[Suggestion] aimbot detector

There are a number of means by which someone could jump to such a conclusion. Confirmation bias, rage, denial, etc.

While human traits will likely get the brunt of the blame the most in this topic for coming to an assumption like that, I'd like to look at it from a different angle, where minor details can add up to make someone think another person is aimbotting when in fact he's not.

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Take a gamer with a mid-range computer and default equipment. Now take a gamer of the same skill, but with the best computer money can buy and the best monitor, best mouse, etc.

Lets look at ways in which Gamer 2 can have an advantage over Gamer 1.

-Gamer 1 has a default mouse. Two buttons, maybe a scroll wheel, enough for most needs. Meanwhile, Gamer 2 has a 8 button mouse with Adjustable DPI settings (1000-6000 DPI) which can be changed at the push of a button in the middle of a game. Gamer 2, having a better ability to fine-tune his mouse output thanks to his hardware, gets an advantage over Gamer 1.
-Gamer 1 has a 60hz monitor, his game runs an average of 30 FPS in combat situations. Gamer 2 has a 120hz monitor, and runs at an average of 123 FPS in combat situations. Gamer 2 will be able to see and react slightly faster than Gamer 1 can, and the smoother gameplay of his rig lets him aim with more precision, so that's an advantage.
-Gamer 1 uses the reflex sights. Gamer 2 put a dot on the center of his monitor. The reflex sights in this game are wrong, so Gamer 2 will be able to shoot on the move with greater accuracy than Gamer 1. Another advantage.
-Gamer 1 has a really bad DSL connection. Gamer 2 has a really good fiberwire connection. Gamer 2 gets his updates faster than Gamer 1 does, so that's a bit of an advantage, though client-based hit detection can conspire to swing that advantage around if it decides to depict Gamer 2 running into a wall because of lag on Gamer 1's end. Still overall an advantage for Gamer 2.

Take those advantages, and enter the game.

Gamer 1 runs around a biolab. He's having an awful day. Gamer 2 seems to be everywhere and always knows where he's at, and it seems like he kills him instantly (IRL, Gamer 2 headshotted him with his greater precision thanks to his mouse, "Norweigan Aimbot" and the latency and client-based hit detection makes it seem like Gamer 2 is killing him instantly). It seems like Gamer 2 is always the one killing him, and he can never seem to kill him no matter what he does. This isn't fair. He can't possibly be playing fair, he must be cheating. He must be aimbotting! That's the only way he could possibly be killing Gamer 1! And it's not just Gamer 1! The other gamers are having trouble with Gamer 2 as well, so that just seals the deal, he's an aimbot!

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It may not be the answer for this particular player, but hardware advantages can afford players advantages over others, and these advantages can be misconstrued as cheating. Or it could be the player's been killed by liliolz12345678 over and over again and the confirmation bias and denial that he's not that good making him think everyone else is cheating. Or it could be everyone else is cheating.

That a cheater can exist in a game and get away with it is a very toxic thing. Person sucks in that poison and all of a sudden the answer to everything is that everybody must be cheating and he's the last upstanding person. It's like the Red Scare of Internet Gaming. Suddenly your perception of reality is warped and you start looking at everyone and everything with suspicion. That person publicly opposes cheating. But that's what he wants everyone to think, he must be cheating like crazy and wants to keep it all to himself!

It doesn't really take a lot of legitimate cheaters to ruin the perception of a game for a person entirely, just one or two to seed the idea that maybe those people who seem to be really good at the game aren't really so good after all...and then from then on, everyone and anyone is the enemy in disguise.

So would about 99.9% of the playerbase, I think we all get those from time to time, just have to laugh.

I've only reported people when I see the reverse of that Wrel video explaining lag.

For example, I arrived at a Bio Lab with just one VS (using my mossy radar) so I knew about where he was. I climbed the tree after landing on the south pad, and he began firing at me *before* I even poked my head above the tree top. Judging by where his radar blip was, there was no way he had line of sight to even see me come in(he was not an inf, and no darts were nearby) let alone shoot before I showed my head, unless he was using one of those aimbot/wallhacks that highlights people through walls. Look up aimbots/wallhacks on youtube, you'll see what I mean.

Just report and move on. I try to give people the benefit of the doubt, but constant *tinkTinkTink* headshots from 300m, or Lib gunners 'getting lucky' at 400m on a moving mossie a few times in a row deserve a /report. Let them sort it out

A perfectly good aimbot detector already exists. It is right here:
https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428021759059989185/killboard

Anybody you see who has killed me is obviously aimbotting

For my diligent services to SOE I would like a Higby decal

What about ESP villians?

I struggle to believe this game had 'good' cheat detection. Obvious stuff sure, but I think there are a lot of subtle hacks that go undetected, and SOE seem to run zero anti-cheat software.

I wonder if there are any cheats in PS2 that don't aim for you as such but just help you out a bit by, say, reducing or removing recoil or by tightening your cone of fire. Since all this stuff is done client-side, it should in principle be possible to make such tools, right? I wonder if they exist and how hard it is to detect their usage. Finding hackers who get 100% headshots from 200 meters away is easy, I'm guessing it's not so easy to find those who are a bit smarter about how they do their thing.

Yes there are

https://players.planetside2.com/#!/5428144714698160945/killboard/?view=timeline&filter=kills

i used to use hacks all the time, and they never banned/caught me.

Only use wall hacks (esp). Its undetectable.
and if u wanna use aimbot u better only use shotguns.

