Did they change their stance on console seasons? Last I saw Blizzard said they don't see the point.
Overwatch
- Thread starter Caliane
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Eidal
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I can see the argument for a token price, like $10-$15. Hackers tend to be pretty destructive in games like this and there really isn't any way to flat out stop them. Ban-waves + account fee seems to be the only functional model.
Zaphid
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Yeah, but Blizzard has never been all that great with rooting out cheaters in the past, so I doubt a box fee would discourage that. Better to just match them against other maphackers or something like that.
Really? I mean, they take their time to do ban waves, but they usually come. The fact that everything you do in Battle.net is tied to their servers I would think makes things easier for them to take action. Was there a SC2 map hack that went unpunished? I know that for WoW, D3, and Hearthstone, they generally ban in waves.
Eidal
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Is there a single company you could point to that "has been great with rooting out cheaters?" Bliz doesn't seem any better or worse than any of the large companies.
Look at CSGO's model; a community review/ban system, box cost, and whatever VAC does behind the scenes. I've played about 30 competitive matches in the last week at the mid-tier level and my games seemed quite fair and fun. If anyone was cheating against me it was so subtle that I didn't notice.
I heard Titanfall does that cheater vs cheater thing, and if you have any links to articles about how it worked out, I'd be curious. It seems like a shadowban, but even allowing for most cheaters to be retards... you really think people won't quickly figure out that their account was flagged after their 2nd match with 4 aimbotters and 10 maphackers?
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Meh for D3 they ban way too infrequently for the bans to mean anything, especially since there's no real over time progress so all you lose is the price of the box. Wow is pretty good but it's a mmo with a sub so not too surprising. HS I don't know if people still bot that, they used to then they banned people then they unbanned them and reset their progress or whatever. Can't really bot that much in that game though since gold gains are mostly tied to arena which is hard to bot I guess.
SC2 has had maphacks since the start, don't think it's ever changed. HotS which uses the same engine has the same map hacks. If you get reported, you get banned, eventually, but it takes a while and if you're not too obvious about it, then you probably don't get banned for a while.
Their track record is so so. I find FPS tend to be ruined even more by hacks though than say botting pve shit/F2P currency does or even map hacks do. I mean sure you know where your opponent is, but you still need to kill him, that's like the equivalent of wall hacks in a FPS. But aimbots are on another level, they will ensure you wins regardless(I guess less so in a team objective based game, but I'm sure some characters will with an aimbot like most of the high damage ones). I don't think a box cost would do a whole lot against it though. I mean it'd help for sure, but it'd also probably hurt their profits so they need to weight hackers impact versus profits and figure out which makes more money. I'd assume F2P with a solid cash shop is gonna be more than B2P with less hackers though.
Blizzard completely rewrote a ton of SC2 which completely broke all maphacking and did far more than their typical just moving offsets so a hacker can update their maphack in 5 minutes and distribute it. From what I understand the new code is much harder to break than the first SC2 which basically was just adjusting the variable for fog-of-war in memory.
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Seems they did in fact remember they used to have euro servers before and didn't need as much time as originally planned to set them up, so EU alpha/beta/promotion thing is also starting on oct 27th:Overwatch Beta Coming Soon - News - Overwatch
Probably still won't be a whole lot of people in but I guess this way they can invite a bunch of high profile euro streamers, which there's quite a lot of.
Probably still won't be a whole lot of people in but I guess this way they can invite a bunch of high profile euro streamers, which there's quite a lot of.
Eidal
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Aimbots absolutely shatter competitive 5v5 CSGO matches. It's almost impossible to kill someone with the full array of hacks enabled. However, doing this will be a fast track to the Tribunal system in which players review games and vote guilty or not guilty. Smart hackers play carefully and toggle on/off to gain a quick insurmountable advantage at clutch moments. It's tougher to catch these guys.
That being said, I've played a bunch of CSGO over the last few weeks and at no point in any of my games could I have conclusively said someone was hacking, and 90 percent of my games were good matches that felt as if they could have gone either way. I'm happy, at this point, with Valve's combination of VAC and player tribunal. I think if you took away the box cost then many more people would hack their hearts away and make a new account as soon as they got caught.
You'd think Valve could also investigate a player based upon the activity on Steam. Like did this person just create a new account, just purchased CSGO and now 3 weeks later is rampantly being accused of hacking? I'd say this person is probably hacking. Where as someone with a few years old steam account and many games probably would get a bit more benefit of the doubt.
Eidal
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Of course they could -- but the problem is it still takes hours to catch that guy and meanwhile he's left a trail of broken games and pissed off players in his path. 3 hours of hacking in CSGO is a lot of grief. I'm not sure how familiar you are with the cliche "just want to make people mad" player-type, but these guys play SOLELY to piss people off and they'd absolutely be thrilled if they could just spin up a new account every hour and smash a few games before having to create a new account.
And your 3 week time span is horrendous -- that's hundreds of ruined games.
The long and short of it is that despite the resources available to Valve, there is a huge profit in developing hacks that the VAC system can't detect and I'd be surprised if a new undetectable hack doesn't come out almost immediately after the last set was figured out. That's why Valve relies on a defense-in-depth: VAC, the Overwatch system (tribunal), and a box cost.
Derpa
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PC gamer article on hacks is still pretty good:Hacks! An investigation into the million-dollar business of video game cheating - PC Gamer
But goes to show why I stay away from FPS games that use matchmaking only, having admins on a server really helps clip most hackers.
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Yeah I do agree with that, having lobbies and admins running servers easily lets you kick hackers, even if once in a while, a legit good player will get kicked from the server for "hacking". Not a huge problem though because it's only off that particular server and you can go find another and stuff. And if you're definitely hacking, you could still have a report systems, hopefully tied to a replay system where you can report someone and it sends a replay of the game to the report thing so they can check it out.
Overwatch won't have that though, it'll have private lobbies but from what I've read it's more like the moba custom games lobbies where you just invite people and it's not public, and no one has admin powers on the server. We'll see though I guess but not holding my breath.
I guess once you get to ranked matchmaking at higher levels, it won't be nearly as much of an issue(due to I assume their F2P system involving buying heroes which means the longer you play, the more you lose) but it'll also mean the non ranked matchmaking/early matchmaking is gonna be a hacker shitfest with terrible games. Kinda like mobas, but with hackers instead of feeders. Or well, on top of feeders since I'm sure people will still do stupid shit like feeding, afking, griefing when possibly(not sure how the abilities work for griefing but some might actually be annoying).
1000x this. In 4-5 years as an admin on my LAN cafe's CS 1.5-Source server I kicked a legitimate hacker twice. Shit just didn't happen on servers with active admins. Admin tools were a little crazy too in CS. Could rebind a players keys from console ^.^. Only had to kick two because the other five or so left after spinning in place toggling their flashlights for a few rounds.
Flip side of that wasn't even a big deal. Can't even count the number of times I got kicked off a server for "hacking" and it's some of my fondest memories. 1XX - 0 on playgound_x in a pub with half the cafe watching over my shoulder until a player literally called a server admin on the phone to come kick me. Insta kick after a pure luck one in a million headshot on scoutknives after spinning 180 in a panic and firing blind while being knifed. Dedicated servers made the old school FPSs what they were. This fucking lobby bullshit is pure faggotry. Luckily age, brain damage, and the trashing of my fine motor skills as a result means I don't even play FPSs anymore.
Considering the emails from Blizzard are almost always lagging behind when they actually flag your account the best way to see if you're in tomorrow is probably via the launcher