Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks

@wolfmanbush

You want some videos of cheaters? I got 2 from just a few days ago and you can watch through them to tell me how im wrong about them cheating? You want some screenshots of conversations of people who are in cheating discords and how they tell me people very rarely get banned for cheating?

What sort of evidence do you want? You are basing your whole thing on just what you have seen in game, and are completely oblivious to the fact not everyone might be as lucky as you?

And sure, cheaters are not in any way a majority of players. But the fact still stands its incredibly easy to cheat on this game and its incredibly tedious to get cheaters reported. That is the biggest issue.

1. Easier system to report cheaters
2. Better tools for Rare to spectate possible cheaters out there
3. Better client side anticheat that detects when someone is messing with the game with an external program.

These are not a lot to ask for in a pvp game in 2022. But go ahead and keep on defending the lack of said features and the difficulty us, the players who actually play legit, have to go through to even report someone blatantly aimbotting in the game.

@wolfmanbush I do report the cheaters, but again, why is it my job to weed out cheaters out of the game? Why is it up to me to write a lengthy report and record long gameplay videos and take time to upload them, and take note of any possible timestamps for rare support? Its an incredibly tedious system just to report a cheater.

@pumpa-cat

we do report them. It is still laugable that we have to go through and do all that I said above because there is no proper client side anticheat to do the job.

Instead us, the players, are forced to do it? Is that a good system?

Why is there no report feature ingame? Why is there no way for rare to spectate potential cheaters, instead we have to record lenghty videos and provide proper evidence? Should it not be the anticheat that does this? Should it not be the security team that is able to overwatch cheaters gameplay?

No, its us the players who are paying to play the game that need to do the work. I find this laughable.

@pumpa-cat

Also, please tell me how I am supposed to get a "video evidence" of a cheater who keeps aimbotting me out of nameplate render distance? They can also hide their names from recent players. Any advice is welcome :)

@i-jusa-i said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

@pumpa-cat

Also, please tell me how I am supposed to get a "video evidence" of a cheater who keeps aimbotting me out of nameplate render distance? They can also hide their names from recent players. Any advice is welcome :)

In on demand pvp? The server matched you. Time stamps from your recording (30 sec xbox quick recording)

In your report, state what happened. You couldn't get name plate.

They can get that player's info even if in streamer mode.

I think that one step rare could take would be not allowing people to just make infinite accounts per 1 copy of the game.

I do get that it would be a dealbreaker for some people who enjoy doing certain challenges on alts, but it is very much needed to lower the amount of cheaters.
If people have to buy new copy of the game every time they get banned they would think twice before doing it. Add vac bans on their steam accounts.

What is the point in reporting a throwaway alt if they can just make a new one?

I understand that people refute the amount of cheating in the game. I really do. @WolfManbush is coming from an excellent standpoint of, "If it is so widespread, how come we don't see more blatant evidence of it through all the hours playing and all the many more hours being streamed?". That is a logical and fair standpoint.
The only logical and fair counters I have for that are:
The use and results of the most common cheats are not blatantly evident - especially when used by people clever enough to prevent it from being obvious.
And how much is too much? How much is widespread? There are a lot of regions and a lot of players on a lot of servers. It is possible to not see blatant cheats so often, even if they are still beyond a (subjectively) tolerable frequency.

Not being someone that uses cheats, and not having definitive proof of how often I have or have not encountered them, I can't really take a full stand on either side on just how widespread the use of these cheats are.

I have seen and do know a good deal about certain aspects of it. DISCLAIMER - I have never ever used any such thing nor played with people that use them. I have, however, run into some of the nastiest of players that have revealed things they use and have had acquaintances (friends of friends) reveal a great deal.
Hell, I don't even use most any exploits in my entire SoT journey (been playing since the beta). The only exploits I've ever used are the sword lunge holding block, and I use to use the fast shovel dig, on occasion. I don't like any of the other exploits and have refused to learn them, or use them.

