How do you actually tell if someone is cheating?

General Discussion
1

Newish to the game and I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone cheating but I want to know what signs to look out for in the future.

2

It can be really hard to tell on aim alone because aimbots can be calibrated to miss shots, only hit centre mass etc.

You can have really obvious looking ones like spinbotters that will be doing their best spinning top impression as they dome people across the map. Or people who hit headshots whilst they’re looking at the floor etc. But not all cheaters will be that obvious unless they’re ragehacking.

Usually the aim skill doesn’t match their gamesense (eg ‘they don’t miss but they do daft stuff like stand out in the open, frontline, and misuse their cooldowns.’)

Doing really poorly to start off with, only to go AFK on respawn and then suddenly have the aim of a pro-player.

Tracking people through walls/obstacles/other visual obstructions that most players won’t be able to see through. This goes for headshotting sombra’s out of stealth consistently (it happens by accident occasionally when someone is aiming for something else, but if they’re doing it several times in one game it’s sus.)

EDIT (for clarity): it’s always a good idea to give benefit of the doubt and to review a replay before pressing that submit report button. Sometimes we will experience moments when a player will pop off and kill three people, but it turns out they were just super lucky or playing out of their minds.

Don’t fling out accusations randomly to people. If you think they’re cheating just report and move on.

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3

lol I have a better response to this

You realy can’t :slight_smile: You might think you can, but in all reality, you’re lagging or your brain is lagging.

I’ve seen shots that seemed “impossible” but when viewed on deathcam, they were.
So either my brain didnt process what happened since it was so fast or, I didnt see every frame for whatever reason.

4

How do you do, my fellow non-hackers. Cheaters? I’ve literally never seen a single cheater in my 90000000 hours of playtime.

Ok well nothing to see here folks, thats the thread.

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5

You know they’ll be here soon

6

Judging by many here just mark everyone who is even a little bit better than you and deny all the facts that it is not so

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7

Its hard to tell so people get paranoid and see what they want to see.

:person_shrugging:

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8

Nah, better than you = cheating, obviously flawless strategy.
But yea its hard to do it especially since game will not help you with it most likelly, not sure how overwatch with this but replay cameras not always show 1 to 1 what happened in game.
Also, we had arrows that were able to look like they are beint turned around, because hitboxes are larger than models in the game…

9

i think we actually agree aster LOL for once

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10

I really think these accusations of cheating are just people super salty.
HOnestly the only thing we can realy prove is this:

  1. As predicted, the DEFENSE MATRIX campaign is being abused left and right. People are getting ToS violation actions wrongly and Blizzard isn’t doing jack about it. (Lawsuit Lawsuit Lawsuit)

  2. the Matchmaker’s quality was dumpstered in the name of quicker queue times

  3. Smurfs are still a problem and streamers openly do this and think its ok so the community thinks it’s ok. (i mean, just put a rating in the game based on your hero progression rather than your entire account and this solves the issue. You basically would have to choose your hero up front before joining the queeu and you’d be locked out of heroes for that match that are much higher up in rating so you don’t ruin the experience of the lesser-Xp’d toons your’e playing with)

11

You can’t anymore, unless the people cheating are dumb and rage hack. Good cheats today look legit. Only AI can deal with it in the foreseeable future…

Last cheater I saw was OW2’s Season 1. A Sojourn wasn’t missing her left click in death cam.

12

maybe not headshotting, but shooting sombra while she is in stealth can be done by people with legit good intuition.

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13

It’s fine if YOU really can’t. :slight_smile:

Cheating actions aren’t handed out lightly in this game. They really go too far to make sure, though I suspect some benign third party software could be responsible for a few innocent people getting actioned.

14

seen two threads get auto deleted by the spam filter while i was going to reply to it.
looks like blizzard is trying to sweep the cheating issue under the rug

15

Oh I know that spy checking has knocked many a sombra out of stealth. In fact I wish more players were in the habit of doing it. But if someone seems to be ‘psychic’ when it comes to their sombra safari alongside other indicators, it could mean that player is cheating.

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16

Tracing is a pretty clear give away that someone is walling.

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17

yep, and its this that i can honestly say, i have NEVER seen a cheater in this game…and i watch replays of sus things…for people to say there are cheats galore…i just dont see it…must be lucky

(edit) i MAY have just seen my first one…not sure…i was in a match playing as sombra, the opposing tracer was a little ways from me, she had grabbed a health pack in a room, then rounded the corner, and her reticle sort of snaps to where i was running in stealth. the tracer then pops off a quick burst right at me, and pops me out of stealth. i mentioned it in game, and the tracer claimed “it was because of the widows ult”…to which i said “ok, my bad”…but then the tracer, a few moments later, left the game.

I decided to check the replay after the game and noticed that when it happened, the widow had her ult available and had not used it…so im thinking this person…perhaps was using a hack? maybe my first one that ive seen?

18

I see this much more often than straight up aim-lock for sure

19

Flats does a semi-regular series on cheat replays that may be helpful.

I would usually suggest if you think someone is cheating, don’t do anything in the heat of the moment, but after that game go back and check the replay from their POV - unless its someone spinbotting, then report away. And just to stress the point, I am not going to be looking at a replay at all unless I felt pretty strongly something might be up - I’m more interested in playing a game than on being cheat patrol.

For a start, checking the replay might suggest that rather than being some kind of aimgod, this person was just firing into a tightly packed crowd and getting lucky. You might remember that string of kills very clearly, but not so much that the guy didn’t really do that much the rest of the time.

But what stands out to me is uncanny accuracy particularly when combined with wild movement. If aim and tracking are locked on no matter how they move around, that’s a red flag, particularly when coupled with this player is E1 with a joke/insulting name and basic skins. However, stolen and purchased accounts, as well as just plain terrible judgement, are very much a thing, so there is no standard cheater ensemble.

Some people do have really good aim - I always check the player profile when possible and if that suggests this is someone whose game background fits with someone who ought to have pretty good aim, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt if things are aren’t just flagrant.

Does the player seem to be aware of enemy players he has no way to perceive? Tracking enemy players through walls is a red flag. Just don’t forget both footsteps and experience are things. If in the playback you can hear yourself coming, they probably did also; and experience can suggest routes players like to take.

And while people go on about subtle cheating - perhaps with cause - that is going to be very of hard to nail down, so obsessing over that seems like the way to madness.

The kids taking advantage of 18 cheat keys aren’t going for subtle and the current plague of cheating that is exasperating many players, including me, isn’t coming from a situation where it’s just a matter of randos using cheats to be 5-10% better than before.

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20

:warning: DONT POST HOW YOU DETECT CHEATING HERE :warning:

Please read to the bottom.

It’s incredible how few people actually get this point, thanks for pointing it out.

Cheats are designed (Darwin’d) to the point where they’re not obvious - customers of other cheats run out fast.

… SNIP … Removed actual advice I was about to put.

…And another way is they SEND SOME DUDE LIKE YOU TO THE FORUM TO ASK:

“IR NEW PLZ U R HELP MEH: How do you actually tell if someone is cheating?”

Come on dude, fess-up.

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