Anti-cheat

The last thing that the game needs is inaccuracy in detection so it's overall better if they take the time needed to get it right.

This game is terrible about baseless sus accusations as it is, adding extra chaos of false bans and reinstated accounts only makes it much worse.

Gotta do something like that right or it just makes it worse in the end.

@thundertrush Anti-cheat isn't realy gonna help. Just ask the shooter gamers, since cheaters are rampent there and those games have anti-cheat. Unfortunately you can't do much against it, since as soon as the find a cheat and upgrade the anti-cheat, the next moment they have already found a workaround.

Bans also dont work, because:

1. They can easily make new accounts, but even then they can just spoof the name of the Xbox account to look like they are someone else and if someone then reports that cheater, they actually report an innocent player, since the cheater faked being that innocent player.
2. IP-bans are easily circumvented. Not only that, cheaters often use 'fake' IP-adresses and often those are the numbers of other players (often more famous streamers), so you will only ban innocent players
3. Hardware bans also don't work, since those can be spoofed too and would create the same problems as IP-bans.

The real problem is that big cheaters have become so tech-savvy that there is so little you can do nowadays.

@super87ghost

If it were true that anti-cheats are useless then gaming companies wouldn’t use them, yet any sane company with an online game does use them. I’m sure they did their due diligence when deciding whether they’d like to invest money into developing and maintaining an anti-cheat, and evidently they decided, based on their own research, that anti-cheats are worthwhile.

With that said, I’ve played a lot of online games and while many of them had/have cheating issues, many others had little to no cheating problem. SoT easily has more cheats than any game I’ve played, like, very easily.

I’m sure it’ll be an ongoing battle and not stop all cheating, but if an anti-cheat can detect cheat actions within the game and provide an auto ban based on those actions, it wouldn’t matter how many accounts they created because in theory they’d be auto banned each time they attempted to cheat.

Please for the love of the sea gods implement and maintain an anti-cheat. Doing nothing because anti-cheat’s aren’t always perfect is not the answer.

@super87ghost

Yes, and the more difficult you make it to cheat the more people you weed out. Being able to buy something off the shelf and run it in the background is very different than creating multiple accounts and spoofing user names and IP addresses.

Even though we have laws and law enforcement , people still break the law.

We still keep though law enforcement around though.

I don't think a "throw your hand up in the air" and say "oh well , nothing can done" is a reasonable approach.

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

With that said, I’ve played a lot of online games and while many of them had/have cheating issues, many others had little to no cheating problem. SoT easily has more cheats than any game I’ve played, like, very easily.

Competitive shooters/multiplayer games? Seems very unlikely that any competitive game has less than SoT.

SoT is a bubble in a lot of ways. Many people that play sot are super casual gamers, first time multiplayer gamers, etc. It's also got a streaming culture that has some of the most baseless accusations I've ever seen. Daily accusations about the most basic of experienced pvp performance.

I don't think it has higher cheating at all, I think it has a culture of ultra focus on cheating and a lot of inexperience in the community, emboldened by the engagement farming that happens a lot in SoT content creation.

@wolfmanbush said in Anti-cheat:

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

With that said, I’ve played a lot of online games and while many of them had/have cheating issues, many others had little to no cheating problem. SoT easily has more cheats than any game I’ve played, like, very easily.

Competitive shooters/multiplayer games? Seems very unlikely that any competitive game has less than SoT.

SoT is a bubble in a lot of ways. Many people that play sot are super casual gamers, first time multiplayer gamers, etc. It's also got a streaming culture that has some of the most baseless accusations I've ever seen. Daily accusations of the most basic of experienced pvp performance.

I don't think it has higher cheating at all, I think it has a culture of ultra focus on cheating and a lot of inexperience in the community, emboldened by the engagement farming that happens a lot in SoT content creation.

I haven’t played shooters in a bit, the last I payed was CS many years ago, and yes they had a cheating problem. The last online game I played prior to SoT is New World, and while they had some exploits that people took advantage of sometimes, they did not have people flying around the map spawning kegs while in the background they had data on everything on their screen and beyond, while also using aimbot, and every other cheat known to man.

I don’t speak for every game of course, but yes in my experience SoT is easily the most cheat plagued game I’ve played. I still love and play it, but it is what it is.

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

@wolfmanbush said in Anti-cheat:

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

With that said, I’ve played a lot of online games and while many of them had/have cheating issues, many others had little to no cheating problem. SoT easily has more cheats than any game I’ve played, like, very easily.

Competitive shooters/multiplayer games? Seems very unlikely that any competitive game has less than SoT.

SoT is a bubble in a lot of ways. Many people that play sot are super casual gamers, first time multiplayer gamers, etc. It's also got a streaming culture that has some of the most baseless accusations I've ever seen. Daily accusations of the most basic of experienced pvp performance.