Here is the thing that sways my generally skeptical mind on how prevalent certain cheats are within the playerbase of this game:
Look at how widespread certain exploits become among the playerbase. Every longtime player has seen the pattern. You encounter/befriend a few people that find/learn certain exploits. They slowly pass on to more people using them. They become the meta among the sweatiest of players. It grows beyond and outside the sweatiest of the playerbase, and eventually reach non-sweaty players, because those exploits have reached that extent of awareness and usage.
As time goes on, more and more players get accustomed to using exploits, ranging from animation cancelling, to ALTF4 tactics, to glitching through walls, to black screening, to many other things I'm not going to mention. Each and every one of them becomes an exploit used in the meta.
As time goes on, more and more people learn about the cheats available to players. As time goes on, more and more of these players succumb to the temptation.
That only seems natural to me, even though I avoid it and detest it. Humans, in general, are not known to hold to integrity over immoral advantages, haha. Gamers are certainly not a higher standard on that front, in my honest assessment (whether they are worse, I'll leave for dedicated case studies, hehehe).

The problems with alt accounts, using free, and/or paid for, cheats easy to find online, seems to be a nasty issue to me. I don't even like talking about it publicly, because for every person here that will dispute it, and every person here that doesn't believe it, or has not learned about it, there has to be some players that will read all of this and decide to go try them for themselves. And now I want to delete all of this, lol.

Anyway, I also understand how terribly people have very, very wrongfully accused legitimate players of cheating. It's been a running joke since the beginning of this game (and in other games long before this one).

Maybe the cheating is not as widespread as some cheaters have claimed it is in private to other people. Maybe the numbers on the cheats websites are inaccurate or not representative of how popular they truly are.
Maybe it's not a problem.
Or maybe it is more widespread than we realize. And maybe more people are using them discreetly, and if we knew the truth of it, we might all be horribly surprised.

Or maybe we're just looking at blurry photos of bigfoot.

I don't know. regardless, just try and enjoy yourselves out there (without cheating). And hope you don't encounter the worst of the worst too often.

Although, I am curious. I've heard bad things about the frequency of cheats used in the Oceanic Regions. I can't confirm whether that is or isn't true though. And I do loathe to spread rumors. I'm just curious if anyone here has personal experience on those servers. And I wonder how much that may play into personal experiences and anecdotal evidence.

And if you read all of this (what a waste of time!), tell me your favorite tall tale. And your favorite animal. And whether you agree that Dark Side of the Moon is a master piece. :D

Fair seas!

Hacks/mods are an issue but, when it comes to aimbotting, that is hard to prove. There are some REALLY good players in the game with incredible aim who know all the tricks and tactics to hit their shots consistently.

We've all seen vids of blatant hackers/modders though. From ESP to teleports and FOV mods. How quickly they get identified by the Azure Anti-cheat and dealt with is unknown though and that creates a certain skepticism of the system within the community.

We do still need better reporting tools though. The support part of the site has been inadequate for far too long, with some folks unable to even access it.

Being able to create multiple accounts on the same purchase of the game (and how easy it is to get Game Pass) is the real problem, I think. That's something that Rare needs to work with Microsoft on sorting out.

@electricknights said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

And if you read all of this (what a waste of time!), tell me your favorite tall tale. And your favorite animal. And whether you agree that Dark Side of the Moon is a master piece. :D

Tall Tale: Stars of a Thief
Animal: Dog or Wolf
Dark Side of the Moon is pretty great, definitely up there in terms of masterpieces.

@wolfmanbush said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

Whatever cheating you are seeing or hearing about I'm not seeing show up in streams or the servers I am on.

It almost seems like there are two different issues at play here. People who get killed in game and have no idea how and then come to the forums to claim hacks. I think you are perfectly right to take those claims with a grain of salt. However, as we see in this thread, you also have many longtime forum members who are in good standing saying how they have had cheats demonstrated to them. You can't just dismiss these claims so easily and say "it's all anecdotal." Your experience (as quoted above) is just as valid, but also just as anecdotal.

I've mentioned before I played with a certain crewmate for a while and one day they told the rest of us they were using ESP. We had no idea until that moment they were cheating. They demonstrated how it worked, told us what it could do, mentioned how easy it was to toggle on and off, etc. How do we report that? Submit a ticket and say "such and such a person told me so?" There's no way for me to even record evidence because, as I play on XBox, any conversation in party chat (where this revelation occurred) isn't included when game footage is captured by the system. Maybe there's a setting somewhere that will include party chat coms, but if so I don't know where it is. All we could do was to immediately stop playing with that individual.

