Cyrious made a video about Skilled Players

Thoughts?

The pinned post in the comments is a prime example of the first part of the video; you get a couple of those ***** in an echo chamber and suddenly half the players in the game are cheating.

Video itself is ok, if long. The truth is that there are players that would be in bronze tier, even veterans, if the game had match-making. Some will just never see the same improvement as others no matter how much they try, and they are going against people that would be top 500 in the game. You can understand their frustration, maybe even sympathize a little if you were in the same position at first, but the fact is that it is frustrating trying to argue with these players and the bs they perpetuate. Who knows how much people listen to them, but a negative stigma around the game being full of hackers is hard to get rid of.

The game should not revolve around murdering people. Murdering people should just be a means to an end. The real goal should always have been around accomplishing particular tasks.
The beauty of that is that you can create goals that cater to different players and skill-levels. A low-skill player could perform a certain task that is fun to complete and helps his team, while a high-skill player tries to pull off more difficult tasks that require that skill. Ideally teams are encouraged to bring players of all skill levels that perform different tasks to get the best result, rather than bringing just a team of aces that do one task particularly well.
Make players create most of these tasks, for example by letting players deploy special items and gadgets around a base that have an effect on how the battle will progress, so that an increase in players also increases the amount of tasks you can perform.

The trouble is, when someone makes an outfit of only the best players, noone is going to have fun when they show up...
Good players are fine mixed in to an average outfit,
but when an entire Platoon of 360-noscope-MLG-tryhards drop on your base, bye bye fun.

Kudos to them for getting good, but imagine facing an outfit like that as a new player?
Repeatedly dying before you can fire a shot...k...uninstall, back to cod.
The game is at an age were we need all the players we can get,
so it's time to start thinking about the experience of the people you're stomping.

idk I have fun doing my best pushing them out, and I try to join their squads when they're on my faction (these players usually hop from faction to faction often to get the best fights).

Can't tell good players to play bad.

I always try to help my faction in battles and I try to get better all the time. But at the end of the day I don't care if I am good at PS2 or not. I log in to have fun not to get some false sense of ego based on my game skillz. I think playing any game with the sheer goal of "getting gud" is a recipe for boredom and aggravation. And personally I find the whole thought process of worrying about how good you are as just missing the point.

But I do want everyone to be enjoying themselves at every level of the game. And I do understand when you are starting out that is a challenge in PS2. However I attribute that more to the learning curve than a skill gap.

Just my take on it.

100% agree. Let's face it, Cobalt has a few of those kinds of outfits. Whenever I play against NC and Hydra show up, I either try to suck it up, or just leave the area and go fight elsewhere. I don't live on the game. I have a life outside of the computer. I don't have time to work towards matching up to their skill level. I just want to have fun before I finish up and go to bed for the night.

It's easy for people to say, join an outfit, but as a new player, there's so many of them out there. How can they possibly know which is good or not? Most players end up focusing on K/D ratio as a determinant of good/bad skill level, rather than actions performed such as repairs, revives, and heals given. Not only that, some outfits won't even let new players join because they're so low-skill. Sometimes messaging that A+ player will yield them a poor response. It's so easy to say new players should be doing those things Cyrious describes, but he is not a new player who has just joined the game now, as opposed to launch.

Meanwhile, the tryhards are the people who organise platoons, form outfits, retain players, and are those who's online when you log on for your pick-up session. Glad you're doing alright in life, just a shame you have to s*** on those who enjoy the game.

I play to better myself, I play to enjoy growing with a team, I play to get in-game friends, and to do more than I can on my own. Most of all the experience of all that is a hundred times more rewarding than engaging in a passive farm number 93295298347238947. It is an active play style where you create the fights, you take action, and you're not sitting around making excuses.

That being said, I think the game should reward support actions more since you should be rewarded for working for your team's success. It would also go a long way in lessening the obsession with KDR and similar stats. From a competitive standpoint if it was viable from a SPM standpoint to go all in on medic or engineer I am sure we'd see a lot more good medics/engineers running around too. I mean, new players are going to get funnelled into whatever works best.

