No hourglass for new player !

@bdt2370 said in No hourglass for new player !:

We absolutely need to prevent new players from being able to access Hourglass right away.

Why? Obviously, not to block genuine newcomers, but to stop those who constantly come back with freshly updated cheats, bypassing every security measure (you know the type). But there’s one thing they can’t bypass: logic. A simple condition like ‘if you have less than X levels, X hours of gameplay, or similar... you can’t play Hourglass’ would be enough.

And what about real new players? Well, if they have friends already playing and want to discover the PvP side, they’ll need to do a bit of Adventure first. I get that it might sound unfair to those who aren't interested in Adventure, but peace of mind comes at a cost — and I believe most rational players would be willing to accept that. A lot of games that offer PvP don't let you play against real players right away, and nobody complains about that.

I’ve seen a lot of cheating post lately, but i haven’t noticed any cheaters. I’m starting to wonder if there’s a console server specific cheat wave going on right now? What cheats are you observing?

Not trying to undermine your post, I’m genuinely curious. I started playing in season 9 and the whole reason I initially came to these forums was to see what was being done about cheating. I’ve seen every manner of cheats imaginable, but in the last couple months I haven’t noticed any at all. I do hourglass every session, and when I’m not doing hourglass I’m interacting with players on adventure, no cheats noticed in a while. I have been accused of cheating a couple times in that period, though, which is great, I don’t get cheating accusations often, they give me warm fuzzies.

@bdt2370

Are you playing on console only servers? Genuinely curious. Like I said I’ve seen so many post but not seeing cheaters. I play on pc and typically pc players experience the most cheating.

If you saw someone freeze mid air I believe they’re a cheater.

Hopefully you got it on video.

@capt-greldik Something to keep in mind: with the new cross region match making, if you have a high win rate you will queue into the cheaters from all surrounding stamps. I have around an 80% win rate over a couple thousand HG matches, and since the update I have queued into about 10x as many cheaters. I'd say it went from around 1/30-1/40 to about 1/3 matches I get a cheater. I'd imagine players with lower win rates might be seeing them at lower rates now because they are fighting crews with similar stats to themselves.

Great idea. In most shooters I've played, there is some sort of account level or number of casual matches required to play before the ranked mode gets unlocked. I'm sure there is a way to implement this in SoT like you said. Maybe a minimum total reputation or something before HG is unlocked. It has to be something that doesn't necessarily require skill, because that would gatekeep HG from swabbies. It would have to be something that just takes time and grinding so a new account would have to play a significant amount before having access to HG.

@bdt2370 said in No hourglass for new player !:

@capt-greldik no I'm pc. And bro what's your problems ? I have the feeling i'm talking to conspiracy theorist who claim climat change isn't real despite the evidence. Cheater are real bro, And if you never see them, good for you, but me, I lost 2 time a 4 streak yesterday because of them.

You’re misunderstanding me. I’m the first to complain about cheaters. But amongst my crew in the last couple months we’ve noted seeing few if any. All I did was ask the op questions not suggest cheaters don’t exist. Relax…

@themetalman4011 said in No hourglass for new player !:

Not a bad idea in principle. Though what should the bar of entry be exactly? Becoming Pirate legend?

This would just shrink the player pool and make you MORE likely to find cheaters, since cheaters can cheat to PL in an hour or two.

@miserenz said in No hourglass for new player !:

@guildar9194
I do not think this is true. At worse it would increase the numbers in the main world.

Ok. Let's image 100 people play Hourglass. Just using a smaller number, for ease of my example.
25 of them are cheaters.
That's a 1/4 chance to run into cheaters. 25%.

Now, you take those 100 players, and kick out anyone not a Pirate Legend.
Let's say that's 30 people.
That leaves 70 people in your player pool.

And since cheaters can fly around, spawn treasure, and do anything else needed to hit Pirate Legend in a few hours, tops, you still have 25 cheaters in your player pool.
So now you have a 35% chance to be matched with the cheaters.

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Pirate Legend is not hard to reach, just time consuming.
Cheaters can reach it faster than legit players. So you're not removing cheaters from Hourglass as much as you are normal players.

@capt-greldik said in No hourglass for new player !:

Like I said I’ve seen so many post but not seeing cheaters. I play on pc and typically pc players experience the most cheating.

Please visit Asian and Oceania servers.

Some randoms from other regions joined our crew and said they've never met cheaters in hourglass even after they unlocked pvp curses. The golden skeleton said it's rare.

When we said we want to sell the Grade V flag from our 3rd match, they said no - wait till the 4th streak.

Our 4th match = blatant mid-air freeze quick swap cheaters.

Over the past few days, I've met so many cheaters. Some are more subtle (magic bucket in their ship, so our ship gets their water despite no holes). Some are more blatant - mid-air freeze. I have multiple support tickets open right now - all on cheaters with 10 hour accounts.

We need barriers to make it inconvenient for cheaters to play hourglass.

Pirate legend requirement to play hourglass can potentially be an effective deterrent against many cheaters. It will at least slow them down.

Whoever teams up with multiple blatant cheaters repeatedly should also be punished.

There is the risk that it makes the general open world more infested with cheaters. But I think cheat developers aren't exploiting sailing speeds yet, I hope. So it's still fairly inconvenient for the cheaters to level up the general factions (compared to PVP factions).

I'm glad that they fixed HG queue times with cross-region matchmaking. Now they need to do this as one of the next steps to slow down the HG cheater problem.