Will SOE do something about ESP hackers?

You Q-spotted him, this gave your general position away. He then looked in that area with his dark-light, a simple sweep of the area around the tower then he came up - back up there you even moved, you were easy to see.

Should not have Q-spotted him

I like your reasoning and well written response.

Guys that come into OPs thread just to shoot things down seem suspect. What are the ulterior motives involved for them? Hiding their indetectable esp hacking via forum posting? This occurred many times in the past where cheaters will stick to their guns on forums throwing desperate red herrings all over the place. Without very updated cheat detection systems in this game, it's best to treat all hackusations in an Orwellian manner and give no benefit of the doubt. Guilty until proven innocent.

If their gaming achievements were indeed brought about my legit playing, good for them. Thanks all the honest legit players out there who need not voice dissent against hacking observations.

There are plenty of hackers on the servers. I left a squad because they were talking about the best hacks ("just adjust your CoF down to 0, and no one can tell!', etc) right in squad chat, and about a year ago I saw someone in /re where someone posted a URL where they had downloaded their bot (was intended for a /tell, because the sentence began with '/tell' - someone got finger-tied). A lot of us are grownups, we've played online FPS since their inception, and you can often tell the difference between someone who's really good, someone who's getting really lucky, someone who's lagging, or when something doesn't smell right, and when someone is just plain botting - those who disagree are either inexperienced, in denial, or hackers themselves. SOE won't do anything about it because they can't do anything about it - the current 'devs' didn't write the core client code, and until there's some sort of client side validation, hackers can create bots to modify in-memory values on the fly.

Realistically, I see someone seriously hacking - running through the air, hiding under a floor, invulnerable, running faster than everyone else, or similar - maybe 2 or 3 times in a year. As far as the 'smells funny' variety - the guys who are doing things like moving their CoF down to 5% or 0%, the ones who automatically knife you if you come within 5' of them (even if you're behind them invis and they backed up into you), etc - this happens probably once or twice a week.

People can come up with a lot of excuses, a lot of reasons it's not hackers, it's lag, it's you not understanding a play mechanic, etc - no matter how thin you slice it, it's still bologna.

You can browse the playerbase stats and see people with padded/botted stats, so it's obvious it happens. SOE created the /Report function (not that it does anything), so it's a big enough issue that someone had to sit down and write some code around the issue. Until they can put something in place to continually verify the client exe and protect the memory space, though, it's an uphill battle, and all we can do is enjoy some PS2 for a few days after major patches - at least until the hackers update the memory offsets and re-release their warez. Don't believe it? Google it - it's unbelievable how big the hack community is.

Such logic much wow.

You can generate cloak shimmer by sprinting/walking near infil. Distortion doesnt go anywhere, its just harder to notice.

Just this morning I accidently found a stalker infil just by jumping around in empty room. I didnt know he was there.

What are your ulterior motives.. Do you have something to hide?

These hacking thread are always so damn ********.

Everyone thinks their testimonies and saying "I swear hacking is on the rise!" proves their points.

He seems to catch with his darklight from quite a distance away (you light up very briefly), however he does seem know where you are from your shout though rather specifically (assuming he heard it).

As usual it is pretty impossible to draw any total firm conclusions.

It's impossible to prove anything.

As I mentioned a guy used a terrain hack in WAR, it allowed him to move inside otherwise inpenetrable buildings (when he eventually put the video of him doing it up, basically to him the buildings weren't there at all - where as everyone else saw buildings) jump out and gank people.

He was a Witch Elf so had stealth so people just assumed he was good at hiding and ganking (which he was..... just with the help of a hack), I fought him many, many times and wouldn't have suspect him of hacking..... yet he was hacking all along for literally years.

Even if that is true (no offense but I will believe this when I've tested it or seen documentation of other testing it, I have never heard of this supposed phenomena before now) it still don't explain how the guy was able to know in what area the OP was 3 times in a row, AND find him as fast as he supposedly did and put a bullet to him.

First one is easy:
Basilisk was already looking in your general direction, heard you uncloak and killed you.
Actually the engie should have noticed you when he bumped into you at 8 seconds, you can even see how he slides of half a step when he bumped into your collision box. If he was anybody with experience against infis you'd be dead at that point already (I'd turn around and fill the general area of the bump with bullets).

Second one:
You spotted him when he entered the building. He came out because he heard the voice makro and already knew your general position (the only question at that point would be "on the tower" or "behind the beams", because that is where Stalkers always are).
You were already in his line of sight for a second when you moved into position on the landing pad, making it likely that he saw you, which is why he jumped straight into the beams instead of looking for you down the beams. You moved away and into the corner when he was out of sight, but at that point it doesn't help anyways, since he already knows you're up there.

Thanks for the reply, indeed I feel very much the same about this whole thing. I wouldn't even create this thread... maybe. But today it's ESP shooter, tomorrow invulnerable Valkyrie (that many people saw and can confirm), next day it's something else. Something has to be done, if we don't voice our opinion SOE won't know the scale of the problem, because how can they? Sure the /report code is there, but it's clearly not enough. I did a report on that dude, it said "300-something" place in queue. Does it mean there were 300+ reports ahead of mine? At that time of day (night in Europe)?? Or maaaybe there's just one GM that looks into them all in his work hours, so that would be in the morning and whole thing loses it's meaning. No wonder reporting has no effect and if they do ban someone who's mass reported it only works in favor of one-GM theory. I imagine his general logic is that if someone was mass-reported by many players at the same time - maybe there's indeed something illegal.
I play games since MS-DOS times so yeah, saw how it all began.

The problem is ..... they could only really do something SECURE about what's called "Culling", when you're behind solid terrain and maybe some walls. Bushes and the Cloak itself meanwhile are nothing but "Textures with an Alpha Layer". Which means the best thing you could be doing to FIX THIS PROBLEM, was what you were already doing... and then recording it, and sending that video to Support: https://help.soe.com/app/ask/


For that first part about Culling, they have to be willing to put Line-of-Sight calculations server-side. Currently they only base that server-side culling on draw distance and somewhat on an algorithm of reasonable number of enemies in the immediate area to expect the client to render at once, followed by number of Allies who are generally less important for rendering unless you're a medic (but you can still see their icons on Radar). I've ALWAYS argued that SOE doesn't do all they can against "Wall Hackers" and that it's by far the most commonly used cheat in the game that most people don't even realize is being used b/c the large number of players who do use it, are not nearly as blatant with it as that guy who kept shooting you was. IE: there are a LOT MORE of them who intentionally walk right past your stalker but still make a mental note of your location and some of them even have a "Barrel Traceline warning" which tells them exactly where your gun is pointing which they can use to dodge out of the way at the last second when you take aim at them.

For us, and SOE, to really deal with those smarter cheaters, we'd need to be able to watch the game from their POV. And the problem with that, is that no one on forumside wants people to be able to spectate anyone else directly or "Ghost them" b/c it would completely ruin every single good Outfit-fight in the game. But if we could see the game from their first person views in an after-the-fact offline capacity, we could tell when they were staring at walls and watching player movements that they shouldn't have been able to see. How exactly to make that happen.... I'm not sure.