Will ZoS ever fix Cheat Engine use?

Rohamad_Ali

I've not logged in log enough or recorded video in years so I will ask the community if they feel cheats are finally under control here. How do you feel about the current fairness in ESO?

Edit to add: Just read the june 3rd report from Jessica after posting this. Obviously its not fixed. Will ZoS ever close up the way these cheaters exploit the game permanently?

SeaGtGruff

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing in the game that makes you say "Obviously its not fixed"?

kypranb14_ESO

In my four thousand plus hours on PC, I have never once witnessed cheat engine use. These four thousand hours span from 2017 to current. I've witnessed bugs, game-breaking balance issues with sets and classes, and players the outclass me in skill by leagues, but never cheat engine.

I do believe I saw a youtube video of something cheat-related back when I played on Xbox, but that was before server-side stuff was implemented.

MaraxusTheOrc

I have played ESO since the beta and have never encountered someone that seemed to be cheating. I don’t know what you’re seeing or doing where this is a profoundly prevalent problem, but me thinks there is bias in your sample.

5cript

I saw someone flying around once. I still dont have the impression that cheating is a big issue in eso.

ChunkyCat

bruh ZoS just banned hundreds of accounts for cheating with third party apps, right before High Isle release.

They made a post about it. It’s pinned up top.

Kory

kypranb14_ESO wrote: »

In my four thousand plus hours on PC, I have never once witnessed cheat engine use. These four thousand hours span from 2017 to current. I've witnessed bugs, game-breaking balance issues with sets and classes, and players the outclass me in skill by leagues, but never cheat engine.

I do believe I saw a youtube video of something cheat-related back when I played on Xbox, but that was before server-side stuff was implemented.

So what are the ways you would personally recognize cheat engine use?

Amottica

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

Edit to add: Just read the june 3rd report from Jessica after posting this. Obviously its not fixed. Will ZoS ever close up the way these cheaters exploit the game permanently?

If you read her post then it should be clear that Zenimax does not take cheating lightly.

The title suggests you are aware of or strongly feel cheating is still a major problem in ESO. I am curious if you have hardly played the game in years what is this based on?

kypranb14_ESO

Kory wrote: »

So what are the ways you would personally recognize cheat engine use?

Unless it's very blatant cheating, like flying or phasing through physical objects/terrain on demand, I probably wouldn't identify it as someone using cheat engine. I'm sure there are under the radar cheat engine users, if I had to guess people modifying their stats or something, but there is no real way to tell them apart from an excellent player.

I'd say the bot farms are cheating too, but I haven't encountered one in a while, and I don't believe the bot farms require cheat engines, if it's anything like Runescape was back in the day.

LordRukia

Do you understand how cheat programs work? New ones get developed, then developers have to find out how to stop them. Its a never ending battle not some simple lever they can pull. Game breaking cheaters are 1 in a million, worst thing you'll most likely ever see in ESO is the bot farmers collecting herbs or killing trash mobs. Every MMO has this issue but its rare even to see them.

Rohamad_Ali

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing in the game that makes you say "Obviously its not fixed"?

The post Jessica made about banning 400 accounts for third party cheat programs pinned at the top pretty much just confirmed it, unless they unban all 400 accounts as say it's a mistake. I was warned before coming back on another game that people were still using cheats. That's why I asked originally an then edited my post after discovering Jessica's post.

rpa

Whatever ZoS does or does not about cheating, they are unlikely to give specific information about cheats and exploits they target while swinging the banhammer. Letting the world know they do detect and ban players using cheat X would just be free advertising for cheats Y and Z.

Rowjoh

Genuine question:

I understand there is a detection protocol server side which pings a red flag if certain cheat tech is active, but does any player posting on the forums and in threads like these know exactly how to to recognise a cheat in-game?

PVE: I've seen Bots and can recognise one but other than that cant recal seeing anything that made me think 'cheat'.

PVP: Very tricky as the ever-present lag and de-sync issues mask a lot of what otherwise would be a clear cheat. Plus the balance is so bad its possible to build 'god-mode', where damage, speed, sustain and damage mitigation are all high-end which once upon a time would not be possible and would therefore be a clear indicator of cheating.

Mayrael

Ok just FYI what cheating programs can and can't do.

They can automatically manipulate the character, and can change any game setting loaded into local memory (this varies depending on the game you target).

What can't they do?
They cannot affect game settings determined by the server, they cannot modify database records.

What does this mean? Well, all settings such as GCD, skil costs, damage, character stats, amount of gold, items, etc. etc. cannot be modified by such programs because it is determined by the server. You can, for example, change the amount of gold displayed, but it will only be the displayed amount and not the actual database record.

And now to make it not so beautiful, I have somewhere on disk recordings of an obvious cheater, who jumped from the outer wall on the inner keep, ran above the speed cap and jumped 10 times further than normal (it was not bunny hopping), but the recording is quite old - from a few years ago.

GrizzlyTank

If someone uses cheat engine to remove the crotch flap I'm not even going to complain.

PvP_Exploiter

I haven't seen a cheater in years on PC EU.

Hlaaluna

I been playing since 2014 and never seen anything that I would identify as cheating. Seen some graphical glitches but a reload ui always got rid of it so figure it was just a glitch.

Rowjoh

so, does anyone know exactly what a cheat looks like and can describe it specifically, say in the last 12 months?

