So today for the 4 day in a row another cheater. Playing galleon HG, always get up to a 4 streak and them bam people flying and always from a sloop. Its becoming an everyday thing now not even like once in a blue moon. Today was strange though, we fought them galleon vs sloop and won, then next match they were both on a galleon so i'm confused how they could get matched twice on 2 different boats?
Something needs to be done about cheaters.
@burnbacon Reporting really does nothing, they get banned open a new account and are back playing very quickly. Like i said something needs to be done, its not enjoyable
@cptfatsparow594 said in Something needs to be done about cheaters.:
@burnbacon Reporting really does nothing, they get banned open a new account and are back playing very quickly. Like i said something needs to be done, its not enjoyable
While it may seem to you that reporting does nothing, not reporting does even less ...
It doesn't seem to them that reporting does nothing, reporting truly does nothing but waste your own time. You're far better off not reporting and saving yourself the 5-10 minutes it would take to trim a clip and submit a report.
For some reason putting a level gate on hourglass is a philosophical/technical conundrum that Rare's had to spend like 2 years pondering.
@worst-tdmer said in Something needs to be done about cheaters.:
It doesn't seem to them that reporting does nothing, reporting truly does nothing but waste your own time. You're far better off not reporting and saving yourself the 5-10 minutes it would take to trim a clip and submit a report.
So, how is Rare to know what cheaters do ? They can't do anything about something that they don't know (fully) about.
If a certain cheat or hack gets reported a significant amount they should do something about it sooner than it gets only reported once in a while.
Even if the provided video evidence of one person isn't enough, another report by someone else might result in a deserved ban or at least action within the software and/or Easy anti-cheat.Also, I don't think every caught cheater will create a new account, certainly if they were stupid enough to do it on their main account. They might hope to get unbanned after a certain time instead of getting more reports on their account because of ban-evasion.
For some reason putting a level gate on hourglass is a philosophical/technical conundrum that Rare's had to spend like 2 years pondering.
So instead of getting back in 5 minutes, they probably will be back within a day or two - or less if their cheating software also includes getting levels quickly ...
Alas, the ability of creating new (free) accounts is out of Rare's hands. This is in the hands of Xbox, MS &c.
So, how is Rare to know what cheaters do ? They can't do anything about something that they don't know (fully) about.
The same way players do? It's not like cheats are some super well kept secret, cheats are advertised on easily found forums/discords with a full list of features. It's as easy as searching "Sea of Thieves cheats" on google/youtube.
If a certain cheat or hack gets reported a significant amount they should do something about it sooner than it gets only reported once in a while.
Frequency shouldn't matter as much as impact. Aimbot is way more frequent than something like teleporting/keg tps, yet keg tps should be higher priority.
Even if the provided video evidence of one person isn't enough, another report by someone else might result in a deserved ban or at least action within the software and/or Easy anti-cheat.
Also, I don't think every caught cheater will create a new account, certainly if they were stupid enough to do it on their main account. They might hope to get unbanned after a certain time instead of getting more reports on their account because of ban-evasion.
You're just wrong. Rare has been clear that cheating is clear line that they will never unban for (rightfully so). One of the most common messages cheaters send in game is a stupid copypasta about how they're only cheating because they're banned, and how they have no voice, etc.
These people are already paying money to cheat, why would they not create a new account when it's so easy to do?
So instead of getting back in 5 minutes, they probably will be back within a day or two - or less if their cheating software also includes getting levels quickly ...
A day or two is a massive deterrent and also unrealistically fast. There has never been a "level cheat", and even with cheats it would take at least 3-4 of grinding PvE to get pirate legend.
This is a lot of effort to go through when you know that account is gonna be banned within an hour if cheats are detected as they should be.
