100%
I’m more shocked you think the other way enough to even type that out. That’s how sure I am. Do you know how much cheats cost? Me neither, but I know the “better” the more they are paying. So 10 or 15 isn’t much. You just push out the real players who play casually who don’t want to pay the 15 because they play 3 times a week.
Like it is adding a “barrier” but it’s not a barrier, it’s just a slight incline.
Much like the phone system we have now. It’s a type of blockage ,it’s just not enough. And putting them together, again, pushes away the less than dedicated.
And if you forgot, cheaters tend to be pretty dedicated. At least the ones you are targeting with this, the repeat offenders.
I mean if you can’t afford to pay $15 one time for a video game, even one that you only play thrice a week, you shouldn’t really expect a good experience anyways.
And the worse ones are free (I’m assuming). So, the paywall at least gets rid of some (probably I’d even say the majority) of the cheaters. My guess is that most people use free cheats, and some people pay.
I’m not saying all cheaters won’t pay $15^10000 extra to cheat in the mode where rank matters more, I’m just saying it weeds out a lot of them.
I played CS back before it had prime, and I play it now after prime was implemented, and believe me, prime is MUCH better.
The game is cooked. The community is what it is and no amount of money will fix it.
This is something that needed to be implemented back in season 5 of the base game once we had issues a decade ago.
Now the game is just stuck with the community and nothing will change that because the game has pushed away the people we actually want playing the game.
When the game wasn’t F2P there were substantially less cheaters than today. This is coming from someone who was Diamond Season 1 of OW. Modern OW is infested with cheaters. We needed hardware bans yesterday and we do in fact need some barrier to play ranked based on a purchase. My philosophy is that if your account has made any purchase above 10$ in the last year its eligible for ranked. This way you still get value without needing to just pay for ranked and preventing cheaters from just buying old accounts too. Cheats are cheap or free. Phone numbers are cheap or free. Having some monetary barrier only helps actual OW players and will deter cheaters. IDK why you’re against this?
The big deal with Hardware ID bans really is, the 3rd party computer market is rich in trade. So it would be a really bad deal if a board, GPU or CPU someone bought off of craigslist was “hot” and turns out to be a banned board.
I could see someone selling a board at 50% off after their board was banned. And it turning into a total mess. I could even see companies like nvidia, Asrock or Asus suing gaming companies over that. So yeah, not a good idea.
Best course of action that we could even remotely come up with is hardware “gamepass”.
Basically a device you would have to buy from a retail store that requires photo ID and it plugs into a USB slot or a PCI slot in the PC and become a hardware pass for people to use.
If it was a thing, people would have to buy it and multiple game companies would have to universally accept this.
I got to thinking on this, that a person would have to use a shatter type acrylic around the chips, so that way if someone tried to drill it or open it. It would have to bust the chips. That way the encoded security key imprinted in the chip couldn’t be attacked with an SEM. and maybe even a person plugging it into a linux pc couldn’t easily reverse engineer it…
IDK. its probably a stupid idea of mine. but who knows. We are moving forward into the future where things like Flock Cameras exist, and totalitarianism is becoming a thing because people cheat the system too much.
Thats fine. As long as the game keeps matching me up only with people in that paying pool as much as possible.
Welp, that means they arent as serious about the game as me then, arent they? “B-but muh food”, ah shut up! This is a one time fee about having a prime like thing on OW, where OP proposed around $15 like on CS, and I dont even care if it gets bumped up to $20. This prime fee has nothing to do with your irl spending habits and priorities, so figure those out first before dropping money on this.
For competitive, I’m in favor of a Prime system based on KYC (ID verification & validation, one account), like in real sports. There’s real consequences for not acting civil and not showing sportsmanship in these activities when playing competitively, and you really cannot “boost” or “smurf” in these without risking to be actually perma’d
I think people will think twice before being ultra toxic, cheating, or breaking TOS in general with these systems in place, and as a result, relations between players will naturally improve over time, and perhaps this will set a standard to be followed by other games.
It’s a good idea but Blizzard would find hard to implement it. Imagine having to take into account every different type of ID each country has and also the different ways to validate each one, it would take a lot of responsability (and some resources).
I really think that this is very important for every on-line space so that people can be identified if they commit something crimminal like endangering minors. However, unless required by law, I don’t think any company would go down that route.
There wouldn’t be a market for buying accounts which are already levelled up or which have had the 50 games played to let you go straight to comp or whatever if payment was a barrier. There is a big market for those.
Consider how much people pay for a single skin then ask yourself if you really think they wouldn’t pay for the game again if they wanted to play it. You’re barking up the wrong tree there.
It also wouldn’t be allowed in every country so people would get around it easily.
That’s my thought. People buy existing/stolen accounts. They did that already in OW1 to bypass the requirements to enter comp. Again, how much is this premium even supposed to be? And when games start charging for things like that, they’re going to increase the price over time until it costs the same as a full game on Steam.
We as players shouldn’t have to pay just to have good games, rather than the game itself making it fair.
I’d be 100% behind the prime thing as free to play just brings out the worst in people, like why would they care when they didn’t have to pay a penny, don’t even buy battlepasses and have no attachments to the accounts they use.
This argument has already been addressed. Yes… people will always find ways to cheat, troll, or grief—and there will always be a market for it. This is obvious. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t implement/improve anti-cheat measures. That’s like saying we shouldn’t have laws because people still commit crimes anyway.
Again (for the third or fourth time in this thread): the point of systems like Prime and HWID bans isn’t to stop bad actors entirely—it’s to reduce them. And yes, these systems do help reduce them. Both have a solid track record in the industry (CS and Valorant being major examples). They’re not flawless (no system is), but they are effective at improving match quality—something Overwatch desperately needs.
People can debate the trade-offs, and that’s fair. But dismissing these systems with “people will still cheat anyway” is just silly.
You can never get rid of cheaters fully. Deterring them is the best we can do. Unfortunately a monetary deterrent is the course of action that has been effective in other games. Including OW1 which had a much smaller cheating population.
Also Blizzard lowkey just did a ban wave and didn’t announce it. There was a sudden influx of “I just got banned for cheating?!?!?!” posts on the forums the past few days. I’ve also noticed less cheaters in my matches.
The question about how much still hasn’t been answered. Because anything under 15 is spare change for people who pay 100s for cheats and bought accounts.
Edit: I just think paying is an excuse for companies not to fix problems. “People will pay so we don’t have to make improvements”.
A) If you’d know how many unfair and random bans exist in this game, you’d never suggest that. And it is also not hard to bypass if a person really wants to cheat.
B) Q times are already long enough and online is already really low to consider such options, it won’t work.
C) Makes more harm than value, check A, ez to bypass.
Actual solution: Stop outsourcing your support into cheap employee hands from India and rework it from ChatGPT responses to actual human resources. Implement in-game patrol like it was in CS named Overwatch, where trustworthy and experienced players can watch potential cheaters and make conclusions based on theri experience and number of matching desisions (GM/top500 players only). Implement a worthy reward system for spending time patrolling.
Soon there will be AI trackers that will scan your in-game performance, considering your base skill, delta, understanding the difference between human input and else, making your gaming “portrait” or call it “footprint” This will be an actual solution but expensive af.
But you know why all of this will never happen? Because GreedIsGood is a native cheat code from Warcraft. But in those days they’ve been making games, not gaming shops.
They also only have 1 account and it requires ID verification.