The fact is that cheating exists in this game. Perhaps not in the numbers claimed by those who mysteriously died and assume hacks. But it's also more prevalent than many assume. You don't see it demonstrated on the streams you watch? You mean some namer isn't willingly going on a stream to demonstrate their ESP or speed hack? Go figure.

Streamers who are in the know talk about it within the confines that their partnerships allow. One partnered streamer recently mentioned the hold up for a more robust anti-cheat isn't from Rare's side; it's from Microsoft's. I can't claim to know whether that's accurate or not. I'm just passing on what they told their chat when chat was moaning that Rare wasn't doing enough. But what this partnered streamer didn't do was downplay the level of cheating in this game. It's well known among the community that it's a very real issue.

Just my two doubloons.

@wolfmanbush said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

@tangus-00 said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

The fact is that cheating exists in this game. Perhaps not in the numbers claimed by those who mysteriously died and assume hacks. But it's also more prevalent than many assume. You don't see it demonstrated on the streams you watch? You mean some namer isn't willingly going on a stream to demonstrate their ESP or speed hack? Go figure.

based on what to the bold?

Based on the firsthand accounts of many longtime members on this forum who remain in good standing and have had cheats demonstrated to them, based on the comments of partnered streamers who acknowledge the prevalence of cheating that they aren't at liberty to discuss in depth on stream, based on the (apparent) widespread availability of said cheats, based on the the testimony of people who have been banned for cheating and have since "reformed" and have openly discussed its prevalence, based on the myriad of YouTube videos that exist that are sometimes created by victims and other times created by people trying to drum up business, based on my thousands of hours of organic higher risk gameplay against pvpers, etc. etc. etc.

...a large majority of encounters are in no way suspicious and much of what is considered to be suspicious could just as easily be server error, which is very common in combat with other players.

Of course. And I'm not sure why you think people are suggesting otherwise. When people claim cheating is widespread it doesn't mean every fight is necessarily tainted. However, if someone is using ESP then, technically speaking, every fight is tainted, it just might not make a practical difference during combat. So of course the majority of encounters won't look suspicious. Does it logically follow that cheating is not more widespread than some realize? Nope.

Consider the server list cheat/exploit/whatever you want to call it that Rare quietly fixed. I'd consider that cheating. Others might only consider it an exploit. Others might call it legit. If you call it cheating it would never show up during a fight. But many people apparently had access to those server lists. Hence, being more widespread than people realize while the majority of the community was blissfully ignorant because they were unaffected. I would never have known about it either if (multiple) partnered streamers didn't discuss it when they ran into it (on stream, I might add).

I could say "oh this must be other players causing this with a cheat" but there is no reason to think that, there is nothing to support that.

Again, confusing the issue of 'randoms showing up and claiming they mysteriously died so it must have been hacks' with valuable, longstanding members of the community (as well as partnered streamers) sharing their personal experiences where cheats were demonstrated to them. The former is circumstantial. The latter is direct.

@wolfmanbush said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

I'm curious why people are involved with these cheats being demonstrated to them?

I've played over 13,000 hours and have literally had zero encounters where people demonstrated cheats to me or talked about how they were cheating directly to me.

I think that people go looking for something to confirm what they want to believe when it comes to things like accusing entire groups of people of something like cheating.

Ahh, so now we've moved on to questioning the motivation and veracity of those who experience this. Got it.

All I can tell you is that I personally have no dog in this fight. As my posts above demonstrate, I'm not running around yelling the sky is falling and claiming a cheater is around every corner. Yet, as I said, I've had someone tell me (and the rest of my crew) all about their ESP. Without us prompting them. Literally out of the blue. Without hinting to them we were suspicious of their behavior. Without "looking for something to confirm what [we] want to believe." It was freely volunteered with no forewarning or prompting.

I've talked to many people on the forums, I've met thousands of random people between solo encounters and open crew. Literally none of them talked about cheating or showed me anything about cheats.

My best friend was never offered drugs in school. I guess they didn't exist.

I think we're done here. I'll give you the last word, but I don't think there's much more discourse to be had between the two of us at this point.

