I don’t think I’ve ever encountered someone using one, but I also don’t know what they’re doing. I know its a program that runs in the background, but what is it doing? How does it know to aim for heads and through walls?
1 Like
Bumping this thread cus’ I wanna know.
Magic
The basic ones, locate the enemy’s HP/Red-border then set an offset coordination from the center of that target to shift it to the head (usually assigned manually).
However, I think the ones you see now are more complicated since this method doesn’t work anymore because the red color is not constant anymore.
Well first thing to know is that there’s tons of different hack programs and aimbots that do different things, so not all of them are the same.
I’ve seem aimbots that make a player magically shoot you even if they’re aiming at the ground.
I’ve seen aimbots that let a player shoot you from spawn, behind walls.
I’ve seen aimbots that specifically miss 3 shots by shooting into the ground and THEN whip around to get a perfect headshot, specifically programmed to miss enough shots to ‘balance out’ the perfect accuracy.
There’s all sorts; so just look for anything that doesn’t seem natural in the kill feed; was the person generally moving the cursor, or was it jerking / snapping to the next target? Was it just a good flick shot, or was it something else?
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter, cuz the game is infested with them and Blizzard is apparently not interested in fixing it that much.
Pretty simple – hit a button and always hit where you want to hit while trying to aim.
If you hear the phrase “toggle” that’s most paid for cheats, where they can hit a button only when they feel like they need it to win – much harder to detect naturally.
(I’m not an expert in this and I don’t have anything to back this up, so take this with a grain of salt)
Assumedly it is gathering data from the game, and then the data is fed into some kind of system that uses it to do something. So, for example, the data is the enemy crit box positions and the function is making the user aim at that crit box.
1 Like
presumably there are a number of methods for it. Though if I were to guess, I’d say a scan for the invisible hitbox on a direct line and would snap to it. But it just as well could be ‘send a packet claiming hit’ and just ignore aiming all together.
Modern aimbots probably read and intercept hitbox data and then feed artificial X/Y input coordinates into your game over multiple interpolated steps to make it resemble a player aiming towards a certain location. The big money is in “humanized cheats”. It is much easier to write a brute force program which instantly shoots 100% headshots than it is to write a sneaky program that tries to mimic the same way a highly skilled player aims.
Fun old timey trivia - The original aimbot was invented for beta1 counter-strike after Gooseman (the mod’s creator) bragged that it would be impossible for anyone to write a cheat that could guarantee headshots, supposing that variations in recoil or accuracy would make it difficult to do more than simply force you to LOOK at someone’s head.
As I recall, it didn’t take very long for a creative “hacker” (as in, computer hacker who broke the system like sombra, where the phrase originally came from) to come up with the idea of substituting colored models client side using featureless blue bodies and red heads. It then was programmed to lock on to anything with the exact “red” tone that the head models were shaded, and would update so quickly as to ignore recoil compensations.
A curious side effect of this particular early cheat was that if you created a custom spray using the exact red tone that the cheat used to recognize head hitboxes, any player who was using this cheat and happened to look at your spray would immediately start shooting at it, and would get stuck, unable to look away until they de-activated the cheat.
3 Likes
Depends on the complexity of the bot.
On the surface-
The software is monitoring the packets being sent between your computer and the server. Within that information is the XYZ of every other player (and projectile, and everything else going on on the game. This is the information the game is using to move and display all entities and their positioning on your screen)
The software is also monitoring your XYZ positioning, and weighing all this information against known XYZ locations within the game itself.
From here the math is pretty simple to draw a vector from your relevant XYZ, to the enemies XYZ
It then controls your mouse inputs, and locks you onto a specific XYZ, ie- the XYZ of your opponent.
As time has gone on the specific mechanics of how they do this has improved.
Typically, cheaters don’t want you to know they’re cheating.
If you’re going around locked onto someone’s head with no fluctuation- it’s pretty obvious.
So many things are done to make it harder to detect from a observers perspective
They’ll intentionally miss shots, for example- typically based on a % you feed into it. Though most will still have a button to bypass this and just lock.
They also tend not to “track”- but instead will flick past, shooting just as it passes over a hit box. This looks more natural than straight perfect tracking.
On and on. They’re made to make you look like a good player, not god.
4 Likes
There are three common kinds of aimbots, “direct”, “triggerbots”, and “pixel scanning”. I am going to give a basic description of how they behave and what you should look for if you suspect someone as cheating. Be warned, if I see anyone providing direct details of how to install or use a cheat, I immediately alert Blizzard Customer Service of such a post as this is strictly forbidden on the forums and will result in both a forum and in-game permanent ban.
Direct Aimbots work by reading data directly from the game client, and determines where to position the cursor based on that information. Triggerbots have no aiming mechanism, but instead will automatically fire when the player naturally moves the cursor over a valid target. Pixel Scanning works by not interfering with the game client at all, but instead extrapolates visual output information to identify the red color targets. All of these cheats require the installation of unauthroized third-party software.