There is a great deal of hypocrisy and a good number of flaws in that video. It is hypocritical when he blames experienced players for influencing the opinions of newer players by calling out cheat-fits. Cysious is ASP ranked himself, with a youtube channel even, so obviousily has far greater influence himself. It is a faulty generalization to assume that just because 6 people were annonced banned for using a specific hitbox hack, there has only ever been 6 hitbox hackers in the history of planetside 2.

The only good point he made was listing #1 contribution of the "high-skill" players: good old dollars. This point is particularily interesting in the context of the path the game has taken the last couple of years. First forcing out players from their vehicles with combined arms and now the whole outfit-wars nightmare. What if all of this has been to appease the cheating player base? You must realize that these players are sociopaths who nourish on this sort of thing. And DBG knows very well, that if they don't look the other way and feed the cheaters, the cashflow will stop and more devs will need to be laid off.

This brings me to the point, it sounds as if Cyrious is defending the devs here, he wants players who knows better to remain silent about the abuse.

The game is a FPS futuristic war simulator... it definitely should revolve around killing people; tasks and support should simply be another way to do that. The other problem is that a team of all high skill is still better, even if you were to have different tasks.

There should definitely be more tasks and things to do, but the game already has plenty of ways you can contribute to a fight both within and not directly involved in it. The game also has plenty of low skill floor weapons, gear, classes, and vehicles that let people punch way above their weight and contribute to a fight.

You're delusional.

Actually no. Take the game Renegade. The goal is to destroy the enemy base or get the highest score when the timer ends. Kills is just one option to succeed, but not a necessary one.

You can introduce mechanics and features that do not revolve around killing. Placing a new type of spawnpoint (the Forwards Station before it was butchered into the Router) would reward players for stealth and infiltration to destroy it. It doesnt prevent a skillful murder-machine from getting there, but it will reward players with less murder-skills too (although its useful for murder).

The idea isnt to have goals that make murder useless, its designed to make people not as good at murder have fun and be useful at the same tjme. A Medic with a Forwards Station could require several attempts to deploy it in the right spot while getting killed by superior skill players, but when he does he'll have supplied his allies with a powerful tool.

The game does not have plenty of these yet. In fact its been hampered by how little of these its had over the years, and it needs more.

In the past I've advocated for something which I will still stand by. We need more events tailored to the high skill players to pit them against each other for rewards which might interest them. As for what rewards they might want, I would just straight up ask some of them, and see what they come up with.

Run these events outside of the live server during prime time sometimes. Give the bulk of the players on the live server some time where they can organize ops without worry about getting suddenly dumped on a high skill outfit which their own players simply can't deal with.

I agree in large part, was just saying that there are already options to do things in the game that greatly help out even if they don't reward the player much. The problem is balancing them so that they are engaging, rewarding, but also don't lower the skill floor in general and greatly lessen or invalidate skilled play/players.

I was pretty sure it was you who also played Renegade and that you would bring it up lol.

Yes, in a way. But almost the exact same could be said for PS2 - the goal is to capture the enemy base or get the highest score. Kills are just one option to succeed. If you think of each hex as a map/match, it gets even closer. I'd actually argue that PS2 has more things you can do to contribute than Renegade.

At the end of the day, the vast, vast majority of players are playing this game to PvP and kill players.

No I'm not. If there, hypothethically, were 1000 subtle cheaters with membership subscriptions, those 1000 cheaters would bring in at least $120,000 per year, equating to the salary of 2 game developers. Even if those cheaters were known, say through the sheer amount of reports or because of battle-eye tracking, it would not make sense from a business point-of-view to ban them.

There are already plenty of ways to contribute not focused on killing. The whole construction system for example already has the features you are looking for. It is also a good thing that obtaining a router takes up-front investment rather than being a pocket deployable. If not, everyone would use it, in turn leading to more killing. If I'm defending a base and someone kills me twice in a row - cheater or not - I take out their sunderer ending the fight fast and efficiently.

