Cheating ?

WeylandLabs

Coming from console and understanding how cheaters from 2016 happened it never crossed my mind that it would continue or keep happening ? I want to apologize for the people who I laughed at for thinking ZOS could stop this ?


I never knew it still existed ...

FeedbackOnly

It's part of their efforts for more communication after the false positives on major trade guilds on PC eu awhile back

ResidentContrarian

Told you guys...a guy literally cheated every week on a different account name in BGs/

Heh, already got to say "told ya so!" once...

BazOfWar

It definitely still happens and I have only noticed it in Ravenswatch cyrodiil as that is where I play.

It isn't rife but there are certain individuals who feel the need to use 3rd party cheats or whatever to get an advantage over everyone else.

I hope that some of those are amongst these bans and if they are then good riddance to bad rubbish.

FeedbackOnly

BazOfWar wrote: »

It definitely still happens and I have only noticed it in Ravenswatch cyrodiil as that is where I play.

It isn't rife but there are certain individuals who feel the need to use 3rd party cheats or whatever to get an advantage over everyone else.

I hope that some of those are amongst these bans and if they are then good riddance to bad rubbish.

Is it only pvp then?

Idinuse

Shokasegambit1 wrote: »

Coming from console and understanding how cheaters from 2016 happened it never crossed my mind that it would continue or keep happening ? I want to apologize for the people who I laughed at for thinking ZOS could stop this ?

I never knew it still existed ...

About time. Glad to see this.

Lephrel

To this day I have never seen anyone cheating in PvP, there was an instance of one guy launching missiles and flying in Grahtwood a couple years ago (pretty awesome ngl), other than that, I have never seen anything.
Given the many threads on false bans already on the forums, I just feel this has probably done more bad than good.

Rowjoh

it's very difficult to spot PVP exploiters and cheaters cos they're heavily masked by lag and de-sync performance issues.

Also appalling balance has enabled god-mode builds which in any other game would be a major cheat scenario.

Fix the lag and balance, and the cheaters will have no place to hide.

biminirwb17_ESO

Cheating is hard to spot if the cheat is not being blatant about it.

The first major case was brought to light by the deliberate meteor spamming to show what could be done.

I have seen a few cases of "how did they do that", was it cheating? Hard to know.

I have fought people with limitless resources, good rotation? Possibly. Or could be cheating.

Cheats will always exist unfortunately but lots of people accused of cheating are not, and many cheats are never spotted by observing gameplay.

WeylandLabs

Rowjoh wrote: »

it's very difficult to spot PVP exploiters and cheaters heavily masked by lag and de-sync performance issues.

Also appalling balance has enabled god-mode builds which in any other game would be a major cheat scenario.

Fix the lag and balance, and the cheaters will have no place to hide.

Exploiting is different from cheating - exploiting is taking advantage from a developers poor code or implementing something that the ZOS team has over looked or will overlook for a period to sell a DLC or market a product.

sparafucilsarwb17_ESO

Shokasegambit1 wrote: »

Rowjoh wrote: »

it's very difficult to spot PVP exploiters and cheaters heavily masked by lag and de-sync performance issues.

Also appalling balance has enabled god-mode builds which in any other game would be a major cheat scenario.

Fix the lag and balance, and the cheaters will have no place to hide.

Exploiting is different from cheating - exploiting is taking advantage from a developers poor code or implementing something that the ZOS team has over looked or will overlook for a period to sell a DLC or market a product.

Exploiting is the same as cheating - you are abusing an unintended bug to gain an advantage and you can definitely be banned for it.

HonestLoverr

PvP is the most infested with all kinds of exploiting, cheating, abusing, 3rd party usage like macros, addons, and all of this is more than ever before. With time passing by its not less cheats that are around. Its more. How can people even think they are gone blows my mind.

A different example: Hackers completely ruined the whole Dark Souls multiplayer aspect forcing the devs to literally pull the plug of all of the servers for every Dark Souls title because of those PvP hackers were able to directly mess with everything on the PC of those who they invaded. For some, a win even through cheats is just not enough. That's how far some people are willing to go anytime,

Seriously, wake up folks! Look up google. Track their websites, their forums and watch their videos about whats available and how they do it. Not hard to notice once you know what you have to look for. Report everything whenever you find something suspicious or obvious. And go straight for reporting ingame too once you get a strange encounter with someone and let ZOS take care about the rest.