Amottica

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

SeaGtGruff wrote: »

Out of curiosity, what are you seeing in the game that makes you say "Obviously its not fixed"?

The post Jessica made about banning 400 accounts for third party cheat programs pinned at the top pretty much just confirmed it, unless they unban all 400 accounts as say it's a mistake. I was warned before coming back on another game that people were still using cheats. That's why I asked originally an then edited my post after discovering Jessica's post.

That post by Jessica confirmed that Zenimax takes cheating seriously and takes action against it. It does not by any stretch demonstrate widespread cheating.

I would also suggest hearsay from people playing other games is not a great source of facts.

LashanW

I have seen a cheater in Cyrodiil, they were using a jump hack. He jumps and before he starts falling, he jumps again (normally this is not possible). So he could basically jump any vertical distance.
I saw him go near the outer wall of a keep (from the outside) and dude just jumped like 20m in the air and stepped onto the outer wall. This was deep behind enemy lines and the keep was not flagged. I was watching in sneak and took a screenshot. Unfortunately I didn't have the means to video record at the time.

It wasn't even some random fresh account, it was a CP1400+ player with five stars on the alliance rank (one of them Grand Overlord fellows). I fully stopped caring about Cyrodiil that day.

This was ~13 months ago on PC-EU.

Caupo

Jump cheat sounds useful, at least then I could finally complete Imperial Prison dungeon

P.S. Huge was my disappointment that after many repeats of long and tiresome battle with Flesh Abomination, which I finally did manage to kill, just to discover that the way forward is blocked by stupid gates with 2 levers

Ingenon

Until we know more details, which I believe we aren't going to get from ZOS, I don't think we know how big a problem this 400 plus account ban was.

For example, if these 400 plus accounts were all PvP players in Cyrodiil, and only on the PC megaservers ...

What is the pop limit on Cyrodiil most popular campaign? About 80 per faction?

deleted220614-000183

Hello friends.
Just couple words about cheating in online games in general.

1. What Cheat Engine does - it is recognizing values stored by game client in (PC) memory and changing them to different ones
2. What is the consequence - client controlled behavior can be manipulated (for example changing of coordinates results in abnormal movement speed, dropping through floor and hiding underground, flying, ignoring obstacles, moving instantly from spot to spot)
3. How can other players observe - virtually no chance. Especially when players are hiding underground with changed radius of attacks (for example they can use melee attacks as ranged with infinite range and grab loot with infinite range)


What makes the whole thing even more complicated is the fact that PC gamers runs quite often multiple programs (innocent ones) simultaneously when playing a game and they can fall through textures without cheating, for example because network is not stable and losing packets.
PC memory can make mistakes either (because of the faulty chip or overclocking)

So this is it, very short explanation.

Waylander07

Cheating in ESO is defiantly a thing as a guy was advertising them on Youtube in the last week. There is a discord page where you buy them. Not sure if there is many players cheating in PVP and really don't care because only cowards cheat.
Please don't ask me for link because last time zos banned me for linking it when I was challenged to do so (my Bad)

Belegnole

IMHO to say that you are not going to play a game because some people cheat while playing would leave you few if any games to play. From what I've seen, every game has cheaters. So the companies running the games are constantly working to stop them. As I used to run gaming servers I know what that can be like. So, if you like a game, play it.

Jeffrey530

Genuine question- which online game can guarantee there are no cheaters or cheat engines?

PvP_Exploiter wrote: »

I haven't seen a cheater in years on PC EU.

- says PVP_Exploiter username checks out (jk havent seen one in ages as well)

SirLeeMinion

Caupo wrote: »

... I could finally complete Imperial Prison dungeon

Unless they've changed it in the past year or so, you can jump from the side of the gate onto the head of one of the (still alive) NPCs and over. Totally not worth doing more than once, though.

Rohamad_Ali

I assume the players posting here that never seen cheating in ESO are newer. They had a mass CE display years ago to bring the situation to light. People flying, invincible ect. They proved it was possible for a whole weekend. After that things got better. Perhaps if you weren't around during Jabberwockey (forget spelling) an shortly after Thornblade, you may not understand. Thank you all for your replies though.

Wise_Will

Didn't know there were cheats for this game until they posted about it

DagenHawk

Ignore those flying Argonians ....there is no cheating in ESO.

Malkiv

Rohamad_Ali wrote: »

I assume the players posting here that never seen cheating in ESO are newer. They had a mass CE display years ago to bring the situation to light. People flying, invincible ect. They proved it was possible for a whole weekend. After that things got better. Perhaps if you weren't around during Jabberwockey (forget spelling) an shortly after Thornblade, you may not understand. Thank you all for your replies though.

Been here since beta. You can check my profile. After the CE debacle, player statistics and calculations were moved server-side, rendering CE useless for those needs. Most cheating is in the form of scripts that automate processes, and forms of packet manipulation. These are things that CE does not do, and the reason why there’s a market for programs outside of CE now. You can still use CE to spoof client-side events, but that’s local machine only, and no one else will see that. I can show you what CE is capable of if you’d like. I use it heavily for Bannerlord. But those calculations are performed client-side, then sent to the server and checked. It’s just a different process than ESO. And it’s a very long process, with A LOT of digging through the game trees to find exactly what set of variables control something and then targeting them so you don’t have to do it every single time you boot the game. CE just is not practical for cheating in ESO any longer.