@cptfatsparow594 i just posted this to the forums last week and people were actually trying to say the cheating situation is not that bad LOL https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/topic/181951/cheat-ads-uploaded-daily
@burnbacon [mod edit] you're saying that complaining about cheats to the DEVS encourages the CHEATERS? you think the cheaters are hanging out in the forums just reading everyone's posts until someone complains then they turn on their rage hacks? LOL! The only way for the developers to know how bad cheating has gotten is to complain to them about it, especially if they never play their own game to see the issues first hand. I developed my own reporting system for my own game which sends the report from in game to a channel in my discord for my admins to investigate, so this AAA team has ZERO excuse to not have a legit reporting function or administrative team.
@marinemike Actually, the best and most tangible way to know what level cheater issues are on is through player reports with evidence. Verified incidents of cheating.
As for your own game, let's get back to reality here please - you can't compare the way you do. Firstly, your game isn't structured the same way as this game is. Secondly, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're not dealing with thousands of people on thousands of servers at any given time. A system that works for one game will not automatically work for another when the differences are massive. It is always going to be easier for small indie games to handle things like this for two reasons - scale and the supply/demand perspective. Cheaters can sell a cheat software for an 'AAA game' for hundereds of dollars per 'copy'. That's not the case for smaller and/or indie games. They will therefor not be targeted on the same level.
@mopwieldinghedgehog like i said, the game has no IN GAME REPORT FUNCTION so you saying to report with evidence is nonsense when you have to come to a website or forum OFF THE GAME just to make a report. It doesn't matter the size of the game, it's about being proactive or reactive as a developer, and SOT has been nothing but reactive - severely delayed. They have moderators for this forum so why not the actual game? My report system that sends the message from the game to my discord, if I can do that solo any AAA studio can do it easily, they just don't care enough. And yes my games have had thousands of players at times and guess what I did - expanded my moderator team!
@marinemike said in Something needs to be done about cheaters.:
the game has no IN GAME REPORT FUNCTION
In-game reporting is a feature, here's the UI stream if you're wondering how:
Settings - Report a Player - Start a Report - In-Game Report - Player's Gamertag you want to report here
After reporting you can add evidence by quoting the reference code whilst writing a report on the support site.
After reporting you can add evidence by quoting the reference code whilst writing a report on the support site.
I think this part is where players get upset. Even tho its clear and simple, a lot of players this day in age dont want to do all that work.
They want a simple point and click Report and want what they reported to be taken ASAP.Any extra step is similar to those not wanting to use a Self checkout. "I dont work here"
I do that fairly often. I have OBS running in the background when I play SOT and with a 3-5 minute buffer. I would say this: Rare only responds with a "we've banned this account" if and only if the cheater is being outrageously blatant with their exploits.
However, if the cheater can in any way introduce a smidge of doubt you get the "thanks we've passed this to security" response.
Here is a video of suspicious behaviour: https://youtu.be/bYLkA1lt9kg
The response was so tepid that I haven't touched the game since. I would be less peeved about this if the penalty for losing in hourglass wasn't so significant (you lose time and the allegiance you could have kept from a streak). And surprisingly none of Season 19 addresses this.
Poor.
@rare-jumbie When a ticket gets escalated to security it also means that unfortunately there can be no follow-up response. An escalation doesn't necessarily mean that no action is going to be taken.
@marinemike It takes a handful of people to moderate forums. If you're going to put an 'in game moderator' on every server, you need thousands of people. You do see how that isn't feasible right?
Also, wether you feel it nonsense or not- reports with sufficient evidence is still the best way to assess the situation as we're talking about verfied instances. Socials and/or forum posts from people in various stages of upset- warranted or not - isn't tangible nor verified encounters.
@mopwieldinghedgehog Or you can handle the root cause of your problem, and actually fix the flaws in the system that allow for cheats in the first place y'know, cuz other multiplayer games do not have this big of a problem due to having actual moderation. Even the free ones that let you make a new acc if you've been banned. There's really not an excuse for this, same with the server issues.
