Mental Health Warning

Competitive Discussion
1

I’ve posted before a couple seasons ago about the horrible state of cheating and unfortunately it’s only gotten worse. I scrubbed my previous post because it felt pointless and since there were “Changes” coming I was hoping for better games ahead. Cheating has hit a breaking point. No matter how many people you get banned there’s always going to be accounts you can buy online that are comp ready and some people are buying hundreds of accounts to continue cheating before you can even get a queue into your next game.

If you’re someone who actually and enjoys the game and doesn’t cheat. I ask you to think about if this game is even worth the hit to mental health you will inevitably take if you actually think you’re going to be playing a competitive game.

I think Blizzard has a social and moral obligation to clean the game up not superficially but actually. Blizzard is absolutely complicit in this presumably because if the people cheating weren’t playing the game there wouldn’t be enough money to run the service.

I’ve uninstalled the game until I hear something is actually going to be done about this. 10 avoid slots isn’t even going to scratch the surface of the severity of this problem. If you’re looking for a fun competitive fair game this is anything but any of those things.

EVERY Single time I open the game I get one, two or three messages the people I reported got banned. Those are just the ones the blizzard actually caught red handed, nothing to say of the fact every one of those accounts bought a new comp ready account within minutes of being banned and were playing again, it sends the message that with cheating and lack of consequences comes toxicity and so you have the worst mannered people you will ever meet and blizzard knows this and matches you against them.

Blizzard owes it to its customers to protect them from this behavior.

The reason I believe Blizzard has this obligation is because they’re in charge of match making, they’re in charge of actioning accounts, so they have a responsibility to protect people from bad actors.

Putting yourself in that situation where you paid for a game and you have certain expectations of the experience you’re getting and you open it and you may not realize because of all the flashing lights and fancy prizes that blizzard is willfully exposing you to people trying to ruin your game and your day all the while creating the perception that they’re doing something about it when they could but don’t.

And to be clear automated ban on an already sold account just for the person to be able to log on a new account before you can even finish your next game and who knows, you could play them again in your very next match ! Matchmaking doesn’t factor in the age of your account so even if you have a highly experienced account you’re still guaranteed to end up in a game with someone with as new of an account possible ready to cheat, grief and troll in infinite supply.

No one’s talking about how Blizzard with its Social and moral obligations to protect people from toxic behavior, isn’t actually doing anything to fix the problem, only bandaids.

That’s not all. If you actually have a real account then even saying ANYTHING GAMEPLAY RELATED in ANY CONTEXT that “OFFENDS” “ANYBODY”(Majority bad actors/cheaters at this point) regardless of the cheaters or reportees previous account history, account age, propensity for previous false reporting, whether the IP their playing at is known for cheating is a chat bannable offense match. EVERYONE should know puts you at risk from being banned at the whims of these people who besides everything else are manipulating the reporting system with no consequences.
How many people feel there’s almost absolutely no point in coordinating or suggesting anything when it could get your own account actioned?

If you paid and or play the game as it’s meant to be played and on your main account, no matter WHAT you EVER try to do in ANY overwatch game you are ALWAYS going to be at multiple DISADVANTAGES that only LEGITIMATE players will have.

That makes it a game FOR cheaters BY cheaters. Cheaters of your time and cheaters of your money for presenting something competitive and fun and you’re up against the unfun and unfair no matter what at multiple times over at just about every opportunity.

Nothing about any of these situations are fair to people who paid for one thing and got another. And It’s only ever getting worse no matter how much Blizzard tells us they’re doing or what changes they’re going to make.

You’d think they would do like other games and hardware ban people who are disrupting the service (cheating/griefing). But rather the opposite is allowed through blizzards own system. Blizzard COULD keep the same people from making new accounts using hardware bans but they WONT because if someone like Microsoft saw the majority of accounts created were made specifically for the purposes of cheating and griefing, only a very very very small subset of actual players would account for the accounts created and active players metric and overwatch would look way less valuable.

Don’t give Activision-Blizzard a DIME until they fix this stuff. No flashy skin or fleeting moments of competitiveness is worth the crap.

I haven’t bought anything from Blizzard since 2018 and it looks like we’re going to be still going strong till 2030 at this rate.

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Those messages u get dont mean anything, they dont mean someone got banned, theyre just saying thanks for reporting. Im 100% sure nothing is actualy done, ive reported people for racist slurs, got a message, and ran into them again that same day saying the same trash.

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I mean look at PUB:G, they publicly ban 100,000+ cheaters EVERY SINGLE WEEK.

Just proves how scummy the human race is. How dishonourable and low most people are to need to cheat at video games.

I blame the lack of decent parenting causing this generation of entitled children that were never disciplined properly.

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Your frustrations are entirely justified, and it’s clear that the ongoing issues with cheating in Overwatch are affecting not just the gameplay experience but the community’s trust in Blizzard’s ability to manage and enforce fair play. The cycle of banning and quick account replacement undermines the spirit of competition and can be extremely disheartening for players who are invested in the game.