Behaviors of an aimbot can vary! Furthermore, players often accuse others of cheating simply after reviewing the kill cam. While the kill cam is helpful for a player to make a determination to suspect a player of cheating, the kill cam is often extremely inaccurate. My recommendation is look for continuous consistent performance from the suspected player. Also track their positioning, more often than not, cheating players tend to have blatantly bad positioning consistently throughout the match (overextended, often can make multiple hits from extremely distant locations, etc.) Blatent signs of cheating are instant 180 kills (where the cheater can consistantly turn around and hit the head everytime, extremely high accuracy (watch for post game cards that report this stat), or can hit every hero with little to no repositioning.
Other cheats to watch out for
Other types of cheats include “wallhacks”, where a player can track positions from the enemy players at all times (not to be confused with Widowmaker’s Infra-sight or Venom Mine abilities or Hanzo’s Sonar Arrow ability). “Nukes” which is an act of attempting to DDoS an entire server to force disconnect other players (these virtually never happen anymore but used to be a really bad problem in Korea from what I understand). There is, unfortunately, a problem specifically on the Xbox platform where if a person accepts an Xbox Live Party Chat request, they could inadvertently be giving up their own IP address to another player and that may result in a direct peer-to-peer nuking attempt, but this is not a direct attack on an Overwatch game server. (Click here to learn more information on that.) “Stat Trackers” was a trending way to play a more informative game of Overwatch as that software would screen record information and extrapolate data to provide strategies and advice for the player. They were all banned entirely because some of them would work and provide information as the game was in progress. Finally, in-game exploits where a discovered bug may result in a tactical advantage over the enemy team or lock the match into a stalemate. Wall breaches are often the most common cause of an exploit but on occasion, there are more hilarious ones like the flying Mei bug from about a year ago.
Reporting
If you suspect a player of cheating, whether it be by aimbots, wallhacks, exploiting in-game bugs, etc. please take the time to report them using the in-game report tool. If you come across any information about any hacks for Overwatch, DO NOT ATTEMPT to install or use them! Instead, report those hacks in an e-mail to hacks@blizzard.com (note any emails sent to this address will not receive a direct response). If you see an in-game bug with high exploit potential, either email hacks@blizzard.com or start a topic in the Bug Report forum. If you do post a topic in the bug report forum, first write out careful details about the bug, specify in the title something like “Critical Exploit” or the likes, then quickly post the topic, then click the Trash Can icon or the Pencil icon and remove/edit out the posted information immediately. The Blizzard Quality Assurance team who monitor the Bug Report forum can look at past revisions of the post to look up your information. (See this thread as an example.)
In-Game Responses to Cheats
Your reports do matter and really help identify players who are cheating. In the event that your report helps lead to a person to be confirmed to be cheating, you will see a green-colored message appear when you first log onto the game (different from the blue-colored one which is for abusive chat and gameplay sabotage violations).
In the event that the game client itself detects cheating, your match may be canceled entirely (declared “no contest”, no loss/gain of skill rating). If so you will see this message:
Official Statement from Blizzard about Cheating
See Blizzard’s official statement about Cheating which I have archived from the old forums here:
11 Likes
very interesting, and I will keep an eye out now that I know…
This face is disturbing 
i blame you know who for starting it.
I really don’t know 
1 Like
can we even talk about them? cause they um vanished
1 Like
Ah, yes. The good ol’ [removed by moderator]
jk, no mod edited this.
…as far as I know 
mods be like say it i dare you
1 Like
One of the biggest giveaways on a cheater is their ability to look and aim smoothly when they are doing non-combat things like going around a corner, looking at map geometry (like turning towards a doorway) or looking around at their teammates.
A highly skilled player will be just as precise and efficient with cursor placement in regular situations as they will be in combat. If a player can aim precisely at someone’s head in one flick, they will usually do the same thing when looking at teammates without even thinking about it; it just becomes a habit after enough practice, you do it reflexively.
Somebody who has a hard time looking right at a narrow doorway or chokepoint in a single motion but can somehow turn 90 degrees and hit a small hitbox model like a faraway tracer with a headshot on the first try would definitely raise some major red flags for me.
That won’t help you spot a highly skilled player who ALSO happens to use cheats to get an advantage, but it’s enough to provide a basis for reasonable doubt and also sometimes provide a reason to rule out suspicion: consider that it would be enormously complicated and take a lot of extra effort to mask a player’s input movement with the same precision when they AREN’T aiming at a target.
Lord Voldemort???
Good info.
However regarding the green “thank you for reporting” message I do find it unfortunate I never got one of those when I reported one of the only aimbot players I was certain of: a Sombra with 25+ hours on her and an average of 67% accuracy.
Maybe she did get banned and I just didn’t get the message but for all I know she’s still doing her thing.