the point).
What you say is so true and 250k accounts can easily be recreated with fake phone number apps on android and iOS. Not enough action is being taken against cheaters in this game. The game still has no way of detecting Xim, and Cronus cheats. Both are banned in other competitive games like call of duty, valorant, and apex legends.
It’s a difficult problem to fix to be fair. And blizz are stuck in a position that if they don’t wait to ban in waves, they give away when they can detect a new cheat too early before it catches as many people as it could. But in the meantime its a crappy experience when you come up against them. F2P is a mistake IMO, and just feeds into it. If they had to buy a new copy of the game, even at £20 like OW1 was typically in latter years, they wouldn’t do it. When all they need is to spoof a mobile number, its childsplay to just create a new account.
Blizzard has a history pf inflating their numbers lol. Don’t trust what they say is all I can tell you. On paper 250,000 in the spam of one year is not much, its not even taking into account the servers or regions. It could be all regions put together for all we know.