The idea of hardware bans, which you mentioned, is indeed a stricter enforcement method that could potentially reduce the recurrence of cheating by making it more difficult for banned players to simply return to the game with a new account. It’s a method used by some other platforms with varying degrees of success, and it might be something Blizzard could consider to show a stronger stance against cheaters.

Here are a few strategies you could consider advocating for, alongside other community members, to push for more effective solutions:

  1. Community Action: Banding together with other players through forums, social media, and Blizzard’s own feedback channels can amplify your collective voice. A unified stance from a large group of players can sometimes lead to more substantial discussions and changes.
  2. Persistent Feedback: Continuously providing feedback on Blizzard’s official channels about the cheating issue, suggesting specific changes like hardware bans or improved matchmaking filters, can keep the issue on their radar and underline the community’s seriousness about the need for action.
  3. Supporting Positive Change: If Blizzard introduces new measures or updates to combat cheating, actively participating in and promoting these can help refine these solutions and show Blizzard what works from the player’s perspective.
  4. Exploring Alternatives: While you’ve already taken a significant step by not financially supporting Blizzard, considering other games or even temporary breaks from Overwatch might be necessary if the situation doesn’t improve. This can also signal to Blizzard the potential loss of dedicated players due to ongoing issues.

Your decision to not purchase further products from Blizzard until there is a meaningful change is a powerful statement about consumer expectations and corporate responsibility. It’s crucial that game developers listen to their communities and implement effective solutions to maintain trust and ensure a fair, enjoyable gaming environment.

This is what Chatgpt thinks.

5

Kind of the way things are goin now, in our country.
It ok to cheat to win…sporting events, video games…elections.
“We dont care as long as we win” attitude.

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You can’t really deal with cheating unless you’re willing to a) spend the money and time to be constantly working on ways to disrupt any kind of cheat and b) you’re willing to lose a significant chunk of the playerbase as that chunk would not play unless they could cheat since they would lose more often than they win and as we know, nobody likes to lose in a competitive game.

The sad reality is that Blizzard is now just another studio inside of Xbox at Microsoft and right now the priority for the Xbox leadership is to make sure the 69 billion that were spent on the burning pile of trash (save for maybe some of the artists and some of the engineers) that was Activision Blizzard can be recouped in a reasonable amount of time. At the moment Call of Duty and Overwatch are riddled with cheaters just like any other multiplayer game because cheats have become so accessible that anyone can and, as is human nature, they are be inclined to use them just to “keep up” with the cheating epidemic.

Soooo…there are two main options for you as a player. Either accept that cheating is ruining the integrity of competitive games and play to the best of your ability and improve your skills while reporting anything suspicious. The second option is to simply play more rarely or not at all and just spend your precious, non-renewable resource called time into other forms of entertainment. There are countless of single player and co op games, many of which are cheaper and give you greater satisfaction and, I promise you, the more you’ll play those kinds of games the less you’ll want to deal with the stupid monetization practices in live service multiplayer games and the cheaters and sweaty 24/7 streamers who are grinding for their illusory grand pro career.

On the not spending money side of things I commend you for your discipline, hope you can keep that up and be an example for others to follow. Truth is that these companies have taken you and I into account when calculating how much they’d earn and there are players out there that will more than compensate for you and me not spending money for having our time wasted with this trash experience offered by the freemium game model. Frankly speaking there are just too many players for which this model is so effective and too few that value their time and don’t want to be in the rat wheel producing engagement and dollars for scummy companies. But trust me when I say there were, are, and there always will be people who want to make actual games instead of item shops with a game…erm…casino…attached. Just need to specifically seek those communities that talk about real games, patient gamers who don’t want to play the latest and greatest AAAs (or AAAAs in the case of Ubisoft), gamers who think battle passes are lazy and predatory monetization, gamers who aren’t bamboozled by pretty graphics in games that ask you to go through arduous grind that is designed to make you want to skip it by spending more and more money on an experience that often leaves too much to be desired.

TLDR: It’s fine, just do something else with your time. Single player or co-op games, other forms of entertainment, go play a real life sport, read some good books, etc… It’s not worth boiling your blood for the simple fact that a lot of people are scum. Play Overwatch or similar games less and less often and you’ll be better off as a result. Take care!

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cheating is out of hand. I really do not understand how they allowing this to happen. Like 60% games are with 1-2 cheats, lately even full groups of 5 people aimbotting in team.

Such a trash experience.

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It’s a big issue and I’m under the impression this game is not bringing in profits for Blizzard at this point (hence developers being paid no bonus) which means they won’t allocate many additional resources for anti-cheat. The truth is that nothing can really be done because paid cheats run at the driver level, blizzard is generally a very competent company when it comes to this stuff (try reversing their games at the usermode and see for yourself), but if a cheat maker emulates their aiming software to appear like a normal player to the server-side there is nothing which can be done, and this is the current situation. Sure, some cheats are obvious and can be detected through analytics but the good ones will have gone through trial-and-error with enough bans to create workarounds. This is why it’s so important to actually report people, there’s no perfect way to auto-detect aim cheating without throwing false positives.