The Uninvited

I was actually amazed by the amount of over 400 that got banned. I rarely see cheaters in PVP and for those I'm suspicious about it's sometimes hard to tell if it's lag or cheating.

Some of them I'm sure of though. I mean, if it's always the same player that pulls something off that makes you think "That's simply not possible" then there's only one conclusion.

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

Cheating is hard to spot if the cheat is not being blatant about it.

The first major case was brought to light by the deliberate meteor spamming to show what could be done.

I have seen a few cases of "how did they do that", was it cheating? Hard to know.

I have fought people with limitless resources, good rotation? Possibly. Or could be cheating.

Cheats will always exist unfortunately but lots of people accused of cheating are not, and many cheats are never spotted by observing gameplay.

Good point, especially the limitless resources is hard to tell if it's cheating or not.

SedoUmbra

There is always going to be cheaters in literally every online game especially game with fiercely competitive PvP players or intense grinds - this game has both. As respectfully as possible, it's just naive to think cheating is preventable or no longer occurring.

maxjapank

Limitless resources, over-the-top dmg and mitigation, seems to take little dmg at execution range while burst healing up, and most of all, exceptional speed. I’m very familiar with most sets, vamp mitigation, etc. So I know that some of this is explainable. But it’s the speed recently that surprises me. Even with 2 speed enchants and rapids, they are faster. So what? Does that mean they are using the Wild Hunt ring and/or 3 speed enchants, minor expedition? Possibly. But when certain players have it all, I’m likely to call rubbish. We all know who they are. And yes, they are quite skilled at los and most aspects of gameplay. But so have been many so-called Olympic athletes.

In the end, though, I know that there isn’t much I can do to fight against cheats. So I play to have fun. Avoid them at times cause they often only seem interested in farming newer players, and occasionally join in the X against them to help get them out of the keep.

Rowjoh

Limitless resources along with high speed, good healing, good damage and decent mitigation is a recurring theme.

Sadly God-mode PVP has been possible to build for, for a while now.

8 years of attemted balancing and this is where we are. hmmm...

chrisub17_ESO104

Cheating is mostly preventable. I work on client/server architectures in games like this for a living. Game studios intentionally choose to trust the client in a lot of cases. In other cases they just don't invest the time into writing secure code. Is that a smart business decision? Hard to say actually. Writing secure code takes more time and games tend to have a lot of churn, so writing secure code in games costs more money then most industries if measured over time.

Pretty much all exploits are known, in that we have seen the same ones in games for decades. And technically they usually go back to the same core software bugs. Trusting the client, lack of bounds checking, etc.. Basic stuff.

One of my favorite videos on the history of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhKfnVcVHSk&t=58s

DarrowLykos

Wait until they make cheating in games a criminal offense like they have in certain other countries

Morgaledh

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

deliberate meteor spamming

I nearly peed myself laughing at this... I would have given anything to have seen it. I suppose it would have sucked at the time, but come on... meteor as a spammable? Wait, I have to run to the toilet again.

Mr_Stach

Morgaledh wrote: »

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

deliberate meteor spamming

I nearly peed myself laughing at this... I would have given anything to have seen it. I suppose it would have sucked at the time, but come on... meteor as a spammable? Wait, I have to run to the toilet again.

Morgaledh

Mr_Stach wrote: »

Morgaledh wrote: »

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

deliberate meteor spamming

I nearly peed myself laughing at this... I would have given anything to have seen it. I suppose it would have sucked at the time, but come on... meteor as a spammable? Wait, I have to run to the toilet again.

Exactly. Oh God the lols. Bonus points for imagining Willem Defoe in Cyrod.

FlopsyPrince

Rowjoh wrote: »

it's very difficult to spot PVP exploiters and cheaters cos they're heavily masked by lag and de-sync performance issues.

Also appalling balance has enabled god-mode builds which in any other game would be a major cheat scenario.

Fix the lag and balance, and the cheaters will have no place to hide.

The fact that I can see one person fending off 5+ in IC tells me cheaters are not the primary PvP problem....

buttaface

Maybe the foundational fact of online game cheating:

There are nowhere near as many players cheating as less experienced players think there are, yet far more cheaters than hardcore pvpers will ever admit.