@wolfmanbush said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

@tangus-00 said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

@wolfmanbush said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

@tangus-00 said in Dont want to be a downer but SoT is infested again with hacks:

The fact is that cheating exists in this game. Perhaps not in the numbers claimed by those who mysteriously died and assume hacks. But it's also more prevalent than many assume. You don't see it demonstrated on the streams you watch? You mean some namer isn't willingly going on a stream to demonstrate their ESP or speed hack? Go figure.

based on what to the bold?

Based on the firsthand accounts of many longtime members on this forum who remain in good standing and have had cheats demonstrated to them, based on the comments of partnered streamers who acknowledge the prevalence of cheating that they aren't at liberty to discuss in depth on stream, based on the (apparent) widespread availability of said cheats, based on the the testimony of people who have been banned for cheating and have since "reformed" and have openly discussed its prevalence, based on the myriad of YouTube videos that exist that are sometimes created by victims and other times created by people trying to drum up business, based on my thousands of hours of organic higher risk gameplay against pvpers, etc. etc. etc.

...a large majority of encounters are in no way suspicious and much of what is considered to be suspicious could just as easily be server error, which is very common in combat with other players.

Of course. And I'm not sure why you think people are suggesting otherwise. When people claim cheating is widespread it doesn't mean every fight is necessarily tainted. However, if someone is using ESP then, technically speaking, every fight is tainted, it just might not make a practical difference during combat. So of course the majority of encounters won't look suspicious. Does it logically follow that cheating is not more widespread than some realize? Nope.

Consider the server list cheat/exploit/whatever you want to call it that Rare quietly fixed. I'd consider that cheating. Others might only consider it an exploit. Others might call it legit. If you call it cheating it would never show up during a fight. But many people apparently had access to those server lists. Hence, being more widespread than people realize while the majority of the community was blissfully ignorant because they were unaffected. I would never have known about it either if (multiple) partnered streamers didn't discuss it when they ran into it (on stream, I might add).

I could say "oh this must be other players causing this with a cheat" but there is no reason to think that, there is nothing to support that.

Again, confusing the issue of 'randoms showing up and claiming they mysteriously died so it must have been hacks' with valuable, longstanding members of the community (as well as partnered streamers) sharing their personal experiences where cheats were demonstrated to them. The former is circumstantial. The latter is direct.

I'm curious why people are involved with these cheats being demonstrated to them?

I've played over 13,000 hours and have literally had zero encounters where people demonstrated cheats to me or talked about how they were cheating directly to me.

I think that people go looking for something to confirm what they want to believe when it comes to things like accusing entire groups of people of something like cheating.

See, this is where your stance is going off the rails. Everything is about your own anecdotal experiences, but you begin casting dispersions about other people's experiences.
Believe what you want to believe, but it is laughable, if not insulting, that you'd try to paint other people's experiences of obtaining information about this subject the way that you just did.
It is possible, no matter how experienced you may be, that you have remained (zero insult intended) ignorant to the use of these things. As a person of logic, you must be able to recognize this may be the case. So, I don't know why you would go so far as you have just done.

Human behavior can be rather predictable. When players (correct or not) believe they are going against other players using cheats, a portion of them will begin to use those cheats, themselves. It's the same mentality as using egregious exploits. If their opponents are using them, then they need to use them in order to compete.

I really hate talking about this... but the ESP thing that has been mentioned is rather real.

That said, none of that ensures the cheaters any wins. It is very doable to defeat people using that, along with aim cheats, and a number of other things. Obviously, we've likely all seen other videos of more extreme cheats (flying and dropping kegs on people), but these unseen things that are far far too easily available are a real shame.

But, hopefully Rare and Microsoft are doing good things to combat this stuff. So, I can't honestly say I know what the state of affairs truly is. I'm not about to try using any such things in order to uncover how solid of a job their anti cheating processes are doing. :D

But yeah, it's up to each and every individual to determine whether our experiences hold any significance to them about this subject. I'm certainly no expert, but I've been shown things. That said, I couldn't pretend to know the true extent of things. It could be horrendous. It could be mild. The only thing I am pretty assured of is that it is not nonexistent, hehe.