I don't think it has higher cheating at all, I think it has a culture of ultra focus on cheating and a lot of inexperience in the community, emboldened by the engagement farming that happens a lot in SoT content creation.

I haven’t played shooters in a bit, the last I payed was CS many years ago, and yes they had a cheating problem. The last online game I played prior to SoT is New World, and while they had some exploits that people took advantage of sometimes, they did not have people flying around the map spawning kegs while in the background they had data on everything on their screen and beyond, while also using aimbot, and every other cheat known to man.

I don’t speak for every game of course, but yes in my experience SoT is easily the most cheat plagued game I’ve played. I still love and play it, but it is what it is.

The recent change with controller aim assist really shows how flawed accusations are in the community.

Aim assist is a whole lot of "eh no ty" at best for a lot of controller players. It feels super weird to use for a lot of players and generally doesn't "assist" much of anything.

Yet mass people (most of which likely aren't even controller players) now get smack talked over a feature that they likely aren't using on an input that they probably aren't even using on shared servers.

SoT sus culture is terrible for the game, was years ago and it is today as well.

Accusing people of cheating is bad enough, people getting trash talked over a in-game feature that they either aren't using or can't even use is an extra level of wild.

@wolfmanbush said in Anti-cheat:

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

@wolfmanbush said in Anti-cheat:

@capt-greldik said in Anti-cheat:

With that said, I’ve played a lot of online games and while many of them had/have cheating issues, many others had little to no cheating problem. SoT easily has more cheats than any game I’ve played, like, very easily.

Competitive shooters/multiplayer games? Seems very unlikely that any competitive game has less than SoT.

SoT is a bubble in a lot of ways. Many people that play sot are super casual gamers, first time multiplayer gamers, etc. It's also got a streaming culture that has some of the most baseless accusations I've ever seen. Daily accusations of the most basic of experienced pvp performance.

I don't think it has higher cheating at all, I think it has a culture of ultra focus on cheating and a lot of inexperience in the community, emboldened by the engagement farming that happens a lot in SoT content creation.

I haven’t played shooters in a bit, the last I payed was CS many years ago, and yes they had a cheating problem. The last online game I played prior to SoT is New World, and while they had some exploits that people took advantage of sometimes, they did not have people flying around the map spawning kegs while in the background they had data on everything on their screen and beyond, while also using aimbot, and every other cheat known to man.

I don’t speak for every game of course, but yes in my experience SoT is easily the most cheat plagued game I’ve played. I still love and play it, but it is what it is.

The recent change with controller aim assist really shows how flawed accusations are in the community.

Aim assist is a whole lot of "eh no ty" at best for a lot of controller players. It feels super weird to use for a lot of players and generally doesn't "assist" much of anything.

Yet mass people (most of which likely aren't even controller players) now get smack talked over a feature that they likely aren't using on an input that they probably aren't even using on shared servers.

SoT sus culture is terrible for the game, was years ago and it is today as well.

Accusing people of cheating is bad enough, people getting trash talked over a in-game feature that they either aren't using or can't even used is an extra level of wild.

Haxusations are a problem in every online game, no doubt about it. I’ve seen very questionable claims on these forums several times, and I myself have been accused of aimbot twice even though I’m not even that great at FPS actions. So I agree that people making false claims is a thing. But keep in mind that a lot of us put a lot of time into hourglass and pvp in general, and when you’re in that environment often it’s not difficult to recognize aimbot when they’re being obvious about it. And aimbot is the most difficult thing to recognize because a good player might appear to be using it, but they’re just great. But that’s aimbot, we can dissect videos of aimbot all day and try to come to a consensus on whether the pirate was cheating. Aimbot is just one of the many cheats out there, though. What about insta ladder? Teleporting?

Also, keep in mind that people are currently getting banned for cheats, they are not a myth and they are prevalent. I got email confirmation for banning an aimbot/insta ladder user a few weeks ago. They didn’t tell me whether the person was banned for aimbot or insta ladder, but the aimbot was obvious and I got a really good clip of them using insta ladder (very obvious and easy to identify). And that’s just a couple cheats out of dozens. People used to repair their ship while at sea using the shipwright restore ship feature, kegs used to get spawned by flying pirates, I’m still seeing flying people in streams during season 11, but luckily I haven’t experienced that myself. I could go on for a while, how about ship diagnostics telling you how many holes you have, while also showing you the location of your enemies because you can see their names from afar as if they were part of your crew? It’s a literal cheat party out there. It’s not as bad as season 9 was right now, but it’s still happening.

The more I talk about it the more it affirms my belief that this game has the biggest cheating problem out of any I’ve played. I can’t even count the amount of sessions that ended because of a cheater. To be fair, I’m not experiencing cheating a lot right now, but I’m also not doing hourglass as often in season 11. However, the cheater I mentioned above was from season 11.

As a side note, I just remembered that the reason I began visiting these forums a year ago was to see what was being done about cheating.