Cheaters are running hourglass,, and this is how it should be handled

You make good points, however I don’t really fear the bot farms. Sure there might be some who go to that effort, but it would definitely take their numbers down. I know they’ve discussed in the past, and I agree I do not know why it’s taking them this long. If they wanted to still allow new accounts to play, then perhaps limit matchmaking to other new accounts? It’s naive to think you will ever fully get rid of cheaters, but right now they don’t have to jump through any hoops, either time-based or financial to get right back in and cheat after a ban.

1. they already plan something.
2. how does that fix cheating. Equal supplied ship?. Might as well say having same outfits would also fix it. :/
3. they won’t do this.

Hourglass isn’t a mode that needs set rules. That what makes it interesting and those of us who actually wanna dominate will prepare to do so. Or fail doing so.

@burnbacon kind of an L response bro ngl. If you’re just gonna be negative and have a defeatist attitude why even post? Also wanting unbalanced supplies is crazy lol

@burnbacon to elaborate, balancing supplies doesn't fix cheating, it just makes it less punishing to reset. We shouldn't have to "prepare to dominate" by farming up stuff like curses and bonecallers. Sorry, if you rely on that to win, you aren't really dominating. Also, some of us have jobs and lives, and don't really want to play resource simulator, we just want to pvp and have fun. Sorry, I guess that wasn't clear in my post.

Just did 20 hourglass matches.
No cheaters on East coast NA servers.
I’m actually sad not to encounter and these guys are really chill.

Some even offer sword dueling on ships or islands instead of sinking ships.
Which is pretty much what hourglass offers. No rules or set gameplay just encounter and go.

Others were even more funny. About my 10th round guy shot nothing but fireworks XD set me ablaze

So in short: no need for pocket dimension or equal supplies. Cheaters sure need better way to deal with but they don’t affect everyone it seems.

Best thing they could should do? Reset everyone’s W/L ratio and input there new lock on new players and current.

New players: Have to complete all tall tales, unlock Reaper and Athena lvl 50
Current: every month reset wins and loses and everyone must do a trial run. “Complete 10 tall tales” that shuffles monthly. (And must do them on high seas)

Why tall tales? Because nobody likes doing them and it takes time. But the outcome beats the issue. Less cheaters which you can over look the issue of doing TT (no diving) as well.

Make the lock an actual lock not something silly.

@burnbacon So reading this, this is either 1. satire, 2. defensive stretching of the truth, or 3. maybe MMR works better than we think and you are very low allegiance, because those fights basically all sound like swabbies, which I rarely get matched with. I am a pretty high allegiance player, well past both gold curses, and haven't had 20 fights without blatant cheaters in 20 weeks. all of my peers experience the same.

Getting supps every time you sink is so bad and sometimes takes more time than the actual fight.
I really think that they should make it like arena so everyone has the same supps to make the fights a lot more balanced.
When diving for HG it would also help queue times a lot cause people would actually be queuing instead getting supps.

@sm0der said in Cheaters are running hourglass,, and this is how it should be handled:

Getting supps every time you sink is so bad and sometimes takes more time than the actual fight.
I really think that they should make it like arena so everyone has the same supps to make the fights a lot more balanced.
When diving for HG it would also help queue times a lot cause people would actually be queuing instead getting supps.

@sm0der

Why are you getting more supplies after sinking? The starting supplies are enough, you’re wasting time yourself.

“Instant pvp” when the player doesn’t waste the time. You’re basically wanting your stuff to be used by other players.

@burnbacon if im getting more supps after sinkings is cause NO base supps are not enough especially in high elo HG where if I run out of canons food or wood im done and will sink because evry single good player is going to at least buy base supps if not double buy

They've said previously that they are planning on adding some kind of prerequisite but I don't know why it's taking so long - maybe it's harder to come up with a meaningful one that isn't both trivially bypassed and also not a huge turnoff for players wanting to jump in.

Days played is a terrible metric, because it would be bypassed by farms botting accounts in a virtual machine to get played time up. Cheaters who are willing to pay a subscription are not going to balk at tossing a few bucks for a dummy account with some playtime.

Adding barriers to participating also comes with the potential to kill Hourglass even further than it already is; they'd need to communicate exactly what the requirements are in game so that normal players aren't confused on why they can't activate it and in doing so they do also make it easier to know exactly what they need to farm on extra accounts in order to activate it so there is a balance there that needs to be figured out.

