Potential Aid to Hourglass Cheating Epidemic

Pretty simple, once you end a fight in Hourglass you can choose to block matchmaking against the players you just fought.

So if only 4 people in your Region are playing Hourglass, and everyone starts blocking each other...you have 0
Works for me :P

if you encounter a Cheater, you can then block matchmaking with them for the rest of your session

Issue tho is, what people considered "Cheating" over actual skillful combat. Sometimes my own shots surprise me ^^"

cheaters are still out there unforunantly..
Had an invisible Aim Bot Pirate yesterday..
He magically kept spawning on our sloop.
Couldnt see him until he lit himself on fire, then we killed him, then he came right back.

@rotten-rocko
Too True..
It can be hard to tell the legit hackers from someone with a poor internet connection on a janky server.
I save my Cheater Reports for the blatant cheaters when i catch evidence..
Rare can make the call wether or not theyre cheating. You kno.. opposed to screaming cheater at the top of my lungs.

@burnbacon

So if only 4 people in your Region are playing Hourglass, and everyone starts blocking each other...you have 0

Works for me :P

So why would you block all 4 people if that means you have 0? What reason would there be to do that? none, so it wouldn't happen. If all of those others were actually hackers (which the idea of 100% of the current pool being hackers is wild) then you would just stop playing for today anyway, so again no difference. I did notice a single possible way to abuse this by VPNing to quieter regions and play on that regions off-peak time to attempt to always match against your friend to farm, and that is the only way I can see this being exploited (though if everyone starts doing that, it'll no longer be a quiet region or off-peak times, so abuse of it would cancel itself out).

The two possibilities are that either theres plenty of people in your matchmaking pool, meaning blocking 5 doesn't really do anything in terms of affecting your win-rate by blocking people better than you, or the other possibility of there being very little in your matchmaking pool, which means blocking 5 would mean you cant even get into matches. The prior has little to no consequence, and the latter is directly negative to the person abusing the block mechanic, as such it wouldn't be done.

Issue tho is, what people considered "Cheating" over actual skillful combat. Sometimes my own shots surprise me ^^"

Which is why I acknowledged in the post I imagine people would also use this to just block people that beat them, hence why there's a cap to the amount of blocks you can have and a time limit on them, that way you cant just block everyone forever. If anything it means you wont be getting repeated matches against the same crew thats so clearly not in the same skill bracket as you (whether that means having to fight someone better than you, or fighting someone way worse than you) and should then mean fights are more balanced in terms of skill and supplies.

@li-jratt-li

cheaters are still out there unforunantly..

Had an invisible Aim Bot Pirate yesterday..

He magically kept spawning on our sloop.

Couldnt see him until he lit himself on fire, then we killed him, then he came right back.

Assuming this is in hourglass, if you could block, you would then be able to play knowing you wouldnt fight this guy again tonight.

@rotten-rocko

But people call cheating for all sorts of reasons that aren't actually cheating like lag they start saying your teleporting, if you get a chain of good long distance shots they start saying aim bot, you'll end up blocking people from the fight just cuz they are better then you or there was an issue with the actual game

This is why I implemented a limit to the amount of people you can block and a time limit on it too, that way when people inevitably just block people that beat them, they hit a wall of how many people they can have blocked for a time period. It doesn't really affect the guy who gets blocked because there's still plenty of other players to fight, and the guy that did the blocking cannot block enough people to actually dent the overall amount of people he can queue against.

@rotten-rocko

But people call cheating for all sorts of reasons that aren't actually cheating like lag they start saying your teleporting, if you get a chain of good long distance shots they start saying aim bot, you'll end up blocking people from the fight just cuz they are better then you or there was an issue with the actual game

And do you like having those same back to back fights? I have seen others suggest they'd like a method to prevent back to back fights which this could also be used for

@olde-grim-jack

[Theoretical hack-proofing concept(s)]
Please give me your own opinions and input regarding the ideas I created below:
Imagine if Hacking (use of hacks) was considered a fine-able and serious international crime with fines as high as $10,000 and half of the money goes to the devs of the game you hacked on. Creating hacks with intent to distribute could land you a $100k fine or 10 years in prison.
This part sounds annoying an invasive, but..
Imagine the (optional) ability to create premium accounts where you don't pay extra, but you need to submit a picture of your ID with your address on it and the address has to match your IP address, thus removing the ability to use VPNs to hide your real location (good for steamers and comp players). With these annoying extra steps, you could play on essentially hacker-free servers, of course premium accounts also have a phone authenticator login so hackers can't just hack/buy/sell premium accounts.
Instead of banning, what about banishing? Dedicated hacker servers, but you don't tell the hackers that they've been banished to the hacker servers. It's also full of bots so the hackers get to torment what they 'think' is other players as well as other hackers. They cannot join friends on normal servers.. not that hackers have friends.
What about doing all of the above at the same time?

With such steep punishment I think this would probably kill video gaming as a hobby especially with it being something popular with younger audiences. Parents wouldn't want to risk their Kids installing cheats without them knowing and suddenly incur a massive fine or even get sent (or get the parents sent) to prison. Likewise with how buggy SoT is there's already the possibility of being false banned, there's so many collision launches in this game that an unaware player may see it and think its blatant speed hacks, as may a member of the Rare team that review footage. Abusing Exploits and Cheating via external software are entirely different things, a game being as buggy as SoT would be far too risky to even consider playing with such insane risks if you are thought to be cheating.