I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!

As a side note, I never use forums, nor have I ever felt the need to use the forums before, But I wasnt sure where to express this and have someone notice.
I am hopeful that Rare sees that there is a big issue and are working on it. I wanted to just express my gameplay experience with it and I do hope things get better with some kind of anti cheat.

Thank you

Hg really suffers from lack of interest since the beginning

at best it's repeat fights that may or may not be enjoyable and at worst it's a bunch of cheating depending on the area

The content was built to be super grindy but nothing about the experience really supports that. No real way to ever get the kind of interest they would need to improve the content significantly and cheating is kind of a forever thing to some degree even though people keep repeating "anticheat" over and over.

Imo there will be bans and then cheats will come back but without high interest in hg and the organic environment as a whole there aren't enough people playing the game as designed to dilute the cheating and other issues.

Cheating is amplifying the already growing frustrations with performance of the game.

Their leaning towards casual play and pushing out more skilled/extreme play is likely the only sustainable direction.

The casual experience is still pretty solid for a lot of people, people that just sink inexperienced pirates still have that, but when it comes to risk, challenge, more dedicated grinding, it's not in a good spot to support people playing that way.

@callmebackdraft said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

@wolfmanbush said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

Hg really suffers from lack of interest since the beginning

With all due respect, you keep saying this but we simply have no numbers to say it is true or false.

I play my fair share of HG ever single week and everytime i have an absolute max of 5 minute wait time, usually its about 1 or two minutes when diving.

This is both in the EU regions and US regions

People running into the same few people over and over

both major changes in HG were literally based on low participation in HG, same faction fighting and expanded stamps

The mass amounts of lower experienced players not getting quality "mmr" matches because there aren't enough people playing at their skill level to support them.

The forums and other social areas have been full of frustrated players with lower experience not finding matches where they have a chance, that is entirely because of a mass lack of interest in the content.

A number doesn't determine the quality of people's experience, the experience does. People can throw 30 million players out there, they can throw "this many steam this and this many logged in that" but all that matters is the experience and HG suffers from a lack of interest, that is exactly why cheating is so commonly seen because it's really easy for a small group of people to do a lot of damage in low participation content.

@callmebackdraft said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

@wolfmanbush said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

@callmebackdraft said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

@wolfmanbush said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

Hg really suffers from lack of interest since the beginning

With all due respect, you keep saying this but we simply have no numbers to say it is true or false.

I play my fair share of HG ever single week and everytime i have an absolute max of 5 minute wait time, usually its about 1 or two minutes when diving.

This is both in the EU regions and US regions

People running into the same few people over and over

If i have 10 battles back to back generally i only meet the same ship once, and sometimes twice

both major changes in HG were literally based on low participation in HG, same faction fighting and expanded stamps

Not necessarily low participation rates, however the playerbase choice for faction to fight for was majorly skewed this made for poor matchmaking times since we couldn’t encounter the same faction

The mass amounts of lower experienced players not getting quality "mmr" matches because there aren't enough people playing at their skill level to support them.

This doesn’t show a low interest rate in general, it shows a lower amount of “lesser skilled” people having interest, again i don’t have the numbers i can just speak from my own and my several crew mates experiences and we never fail to get matches in an acceptable amounts of time even on non-peak times for any of the regions we sail in.

The forums and other social areas have been full of frustrated players with lower experience not find matches where they have a chance in, that is entirely because of a mass lack of interest in the content.

Well yes, but this doesn’t show a general lack of interest but as explained above a lack of interest by that group of players.

If i compare it to back in the day with arena where we had 20 server merges and still had to wait for over an hour to start a match…

You are examining your experience specifically

Nobody, including myself, is saying that nobody enjoys the experience or that every area is a problem area.

Season 9 was all about trying to get people to actually play this game as designed, take risks because very few were taking risks, doing world events because very few were doing world events. (something I have talked about here for years) Log in numbers high, 30 million this and that, but the organic environment had unsustainable participation. Numbers and an individual's experience do not paint the entire picture. Some people have enjoyable experiences all the time, activity all the time, that doesn't mean there aren't issues in the environment.

