Does the report SC2 system do anything?

So in case of map hacks, mmr abuse (killing his own base), or other type of cheating. If you report players does it do anything?
or it is just a waste of time?

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There are definitely extremely toxic accounts that are surely getting mass reported that stick around for a long time, so it seems like the reports are useless. However, on a rare occasion Iā€™ve seen accounts that were temporarily chat muted, indicated by a red x, so maybe if enough reports at least about abusive chat are issued they face an extremely light tap on the wrist ā€¦ probably fully automated.

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Hahaha donā€™t you know? It does literally nothing. Game is infested with cheaters, it was proven on reddit recently. There are still cheats. Nothing blizzard can do stop em. They sell it like for 600$/year or something and make a lot of money. If blizzard changes somethings, they just update their hacks. But i doubt you will encounter many of them on your mmr. They should get anti-cheat like in cs go, which runs all the time to block, hacksā€¦ But blizzard is incompetent and now game is dead so they donā€™t careā€¦ Luckily hacks are expensive, or private, so that many people doesnā€™t use them, but i run to couple in yearsā€¦

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The thing to understand here is that Bliz requires internal evidence of a behavior in order to act on it.

In WoW for example, there is a myriad of character tracking metrics. Where they are, what they kill, what they loot, what items they destroy/trade/sell, what they said, etc, etc.

However, SC2 doesnā€™t have such an intensive tracking system.

Chat is tracked (across all of Battlenet), so reporting inappropriate communication is effective.

Use of cheating/hacking apps is monitored by Warden so reporting isnā€™t necessarily needed for that. However, Warden is like an antivirus engine: it can only detect what it knows about. And since new cheats/hacks are always coming out, it will always be lagging behind to some degree. For anything that Warden canā€™t detect, Iā€™m not sure how Bliz handles those reports.

As for anything that is more just bad behavior, their isnā€™t much that tracks that. So things like team killing, quitting to lower MMR, afking, etc isnā€™t something they can definitively act on. For example, if someone was reported for team killing, thereā€™s nothing tracked on the internal end for Bliz to use. Granted replays exist so itā€™s possible that a link to the replay could help in the report, but I donā€™t if they accept it as evidence due to it being an exterior source.

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Iā€™m surprised to hear that chat is tracked.

Iā€™ve never used it. I just use block system.

You donā€™t want to see a bunch of people who work in red-light district ,breaking into your game. So, itā€™s necessary.

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In other words it does absolutely nothing, cheaters were rampant since WoL. Like in other gamesā€¦ Especially when you rank up to top masters and gm, than you will play against some scumā€¦ There was player 14 rank in gm with auto injectsā€¦ And vindicta was maphacking and he wasnā€™t even banned from WCS!!!

More problem is reporting, people report, or post evidence on reddit. But it took blizzard like 8-9 years to even ban PureLegacy. They just donā€™t give sh1tā€¦

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When comes to cheating/hacking reports (outside of what Warden can detect) Iā€™m just saying that I donā€™t know what Bliz does.

If they didnā€™t care at all, the creation and maintenance of Warden wouldnā€™t exist. Itā€™s just limited on what it can detect (like an antiviruse engine). Could more be done? I donā€™t know whatā€™s involved in detection on the back end.

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The moment you believe your system is 100% secure and unable to be cracked is the moment you failed at SecOps. There will always be hacks for literally any game, as long as there is a market for it to sell it in. There will also always be a team working to defeat them. The battle is never ending. Try to understand that.

There are people who plug the holes and there are people who work to find new holes. 365 x 24 x 7, it is a never ending battle.

Waste of time. Been reporting bad behaviour and cheating for years and none of those accounts have yet to be touched.

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Ahā€¦Mars and South America have recently been at war again. Whatever, let me enjoy my Starcraft 2 10th Anniversary Celebration. Stay safe, dude.

Interesting insight. :slightly_smiling_face:

If you could ask them, it would answer to a community frequently asked question. The key point being that reports should be used to spot hacks undetected by Warden obviously.

If you have their ear, maybe them giving some sort of notification to the sender of the report could also help (specially regarding hacking), as we then donā€™t have a way to know if the report was considered, approved, or just dismissed.

I had the disappointment to meet again, today, the very same hacker that I once reported. And this time it was completely obvious he was hacking (he blind placed a bunker on his natā€¦ WITHOUT expanding, and with no scout whatsoever, against a proxy 2 rax, which I donā€™t usually do, and while i hadnā€™t met him in at least 2 months) ; and then kept intercepting units along the map). He was also a first seconds trashtalker, and a smurf. I reported him once again, but I was quite disappointed to see him seemingly unaffected. :confused:

Or maybe the previous evidence provided was convincing enough ? Or maybe they didnā€™t have the time to process it ? Maybe he was banned and created another account under another IP ? I reported him quite a long time ago after all, so thatā€™s possible. If they did send small notifications in that case, I wouldnā€™t be questioning myself about it. :bulb:

EDIT :
thinking about it once again :thinking:

  • The replay I did send the previous time was downloaded, so they DID take a look at it
  • The hacker has 4.5K games on his account, so he wasnā€™t banned. Maybe he had a temporary ban though, but as he played every season, if that was the case it was short.

Chat is the first thing tracked, many years ago it was said that some terrorists were using the wow chat to avoid police, so they started tracking every thing on the chats.

The hacks team is a very secretive bunch due to them wanting to keep their methods out of the publicā€™s hands where it could be used against Bliz and the players. In short, I donā€™t have a communication line to them.

Overwatch has had something similar for a while and it just was implemented in WoW. So itā€™s possible that it will make its way to SC2 too.

When it comes to player reports of hacking (not detection by Warden), something that sets hacking apart from other reports like chat violations is that hacking punishments are handed out in periodic waves (ban waves, as they are sometimes called). Whereas chat violations are processed more on a case by case basis.

The purpose of waiting for periodic ban waves is a bit complex but it boils down to Bliz wants to study the hack, see how it works, and determine how to break it en masse before handing out the bans. This is done to prevent tipping off the hack creators. If Bliz simply banned whack-a-mole style, the hack creators would keep making small changes to avoid detection, thus the hack would never be eliminated. Banning in waves is a like a surprise attack that wipes out the hack altogether, forcing the creators to start from scratch.

So the moral of the story is, when it comes to hacks/cheaters, the reason they seem to hang around for longer than they should is because they are unwittingly helping Bliz to stamp out the hack, and get banned when the process is completed as a bonus.

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