@mopwieldinghedgehog Yea no I saw that, I just ignored it because you are obviously wrong, Rare is a MULTI-BILLION dollar company, you can win an arms race against the like 4 dudes making cheats
@chaoticpeach450 Firstly, Microsoft is a multi billion dollar company. Rare LTD is not. Secondly, if you choose to not believe what I am telling you and what Drew has addressed in several dev update videos, there is absolutely nothing I can do about that.
I'm aware that there is action going on behind the scenes.
I have no doubt that the developers behind Sea of Thieves are incredibly talented and hardworking, and that they have spent possibly tens of thousands of man-hours in trying to tighten up this cheating problem.
But that doesn't change how it feels to see no justice or no immediate (even delayed!) acknowledgement of the issue. I would be much happier if a response was along the lines of "indeed this is suspicious and we will be passing it on to security." Even acknowledging that something isn't suspect is better feedback than the half hearted, canned response that I get.
With the whole 'arms race' thing aside, the mechanics of Hourglass can still benefit from having the developers address (and shorten) the length of time it takes to restock and get back into the fight. It's only made worse when losing to cheaters or suspect behaviour, but it still is slog to have to do it on every loss.
Drew said this was being addressed a month or so ago, but all of the insiders updates have been around brand new (and quite frankly uninteresting) features.
@mopwieldinghedgehog First of all Microsoft is a multi trillion dollar company, at 3.5 Trillion, Rare was recently sold for 70 Billion dollars which means it is worth billions of dollars, that is enough money to solve any problem, that's enough money to literally buy out the hacker, and their silence, to avoid copycats, that is enough to hit the hacker with a SLAAP suit, or any other multitude of things, and still have almost 70 billion left over, Rare and the corpos that own it, are Multi-Billion dollar companies, they can without a doubt absolutely Even if we just assume they only have the amount of money this game specifically made, and no other money from any of their other excessively popular IP's, that is still MORE than enough money to handle this problem.
Arms race only works when you are on equal footing with an enemy, this is like pretending the kid playing with a gun shaped stick in his back yard is in an arms race with the US military. "we cant solve it we're just an itty bitty mega-corp," doesn't really fly with people who understand truly how much a BILLION dollars truly is, and the amount of power that gives you. For reference a million minutes ago was February 14th 2024, a billion minutes ago was September 12, 121 CE the height of the Roman Empire. Like you don't get to get away with "we can't we don't have the resources" when compared to the average hacker you have unlimited resources.
@chaoticpeach450 said in Something needs to be done about cheaters.:
@mopwieldinghedgehog First of all Microsoft is a multi trillion dollar company, at 3.5 Trillion, Rare was recently sold for 70 Billion dollars which means it is worth billions of dollars....
You appear to be very confused. Microsoft bought Rare in 2002 for $375 million, which is about $670 million today. It has not sold Rare. Nor is Rare worth "billions".
You may be getting it mixed up with Microsoft's $69 billion purchase of Activision Blizzard King in 2022. Which to be clear, puts MS in a hole for that amount, which they have to recoup. And while it's true the company is worth trillions, they are still a publicly traded company and investors want profits. It's most likely, given current MS trends, that they are less inclined to invest in gaming to a large degree anymore and are more interested in AI (at least until that bubble bursts).
@rare-jumbie I understand what you mean about the reply. However without proper investigation by safety and security, support can not give a reply that in any way confirms or denies the validity of the evidence provided. Let's play out a scenario. Someone files a player report and are convinced the player is cheating. They get a reply along the lines you suggest.
After investigation it turns out it is not cheating (it was lag or they didn't see another pirate standing behind them etc etc). The reporter notices that the player they reported isn't banned and comes back all upset arguing 'you even agreed that it was suspicious then you do nothing?'. You can imagine where that rabbit hole goes if the reporter is upset enough, right?
I know it can sometimes seem cold or dismissive but responses have to be as close to neutral as possible and - most importantly - stick to known facts in scenarios like this with good reason.
