CHEAT ADS UPLOADED DAILY!

Patching out cheats is putting a bandaid on a gunshot wound. Sure it may stop a little bleeding but won’t fully stop it.

No game in history fully stopped cheating.

@marinemike idk what you linked but I’m guessing it’s the repeat “free cheats” videos on YouTube, they are just malware and if you click on the channel you can see it’s stolen and is just spamming the same video for every popular game.

It’s not a sot specific problem, just a YouTube problem

Every game has cheaters. It helps if you record and report so they can see exactly what where and how the cheat is happening.

In the meantime, don't give them free advertising please.

I’ll add my perspective here, since my previous thread where I shared feedback as an active Hourglass player was locked.

I understand and agree with many of the general points raised here. Cheating is an arms race, no online game has ever eliminated it completely, and some cheats do get patched over time. That part isn’t really in dispute.

Where my frustration comes from is the practical gameplay impact, specifically in Hourglass. From recent sessions, cheating does not feel like an occasional edge case, but something that regularly decides matches with no possible counterplay. Wall-banging, air-freeze, extreme aimbot behavior, and machine gun usage are still very present. When you encounter multiple cheating crews within a short span, it becomes very difficult to reconcile the idea of “visible improvements” with what actually happens in-game.

Some cheats have been dealt with quickly in the past. Teleporting onto beds is a good example. That exploit was short-lived, widely reported, and addressed relatively fast. The difference now is not necessarily that cheating is less severe, but that many players are increasingly burned out from reporting.

This leads into the reporting system itself. Players are often told to “just report it,” but in practice this process is extremely time-consuming and discouraging. To submit a report properly, players are expected to record clear footage, visibly show the cheater’s name, clearly demonstrate the exploit being used, upload the evidence externally, and hope it meets the required threshold for action.

Even when reports are valid, bans often take days. Cheaters are aware of this and expect it. They can play freely for several days, receive a ban, and return on a new account within minutes. From the reporting player’s perspective, the entire process feels pointless. You lose your matches, invest additional time gathering evidence, and see no immediate or meaningful outcome.

On top of that, reports can still be rejected if the evidence is deemed insufficient, which further discourages players who genuinely tried to help. Whether this is due to strict guidelines or lack of in-game context, the end result is the same: people stop reporting altogether.

Because of this, fewer reports or fewer forum posts do not necessarily indicate fewer cheaters. They can just as easily reflect reporting fatigue and frustration. From active Hourglass gameplay right now, the experience feels largely unchanged. We are effectively left waiting for the next update and hoping something improves. Often, it doesn’t, and the cycle repeats.

One additional concern is how feedback like this is typically handled. Discussions often end with a standard redirection to the report system and the thread being closed. While I understand the need to keep forums focused, this also means that broader gameplay feedback from active players can easily disappear without any visible follow-up, reinforcing the feeling that there is no place left to meaningfully discuss persistent issues that reporting alone does not seem to resolve.

This is not an attack on developers or moderation. It is feedback from someone actively playing the mode, trying to explain why, despite theoretical progress, the in-game experience for legitimate Hourglass players still feels stagnant.