An example, I was bringing up meg spawn issues well over a year before it became a common narrative, other people would pop in and say "I saw 3 I saw 5" but I knew that overall people were seeing less because of all of the signs in the environment. Not just my numbers but I knew some areas were not spawning them at all anymore which would bring down overall encounters for people, that the timer changed which would really bring down encounters for a lot of people. The signs were there of an issue. That's no different here, all the signs are here for a real participation issue in HG, even with some people enjoying their experience and finding the activity.

Low participation has lead to or amplified just about every issue HG has had including cheating.

It's likely gonna get worse in HG, many legit players that stuck with the content are leaving or cutting back on participation, that's gonna be more cheat sightings more often. So other players are gonna see the obvious cheating stuff more in many areas at many different times.

Don't talk about cheating, they will lock the subject and don't do anything about it, thats sad but they still didn't put the report button for cheating or abusive language in game...
i saw a reply for Rare on steam hub for the fact they do care about cheating but thats was the aswnser "They do care but what do you want them to do in the scope of things?"...

@jinaie said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

Don't talk about cheating, they will lock the subject and don't do anything about it, thats sad but they still didn't put the report button for cheating or abusive language in game...
i saw a reply for Rare on steam hub for the fact they do care about cheating but thats was the aswnser "They do care but what do you want them to do in the scope of things?"...

They've acknowledged cheating a few times in different ways. They rarely say much about much when it comes to issues so even the acknowledgment is significant.

Threads don't make the process move along faster.

I had someone give me the ole kegaroo from the sky a couple of days ago, that doesn't mean there needs to be a thread about it. They just moderate threads and repeat threads, that's not denying cheating or ignoring cheating.

@maryjanelove710 said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

The thing that is wild to me about this game, that I have not experienced in any other game, is how high level some of the hackers are in HG. Or seeing someone that is playing tons of paid games in their library. To me that just screams Rare does absolutely nothing about them. I wouldn't mind it as much if they actually got banned but it doesn't really seem like they do. HG is a terrible feature regardless, it needs some serious work if they don't want it to go the way of arena

That, and while other games have cheating, they don't have cheating this extensive.
Anticheats have a hard time picking up aimbots and ESP, but something like noclipping usually generates an instant ban in any other professionally developed game.

@maryjanelove710 said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

The thing that is wild to me about this game, that I have not experienced in any other game, is how high level some of the hackers are in HG. Or seeing someone that is playing tons of paid games in their library. To me that just screams Rare does absolutely nothing about them. I wouldn't mind it as much if they actually got banned but it doesn't really seem like they do. HG is a terrible feature regardless, it needs some serious work if they don't want it to go the way of arena

There are very very few main accounts in this game that are obviously cheating. We dunno how many quietly cheat but it's not a scenario where it's just a bunch of long time mains obviously cheating. You might view them as "sus" but that is an opinion not a fact.

@a10dr4651 said in I love this game, Blatant cheating is getting out of hand! Help rare please!:

The worst part about cheats is how much it actually degrades the trust between crews. People throw hackusations around a lot more now. Alot of potential positive encounters with gg's are ruined by the feeling of being cheated when in fact it was just a better crew. I'm not saying their are no cheaters out there, I've encountered them much more frequently recently but the worst part is those who are accused of it when innocent and it leaves both crews feeling sour. It just spoils the PvP full stop.

This has been long forming though and imo there is a lack of accountability in it. Long before HG people were being irresponsible with accusations when most of the evidence of obvious cheating was just a viral streamer video here or there, or in pockets of activity like competition/tdm/arena.

There was never justification for the kind of accusations that random adventure had, amplified by content creation. People cheating do damage the environment but so do people that were reckless with accusations long before cheating was so blatant.

It blows my mind how many times I've heard partners or other influential content creators say they don't accuse people and accuse people in 2 minutes of time. People actually think calling someone sus instead of a cheater is somehow better or different. That's why so many SoT chats are full of accusations now, they got comfortable with it in social areas. Zero accountability in the accusations.