As for improvements to hourglass - yes Drew mentioned it in the dev update. What he also clarified was that this was in early stages at the time meaning it will take time before you see it in insiders and later in game. As frustrating as it can be on the player end, these things take time.
cuz other multiplayer games do not have this big of a problem due to having actual moderation.
I have yet to play a single game that does this. GTA, CoD, Minecraft, Fortnite, BattleField. All big games..all have cheats that never get Moderated. They still there even if they claim "We banned 400,000 cheats"
@realstyli https://xyvir.medium.com/microsoft-sells-rareware-to-activision-blizzard-for-70-billion-dollars-immediately-preceding-merger-ae8a3d4c62ea
Though even still, even if it was just millions that is still wayyyyyyyy to much money to pretend like its an "arms race" to try and do anything at all to stop cheaters. Millions is still virtually infinite resources compared to the regular person that's making these hacks.
@chaoticpeach450 ah yes, microsoft sells “Rareware” to Activision Blizzard even though:
1 - the company is called Rare ltd and has been since the 2000’s rareware is their old 1990’s name
2 - in 2022 microsoft already announced it was purchasing Activision Blizzard and this actually completed in 2023So this would mean if that news source was correct (which it isn’t) Microsoft sold Rare to…. Itself.
And even more so, this would mean that that they payed the same amount of money, to themselves as they shelled out for the company that is the purchasee of “Rareware” according to that article.
Genius move
I can tell you one thing in no universe is Rare valued at the same amount of money that the Activision Blizzard brand is
See, Rare has practically 1 active IP which is SoT
Activision Blizzard has at the least but not limited to:
Call of Duty series
Diablo series
Hearthstone
Heroes of the Storm
Overwatch series
Warcraft series
Candy Crush SagaI honestly didn't want to waste my time breaking it down as it's not a news source, Medium is a blog site. That particular blog post read like fan fiction from someone who doesn't understand how acquisitions, mergers, or monopolies work. I initially thought it was part of the "poison the well" movement but it's too early for that and it's likely just a troll post. Thing is, people do find these "facts" with AI and believe them.
Anyway, yep, Rare doesn't have those resources to throw at this problem. Even if they did, they would need to build a case first (or more likely Microsoft would, as they would be the ones taking action). They'd need to know exactly who the cheatmakers are and where they reside, for starters.
Honestly ezanticheat has ruined this game for me. I don't use any cheats but the load times, the lag, now that it's directly impacting my gameplay and general computer use by blocking my mouse software and canceling rebound right and middle mouse buttons... But I just saw a video on youtube about how nvidias AI is now going to basically allow pixel level scanning and response to gaming so basically people with nvidia can run cheats on an ai hardware level that no anticheat will ever be able to address and its not like Rare can just not allow nvidia users to play the game.... I was partly on board with our new AI overlords but if it's going to have that kind of impact on gaming... Though I avoid competitive games anyway. It's rare I have an encounter with another crew in SoT. The few times I do it's just to mess around but the other people are just dull PvPers anyway.
Sadly it really stinks for those wanting to do hourglass that they have to run into this stuff. I wrote off the mode a long time ago after getting my curses. Though hourglass is pretty old now and so few people still engaging with it because of the neglect and rampant cheating it's no surprise you would run into the same crews. Knowing this dismissive community the solution is simple. By a weaker piece of hardware (an xbox) have a worse playing experience, but turn off cross play so you can only match with other xbox players. IMO that is not a solution to the problem. I would uninstall and quit before even considering owning an xbox.
The issue is with reporting, it takes so long and is so meaningless, after speaking with a cheater they pay a minimum of £9 a day to cheat. They don't cheat on there own PC's the use basically like a Xbox cloud type service that the cheating companies provide so they will likely never get caught, they can also get a new account up and running in minutes of being banned as its not on there own PC. Also the reporting system is wack, i've reported 2 properly so far this week and both accounts got banned, one even sent a message from a different account saying back as he knows we reported them shortly after being banned. But the issue lies with the reporting system, a video clip is much larger than the 50mb you can upload. So you ever have to upload to somewhere like youtube first then send a link or spend time compressing the video to the right file size, this isn't a 2 minute thing to report and with them able to create an account 2 mins later its really kind of pointless.