That's the problem, isn't it. There is almost no way to put a barricade up that doesn't kill hourglass. Any barrier to entry is a potential permanent turn off for a player or is too easy to bypass, and as of yet I haven't seen a single idea for it that rides the line without going over one way or the other. PL is a bad barrier to entry, because 1/40th of the playerbase has it, so that's a 97% drop in potential players immediately. Days played is too easy to bypass as you said. Minimum levels would be also too easy to farm, they would be possible to just farm accounts on xp events, and even without that the amount of XP you can get doing modern stuff is enough to make most limits trivial. It's hard to define a minimum level that works anyways. Is the level determined by all your levels added up? Or just certain companies? Also, how does that work with crews larger than solo sloop? Even on duo sloop, you could vote up hourglass, then have the friend who doesn't qualify join, and then dive. How would they account for that? Or what if they have an alt that qualifies, they join the cheat alt on that one, then vote HG and leave the cheat alt on a boat that already has HG voted up? Would that boat still join the queue? There is just too much to account for IMO to make a system that has a barrier to entry for HG.

@swmmmr Wanting the game mode to just be a boxed in fight mode segregated from the rest of the game is crazy. Hourglass is designed from the ground up to be part of adventure, and part of adventure is not always having more supplies than someone else. Part of adventure is also 3rd partying. None of this solves cheaters and almost all of it would end up killing HG much much faster.

@burnbacon I'm level 362 servants and level 115 guardians. I do guardians as duo sloop and servants as solo sloop. I have only encountered one real cheater and one guy who was really really good but I couldn't say for sure was cheating. 1000+ HG matches and 1 confirmed cheater.

Resetting levels would just make people never play the game mode since the rewards are level based and not everyone has the time to grind 250+ levels in a month (if thats even humanly possible while also doing human things like eating sleeping and going outside). Level 1000 rewards would never be seen again.

Making players do ALL tall tales and get reaper and/or athena to 50 would kill the game mode entirely. I haven't even done all the tall tales and I wasn't even PL when I played HG for the first time.

@ggormless Hourglass is not a competitive game mode. Hourglass is literally just on demand PvP within SoT. If you think that it is anything other than an "I want to fight someone right now" button, you are mistaken on what the intentions of the devs is. Hourglass is not ranked, it is not ELO based, there is a level system that only does unlocks. The SBMM of HG is based on your w/l ratio, not level. HG is, and always has been, as stated by the devs all the way back in the S8 SoTTV livestream, PVP on demand. It is meant to be in the adventure world because it is just asking to fight someone. That's all it is. You are giving it connotations that it does not have. Cursed balls are completely acceptable, as someone you might come across in the world might have them. You are confused about what Hourglass is at its core and that's why you think it should be changed.

@ggormless I do all of my matches on default supps, plus pineapples. The only thing I buy is pineapples. I do not often have fights end because I ran out of supplies. If I haven't sunk them in 70 cannonballs, something is wrong. Half my winning HG matches use less than 30 cannonballs.

@burnbacon said:

Just did 20 hourglass matches.

You're so funny, burnbacon. Silly guy.

@theblackbellamy

Understandable that players today can’t sit still for long periods or even complete 5 matches before losing their minds. But 20 matches isn’t a milestone

If you really want to level up. You ignore the troubles and keep going. Drop the dagger and dive dive dive!

@ggormless

Seems all based on time, location.
Cheaters don’t flood the whole hourglass experience like many claim. Some of the causal players may encounter a cheater and assume it just a really good player and move on

No complaining. No foul. They just play…which not May who have SoT do. They aren’t playing they are working

@potatosord Ok, replying to all of your posts somewhat here as one, and coming from a place of respect, so please do not take my meaning here as negative or feel the need to be defensive, but:

1. You are reciting the intention of the devs back in season 8 over and over. Everyone here I think understands that was their original intention, but now, after several years of it in practice, these are major flaws that most experienced hourglass-only players face. Just like with any update released to any game, players who spend a ton of time interacting with it can see ways to make it better, and these suggestions objectively would. Just because it strays from their original intention, doesn't mean it would be bad for the gamemode.

2. You are speaking anecdotally from a self-admitted place of playing very casually, with very little experience comparatively. For perspective, not to flex, I have a 90% win percentage in servants, a 94% in guardians, and am about 3000 total allegiance. There are many like me, with even higher levels and W/L ratio. Trust me, you might go into fights with default supps and it works out against similar W/L ratio players as yourself, but at our level, we supp up. Due to that W/L ratio, we are also bound to encounter more cheaters than you.

Myself and most of the hourglass community do not spend time on adventure. We do not do steals in between fights. We do not enjoy a third party of swabbies griefing an otherwise really close and exciting fight, or pve doing the same thing like a burning blade rolling up. Why? Because we have done all of that time and time again, and the only real end game stuff we find fun is fighting other crews of similar skill. We do not enjoy spending even more time exploiting for more supplies, or fighting the harpoon mechanics for 5 minutes after a win, then sorting, after ever. single. fight. We make up the majority of people who interact with the hourglass content, not you. So if the majority of people playing the game mode do not enjoy all of those things, then the devs should be interested in making the experience better and more fluid.