That's actually not true at all. You can indeed have a good reason to suspect another player of cheating regardless of their statistics, because it is almost all that is left.
1. The classic rebuttal: Players with consistently poor performance in-game may be more likely to turn to cheating, and therefore already have an established average or below-average profile of statistics. Statistics here are entirely void, even if the player in question is obviously a rampant cheater.
2. Anti-anti-cheat measures: Advanced cheating features, which are logically prioritized after basic functionality is implemented, allows players to mix a portion of the real player's skill in with the automation or emulate human behavior and reaction by deliberately slowing down movement and creating mistakes.
3. Cheater intelligence: No cheater worth his or her salt is going to make him or herself an obvious target. An intelligent cheater would understandably prioritize keeping a low profile and would never exceed an arbitrary threshold of suspicion (such as your 30%/50% numbers above). However, should the cheater accidentally do so, he or she would sacrifice a small amount of their playtime to normalize it.
4. Anti-cheat systems...are just not capable of definitively catching cheaters who may very practically never be caught. Publicly released cheating programs account for the vast majority of detected signatures that result in player bans. But there is a large "underground" community of private programmers who rarely release anything to others beyond basic how-to guides for novice coders. Thus, there needs to be suspicion on the players' and GMs' end to make any meaningful dent (which is still probably too little, though is still be worth the effort) rather than forsaking themselves to a blind, "objective" means of detecting cheaters by their statistics.

The only people you see using the obvious cheats (speed modification, no collision clipping, superhuman aiming, etc.) can probably very easily be categorized in one big category: the suicidal cheater looking to test their effectiveness, understand anti-cheat measures (both automated and manual), boast to others or record in a video, or even as a cheap and quick thrill. The tiny bit remaining are those reckless cheaters that may end up sobering up and reapproaching the game, again as a cheater, more cautiously.

That's not to say that "hackusations" aren't awful. They're a sign of poor sportsmanship, of course, but that's really all they are. They extremely rarely pose any more harm than that, and it's the type of vitriol that a player might unfairly be expected to learn to deal with during his or her competitive multiplayer gaming life.

And this is how APB died even with punkbuster.

'Echo' might be a slang term for it, but it's actually a result of the netcode. Specifically a result of the client side hit detection using interpolation.

The alternative is for the server to try and predict the movement of other players, but this doesn't work very well when people can change direction and speed very quickly. Instead, each round trip the server does (depends on your ping), it updates your location, your movements and anything you've done (like shoot somoene) then syncs up ("attempts" to place each event in order) with everyone elses, then passes it on to the other clients. It's not 100% accurate, and so it's possible for you and another player to kill each other at the same time.

If you have 20 ping, but your enemy has 200 ping. It is absolutely possible to be killed legitimately 1/4 a second after ducking behind cover. This is not to your advantage unless there is packet loss somewhere along the way in your favour. It makes it almost dead even. If you have lower ping, you will be better synced with the server and your bullets will register with the server more frequently. While this is technically an advantage, it won't stop you from being killed by someone with better reflexes and a better aim even if they have twice your ping. Your best hope with a lower ping is that you and the faster player kill each other at the same time instead of you being killed first.

Interpolation is extremely frustrating, I know. It's far too lenient in most games. But the alternative is much, much worse. This is the trade-off for having an fps game that isn't played on a LAN.

As for the OP... Most of my friends play in semi-pro leagues for other fps games. When you watch their screen you would swear black and blue that they were wallhacking, aimbotting or cheating somehow. But it's all legit, they're just extremely good. They put me to shame, and I'm no slouch at FPS.

Edit: Obviously hackers exist... They're just extremely rare in PS2 from what I've seen. COD on the other hand, is absolutely littered with blatant botters. But they don't last long before they're banned.

The problem is that they keep coming back.

I don't mean to mock you OP, but don't you think that SOE is waaaaaaay ahead of you on that front? Game developers were doing that since year 2000...

Interesting strain of thought, this could lead one to think culturally established morals and ethics within a certain countrys society may directly influence their sense of what others percieve as fair behavior.

Ps2 devs talk about how they have these wonderful stats, yet there are players with stats that are clearly outside of standard play. And they have been playing for months and months - anti-cheat detection except for the most blatant cheats is a joke. I don't want to get into opinions on the Dasanfall site, but it's pretty 'interesting' to see just how excessive some of the cheating is when some incredible accuracy numbers by a few individuals that just hit BR100

And ps2 pop is making it difficult to just redeploy to another fight.

Slightly OT but w/e : A while ago on CS:S, I managed to land a lucky double headshot kill with the basic sniper in one bullet. Turns out that before that, I was running around with a shotgun/deagle combo and I had a pretty good kill streak, involving skill and mostly luck.
When the double headshot kill happened I was banned permanently from the server because I was accused of aimbotting.

I think we all have those holy moments when our luck and skill meets for a minute.

So yeah, outside of those glorious moments, it's mostly the long term stats that have to be suspiscious... But as someone mentionned, you can probably shoot in the sky to lower the overall accuracy or use aimbot that targets the body to avoid having too many headshots. Those people that use tools like this are smart in their own way, and if they're having fun... well good for them. But in the end, they're not really such a big deal because we probably don't see many of then. I only have about a 100 hours of this game and I never suspected anyone of cheating. If someone that kill me used one to do so... It doesn't change anything for me : I'm still having fun. One more death is nothing.