Rare should have enough info on the cheats now and should be able to do some sort of patch, the fact its been in the game now for what 5-6 years and they haven't done anything is bizarre. People keep complaining about the player base dwindling but its only going to get less and less the more cheaters are allowed in.
If they can litterally fly or zip up and down i really can't see that being that hard to find a patch for, obviously aimbot is a lot harder i would imagine but even then the amount of times people can insta kill you from a boat half a square away i can't see it being that hard to impliment if x shots hit at x distance without a miss then ban.@mopwieldinghedgehog said in Something needs to be done about cheaters.:
@rare-jumbie ... Let's play out a scenario. Someone files a player report and are convinced the player is cheating. They get a reply along the lines you suggest.
After investigation it turns out it is not cheating (it was lag or they didn't see another pirate standing behind them etc etc). The reporter notices that the player they reported isn't banned and comes back all upset arguing 'you even agreed that it was suspicious then you do nothing?'. You can imagine where that rabbit hole goes if the reporter is upset enough, right?
I disagree with your "opening a can of worms / rabbit hole" argument. It's not as if I'm sitting in a board room with the staff where they are obligated to keep conversation on my terms in fear of some sort of reprimanding. We are separated by miles of the Atlantic and they can choose to end a conversation with me as soon as they wish—they do this already by closing a ticket. For them, the outcome is the same, whether they reply to me or not. For me, on the other hand, a more detailed or transparent response shows a level of care without me having to hope that it's happening behind the scenes. It makes a huge difference, and will leave me more willing to engage with their product—and spend money!
As for improvements to hourglass - yes Drew mentioned it in the dev update. What he also clarified was that this was in early stages at the time meaning it will take time before you see it in insiders and later in game. As frustrating as it can be on the player end, these things take time.
He actually says that the first hourglass improvements will be making its way to insiders soon. Let me clarify my previous statement; I'm not asking for it to be in Insiders 4 or 5 weeks later. I'm asking for it to be at least mentioned in the Insiders Season 19 Dev Updates alongside all of the other super important features that somehow took precedence for being mentioned such as:
[Mod edit]There is supposed to be a team dedicated to reviewing existing features and as I recall those revisions should be included in each season. So what's being revised in Season 19 if not Hourglass?
@rare-jumbie I had to remove a part of your post as we are not on the insider part of the forums right now. NDA lift or not, insider details/discussion/conversations still need to be kept to that part of the forum. Not everyone wants to know everything beforehand.
On to the other contents of your post. Firstly - you can disagree with me, that's fine. That does however not change the fact that confirming or denying a player suspicion without proper verification is not a route any responsible company would want to take.
Secondly - soon is subjective. Players will always feel that 'soon' should be much quicker than it in reality is. Things that need insider testing will come to insider when it's good and ready. Not much need mentioning it if it is either not being tester or has not yet been scheduled for testing. Furthermore - a seasonal Dev update is about the themed season and it's planned content. Changes to HG would not be a seasonal based addition.
@MopWieldingHedgehog While the Insider Programme is designed for community testing, I believe its current structure poses a significant risk to the game’s long-term health.
By providing early access to major engine updates, PvP balance shifts, and anti-cheat iterations, studio essentially handing a "manual" to cheat developers...Predictive Exploits: When major engine or code changes are pushed to Insider, it creates a "sniffing" window.
Cheat developers can analyze gaps before the update even hits the live servers, allowing them to have day-one exploits ready.
Anti-Cheat Vulnerability: Testing anti-cheat measures in a semi-public environment gives those who develop "anti-pirate" software a headstart to find workarounds.
By trying to be transparent and community-driven, devs might be making it easier for bad actors to destroy the game?!!We need a more secure way to test core engine and security changes that doesn't serve as a blueprint for those trying to ruin the experience!
HERRING
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