@worst-tdmer suggestion 2 wouldnt stop cheaters, it would just make it so resetting after a sink to them is w/e. and 3 if it was on a separate game build and not free like with game pass, then alot of cheaters would be discouraged from it.

@swmmmr 1.) Your suggestions would objectively kill the game mode, not improve it. Some of what you listed is even the reason why Arena was shuddered. Keeping hourglass off of High seas makes it a worthless game mode. You might as well just go play Blazing Sails or Broadsides, you know, those games which exist to replicate the arena mode that SoT dropped and neither of them even get 10% of the player count of SoT on a bad day? Or how about the idea of forcibly evening supplies? What's the point of taking supps if they'll just be erased? What's the point of having the seas part of it at all aside from being the place where ships go? What about random supply barrels in the water? You don't need to sail or dive or even spend time in the water. If supps are evened, then there is no reason to not instantly go to a menu or rejoin the queue the second a match ends. It really just sounds like you want to play a different game but with the feeling of SoT.

2.) That would be fine and dandy if the SBMM actually worked. I have been matched against level 7000 streamers who only stream HG and SoT PVP. My win rate is also about 80%, so your supposed place of superiority is actually not as high as you think. As well, since when the SBMM works it tries to match W/L ratio, not level. HG level is not a measure of skill, it's a measure of how much time you put into the game mode. I have seen double gold loss farmers. I was stating my levels to show that I play the game mode a lot. Not nearly as casually as you seem to think, I only started a few months ago. When I lose, it is almost never because I ran out of supps, and when I streak, I don't run out of supps because I take them from my opponents wrecks. The first match is the only one where I have "low" supps, because I always take the supps of who I sink.

I guess I don't count as part of the "hourglass community" despite having over 1000 matches and nearly 500 levels, playing the game mode at least 4 days a week because I also enjoy other parts of the game, parts of the game that existed before hourglass, parts of the game that I enjoyed playing before hourglass existed. No one said you have to do steals between fights or heavily interact with the PvE world between fights. The PvE world exists as a place for player interactions to happen. If you don't want the risk of meeting players, play safer seas. What's the point of raising and lowering hourglass in a boxed off game mode? You lower because of the risk of being sunk, if you take away that risk, you take away parts of the game mode. Might as well just make it a menu where you click a button to join the battle instead of diving and all that. As someone who is supposedly "so hardcore" into hourglass, you don't really know much about it. No one uses cursed balls. They provide almost no advantage and are exceedingly rare. Bone callers are less rare but if you are losing because of bone callers, you are not the hOuRgLaSs gOd you claim to be. Bone callers are almost not a threat at all.

"We are the majority, not you" You are the majority of the people who currently interact with hourglass, which is a tiny portion of the playerbase. That's not what they want. Ideally, every player would interact with hourglass. The average HG player is supposed to be the average SoT player. They are not trying to appeal to you, they are trying to appeal to everyone. You might be who took interest, but that's something they are trying to fix. Hourglass is on the quest table for a reason. It's "The Battle for the Sea of Thieves" for a reason. It's the main good guy vs the main bad guy. Lore wise, they would ideally have every player doing it. Appealing only to the hardcore is the quickest way to kill your product because the casual base is more of it than the hardcore base. Arena players went HARD with arena, and became pretty scary on the seas for their time, but 98% of player time was not spent on arena. They didn't have enough of a casual player base, and it died out. They couldn't get enough casual players in to keep the mode alive, and that's what will happen if they segregate HG. It's already happening, mostly due to the stigma around the supposed difficulty of HG. They had to add cross region match making to make the queues reasonable again as long as you can put up with some ping.

I want this game mode to feel better too, but that comes from them making the game work properly at an engine level, not a gameplay level. Hitreg and foodreg alone are more of a problem than anything you listed.

@ggormless I don't want to take the time to address everything because most of it has already been covered, but I do want to point out that they updated reaper/bonecaller skeletons so you can walk through them

PvP is inherently competitive, you play HG to win a PvP match, therefore, HG is a competitive gamemode.

Not really. Its a Tool for PvP and some pvp can be fun and enjoyable win or lose. It not about winning to have fun but what happens during those fights.
So HG is a Tool for PvP and isnt 100% Competitive as many have said "Players Run" which isnt competitive. And there no points earned, just Exp which is only good for Rewards. Once you got those rewards and Max lvl, whatelse is there to work for? Just PvP that you can freely do without HG.

If you are fighting someone on an equal skill level, chances are the fight could go on for a little while, and there's probably a supply difference if you're fighting purely on default supps. Starting at a disadvantage compared to someone who has beaten someone and taken their supplies or double-bought captaincy and crates is a bad design choice, it should be an even playing field, otherwise its just unfair.