For those who can't tolerate any cheating in their games, MMOs aren't going to make you happy. Better for those sensitive to being cheated to play games with fixed gear/stats. There will be some cheating on those, but far less. Better yet to not worry too much about cheaters and just play MMOs for the casual fun they are, not ESports, will never be Esports.

It is good that ZOS takes steps to admit and address the problem.

maxjapank

Morgaledh wrote: »

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

deliberate meteor spamming

I nearly peed myself laughing at this... I would have given anything to have seen it. I suppose it would have sucked at the time, but come on... meteor as a spammable? Wait, I have to run to the toilet again.

I remember seeing after entering Cyrodiil long ago. It was funny and wasn’t. For a long time, players were commenting on how certain players always seemed to have ults up exceptionally fast. Then those players and others would come to the forums and give every reason other than cheating. Then when one player got fed up, he downloaded a cheat addon and spent the entire day spamming meteor until he was banned. Personally, I think his being banned was the wrong decision. He finally showed publicly what the Devs either knew or ignored. Changes were immediately made after that to break that specific cheat.

W0lf_z13

Morgaledh wrote: »

biminirwb17_ESO wrote: »

deliberate meteor spamming

I nearly peed myself laughing at this... I would have given anything to have seen it. I suppose it would have sucked at the time, but come on... meteor as a spammable? Wait, I have to run to the toilet again.

I remember those days far too well.... walking out of Ash to get blasted by 6 meteors from 1 person... even after death the meteors still hit my corpse..... was funny but all of us there were super ticked off and just ended up full on zerging the player down .... was like 20 of us on 1 person then we all tbagged them for cheating

EnerG

I personally have never seen a cheater or bot farmer (that I could tell) Ive seen a gold seller in chat and that was it. Ill call that a success for their report to ban pipeline of cheating/botting tbh, at least on pc, console it maybe harder to report/ban cause most the posts i see of botters is console

FantasticFreddie

buttaface wrote: »

Maybe the foundational fact of online game cheating:

There are nowhere near as many players cheating as less experienced players think there are, yet far more cheaters than hardcore pvpers will ever admit.

I think for a lot of people it becomes a "boy who cried wolf" situation. If you and half your guild mates get inundated with "rEpOrTeD fOr HaCkInG" enough times, when you know perfectly well you aren't, you start tuning it out.

But we forget, that "boy who cried wolf" story does in fact end with a wolf LOL

chris25602

I feel like there is a threshold just like in real life. Going 5 to 10 over the speed limit mayb you get pulled over probably not. Mount an auto fire spinny gun on your car you are definetly going to jail. Meteor spam yes ban and fix....but the animation canceling is cheating people just need to get off the game.

Pevey

chrisub17_ESO104 wrote: »

Cheating is mostly preventable. I work on client/server architectures in games like this for a living. Game studios intentionally choose to trust the client in a lot of cases. In other cases they just don't invest the time into writing secure code. Is that a smart business decision? Hard to say actually. Writing secure code takes more time and games tend to have a lot of churn, so writing secure code in games costs more money then most industries if measured over time.

Pretty much all exploits are known, in that we have seen the same ones in games for decades. And technically they usually go back to the same core software bugs. Trusting the client, lack of bounds checking, etc.. Basic stuff.

One of my favorite videos on the history of this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhKfnVcVHSk&t=58s

Thank you for posting this. It was a super interesting video. I think an uncaught gold dupe bug of the sort described in the video is a better explanation for the inflation on the PC servers than any other I have seen.

totzummrdave_ESO

I haven't encountered any proof positive cheaters in PvP (only one possible who instakilled me and my buddy with one single volley from a bow at 80 to 90 yards when I and my buddy were about 30 yards apart), but I have witnessed and recorded hundreds of blatant cheaters in PvE. Everything from where someone would lock on to harvest a node from easily 50 yards out so no one else could select it, then close in to gather it, to watching several nodes being harvested simultaneously from solo players who never even dismounted. They would literally ride up to a spot, stop and poof, all nodes in their vicinity would instantly auto harvest without getting off their mount. And then there are the multiboxers and macro botters...

WeylandLabs

I feel there is a difference from banning bot script accounts, and legit cheaters that are players. In this case it was actual players... That's the concerning part.