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It doesn’t mean they got banned but it does mean something happened. It could be a 5 minute comp suspension. So it doesn’t mean the consequence you think is just happened, no. When you get that message though, it does mean an action of some sort was taken.

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NGL didn’t fully read your entire post but… I think you just need to accept that for the mass market comp scene for games like this cheating is always going to be a thing. There’s no money on the line so they won’t invest money to fix it. This is a free to play game. Cheaters risk nothing to cheat. I agree I feel like half my games have ‘soft hack’ cheaters at the very least (cheats which will auto tap an ability in response to incoming damage or abilities, or pull your trigger for you if your cross hair hovers a crit box etc - if not straight up aim assist) but there’s literally nothing you can do about it without some kind of super privacy invasive way of snooping on peoples PC while OW is running to verify you aren’t cheating…

I kinda doubt beyond ‘common sense’ bot detection methods like detecting impossibly inhuman reaction time or detecting inhuman inputs which im sure most professional hacks wouldn’t do anyway you are hopeless to ‘detect’ cheating automatically. Everything would need human review and I bet most people would still get away with it even if you did that PLUS you’d introduce human error into bans the moment you tried.

I think the days of competitive integrity in ANY online games is long gone at this point. 100% chance that EVERY online game with more than 1k players will have professional grade hacks/cheats/tools for it. Just try to have fun and ignore the problems.

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As long as game tries to screw you over by giving you bad games, there are always people that will try to screw it back.

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internet video game boycotts :joy:

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Great post man, totally agree. What makes the “mental health” part even worse is that SOOO many people don’t know what modern cheating looks like. The best ones work very similar to aim assist on console where you control the mouse until it gets within a close radius of the player and then it loosely “magnetizes” to them, so it doesn’t hard lock onto them it soft locks, just like console, giving you a huge advantage but looking pretty natural (unless you know what to look for).

Here’s what I believe it will take for the community to take cheating seriously:
A major influencer is going to have to “expose” cheating by literally using a cheat and saying “this is what it looks like, this is how it works, here’s how you can tell who’s cheating,” basically educating the general public so that they are aware when people are cheating. If you observe, you can clearly see the moment the crosshair “magnetizes” or “pulls” onto the player, it’s especially obvious when it happens too quickly, for instance someone walks out from behind a wall and the crosshair instantly magnetizes to them beyond normal human reaction time. The problem is right now when you accuse someone of cheating, the general IQ’s all defend them “I saw his replay, he missed a shot so he’s not cheating,” or “if he was cheating he would have way more kills” or “if he’s cheating why is he in plat?” All very asinine statements. To give an example, a major streamer is on video headshotting an invisible sombra (the streamer was NOT aware a sombra was even in the match) and STILL some low IQ’s were defending him.

Right now we’re dealing with an uneducated public and big businesses who don’t want to ban all the cheaters because they would lose player counts. I’m not confident it will ever change, it may come to be that you just have to start cheating to really compete at the top tiers, because I can tell you almost every major DPS streamer I have seen is definitely cheating, EXCEPT for the ones who play in the Overwatch League, which never looks suspicious even for a moment.

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Its the entire premise of Capitalism.

Capitalize on targets weakness. No limits.

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This is the wrong mentality to have, seriously. If the developer refuses to go to war against the cheaters, we need to put our foot down and hurt them where it hurts the most aka the wallet.

Starting from the previous season, i’m not buying any more battle passes nor skins ever again, until they do something about their non existing anti cheat.

When a large portion of the community does the same, that is the same as sending Blizzard a message, letting them know that enough is enough.

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The report was for a different player maybe?

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It’s well documented at this point that the report system is fully automated. It doesn’t matter whether a report is false or not, the only thing that matters is how fast the reports come in.

This is what Blizz means when they talk about their protections against false reporting. Because they only ban based on the rare of incoming reports, rather than veracity or total number, everyone has a certain leeway for getting reported.

Of course this fails to account for coordinated mass reporting, such as the kind committed by anti fan communities against streamers or even just certain heroes.

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Since you “know” a lot of people are cheating, could you show us some games where you found these cheaters?

Thx a lot!

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This one right here, Blizzard. ^^^^ Interesting post history!!! Does being a full time cheater apologist pay a lot or is it more of like a hobby for you? 400 posts all about pretty much the very same thing. Very dedicated. Is there some sort of badge or achievement you can get for that?

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Hehe, the cheat developers do want to know what makes their cheats look like cheats, so they can improve their product. It’s common sense they would want to see any kind of feedback on how easy to hide their cheats are.

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