There where things get weird.
Nobody is ever at disadvantage, everything can be switch around, something else comes into affect that changes the battle to your favor. Like Third party ships, NPC threats or even the Weather. Which all those seem to be the bane of players, idk why.
So someone having more supplies than me, will be taken care of if say a NPC galleon shows up and blasts them, or they can't see in the Storm. Supplies = Nothing. You can win a fight without even sinking ships by cannons in Hourglass because of the "Death circle" OR my favor, crashing them into Rocks/Islands.

Even just improving default supps so that they are actually decent would benefit the experience a lot.

Okie, So. IF they ever do, say...Double your resources. OR Anyone who starts Hourglass gets Triple Resources, Loses anything they might of had already and start with 500 cannon balls, 200 Chainshots, 300 Planks etc etc. IF they do this, And by some crazy thing, players are still..Losing just as much or more. What the next step to fixing it? What happens afterwards? What the next big "Change" to fix.

Evening supplies is to intentionally eliminate the entire boring process of taking supps from sinking the other ship—its time that could be spent actually playing the game and fighting, instead of having to organize.

Or. you can be a Good player and not bother with such tiny things? Drop dagger, dive and fight. Quick and easy.
Sure it also a good gold sink, maybe that why?

I'd rather be playing the actually enjoyable and exciting part of the game instead of loading bar simulator.

You are doing that yourself. Really think about that, Who is clicking the buttons.

Third-partying is nothing but an annoyance, especially when you're locked inside of a barrier that said third-partying opponent doesn't have. Me personally, I don't want adventure chaos in HG matches.

So now we are into the thick of it. It not about Hourglass for what it is, Its this: "I want Arena back" that really the main words players wont say, because that the truth.
It not about supplies, Runners, Cheaters, or whatever. Its Players want Arena. But they can't simply say that, fear of Locking threads.
So they make these threads, asking simply to change hourglass, to be close enough to how Arena is.

Arena: Set supplies, Set rules, Own pocket dimension, Not in Adventure.

I expect that sort of thing in adventure, not in HG.

Haha...than you misunderstood why Hourglass was even made. To get away from Arena, To give players a straight way to pvp without sailing around, and keep it all in Adventure. Because that was expected to happen, other ships to join in...On...Player vs Player fights. That the other issue I seen, Players wanting PvP...but when its "more" than what they want, its bad.

I think asking for a barrier so that other players can't intrude on the match isn't too much, and relocating some of the HG spots so that they aren't locking islands away in said barrier, just putting them in open ocean like near the coral fortress

Sure, then we all know where those players are, now players will wait for you to end your fight and wait for you to come out of your safe zone. Unless you want another rule added where, you Instantly dive again...to a new fight. Fighting in the same...area...over and over, nothing changes. Just two ships in open water... that get old.

Bottom line:
It not simply asking to change Hourglass to fit the needs of a small group of upset players. It the same group of players, who want Arena back and wanna change our current and only PvP tool, into a proper Mode.
More than likely, it be quickly shutdown just like arena..due to lack of updates, player pools too small and of course the endless cheaters that will never go away.

Potato and BurnBacon....sheesh.

Asking to not have 1/3rd of my time playing hourglass spent managing resources, and wanting more balanced fights isn't even close to the same thing as asking for Arena back. Hourglass also wasn't made to "get away from Arena." It came long after Arena left. And while "what was expected to happen" with 3rd parties might have been the INTENTION, in PRACTICE it is NOT GOOD. Where's the proof of that? The two fighting boats pause and sink the 3rd party boat or PVE 9 times out of 10. Because its an ANNOYING INTERRUPTION and we don't want it to get in the way of our fight. So regardless of Rare's intention, the players engage by swatting it away like a fly as fast as possible, so they can get back to the reason they are playing. IMO, it was less INTENTION, and more LAZINESS from a development standpoint. They didn't want to go through the process of making it fair and balanced and separate from adventure, or lacked the resources, so they didn't. And now people like you are defending it to the bitter end, even though its objectively bad design.

Burnbacon u ask after fixing supplies what the next big change would be? HONESTLY PROBABLY NOTHING. If they can do nothing else to improve cheaters, at least don't grief my time and gold at the outpost every time we sink to one. Or don't grief my time in between dives supplying, or in queue waiting for other crews to finish supplying at their outpost or post-win. Saying you are never at a disadvantage and you flip any situation around is hilarious. So is going on 20 streaks without ever grabbing supplies. We know thats false. Every. single. person. I play hourglass with double buys and uses an exploit to get supplies before diving. Is that Rare's intention too?

Balanced supplies would benefit ALL hourglass players, not a small group. Less experienced players with no gold could go in with a better chance at winning, and thus a better chance at continuing to play.

@potatosord tested, this is incorrect. you cannot walk through enemy skeletons on your ship...