This I can somewhat agree with. It is entirely possible that for whatever reason, a few players escaped this. It's extremely unlikely, given the depth of the investigation, and how simple it is to identify someone who's a non-exploit cheater. But it is possible. That said, it gives us a ballpark. It's highly likely and therefore reasonable to assume the majority of these cheaters were caught. That majority amounted to 6 individuals. The rest that (potentially) were not banned would be a group inferior to 6. It's at a point in time where we had more players than now. Ofc, it's possible in between these bans (there were multiple) masses of people cheated then quickly deleted their accounts/players before the investigation(s) were opened, and created them again after the investigation(s) were over. If that seems logical to you, fine.

I must've missed the part where he claims there's only been 6 hitbox cheaters in the game's history. What I can say is that no matter how you put it, it's proof hacking has been a ridiculously overblown issue, that at that particular point in the game's history was proven to be a hyperbole. People complaining about hackers being everywhere in a game with thousands of players, then numbers released show there's only been 6. I'd say it's a solid example there's a bigger problem concerning player mentality that cheating.

While I can somewhat accept the first point, this statement is just delusional and borderline a troll. You say Cyrious is making "a faulty generalization" the proceed to say the cheating playerbase is keeping the game alive (cash wise) and the devs are fine with it.


That's wild. If it's not obvious to you, there is 0 reason for the devs to support cheating. First off, there's not nearly as many cheaters in the game to make a significant difference even if they bought every single item possible with dbc and run membership. Seriously, that is such a dumb statement I shouldn't even have to be typing a reply.

Second, the goal of the devs is to make money, and therefore they need the game's playerbase to grow. Allowing cheaters deters normal players, so obviously the devs take cheating seriously, and punish cheaters. It's a win-win for the devs, because everything on that account belongs to DBG. So they ban the account, keep the money, remove a cheater that's bothering regular players, AND if the cheater makes another account he'll have to spend money again, which DBG can confiscate if the cheater is caught cheating again.

And you can google it there's a few bans they announced, even one where they dealt with cheaters who had spent over 200 USD on the game. So yeah, I'd really like to know where you're getting this conspiracy theory from. Maybe if you read your post again you'll realize you clowned yourself.

Even the best of players eventually get overrun. Either by immeasurable numbers, by a tank/a2g, a sniper, whatever.

Lesser skilled players are vastly superior in numbers. Skilled players amount for a tiny portion of the community. Even when half a squad of them are holding out against 96+ enemies, there's eventually a breaking point. I'm not the best of players, but these guys usually will let you join them if you ask nicely; if for some reason they don't you can usually follow them and they'll support you regardless.

Anyways, I've played with really skilled players a few times, and while it is extremely fun, challenging and exciting, we rarely win. Seriously, usually a platoon or two get dumped on us, and we're overrun. Medkits/consumables and sometimes ammo aren't infinite. There's a point where you empty your primary because too many players come in at once, you switch to your pistol/launcher and there's no ammo. Even going around crazy desperate knifing sprees you'll eventually die, either to a shotgun, a nade, or whatever dude isn't afraid of wiping out half his team to get you.

And with the wrel assets and other available cheese, it's not hard to flush these skilled players out, especially when you have the numbers. It's a nice little challenge that changes from the boring zerg/ghostcap mentality.

You make the mistake of saying "there are some methods that allow you to do that, so there are enough".
It is currently unstructured and unbalanced. The construction system you name for example is extremely time consuming and hazardous as it has a high likelyhood of failing or simply not being rewarding due to enemies destroying it or the fight simply moving on.

This all needs to be more structured and consistent to make it more enjoyable. A newbie should not feel incapable because he's getting killed over and over again, he should feel that despite dying several times that he accomplished something. The tasks to complete should also be offered to the player immediately and with far more focus. Less prominent KD stats, far more prominent rewards for completing tasks.

Think of it as a type of self-balancing tutorial. A new player will try to complete tasks and have fun, in the meantime he'll learn how to use the shooting mechanics and be capable enough not to feel bad when he attempts a more murder-focused goal. Players that dont have the time or skill to become better at some point will stay inside a certain task package that corresponds to that skill level. Giving them plenty to enjoy themselves without feeling (too) bad when they get killed by better players repeatedly.

"subtle cheaters"..... you're totally not delusional.....

and then it would be cool to understand how we went from 6 confirmed cheaters to a fourth of the active playerbase cheating.

Battle-eye is meant to automatically detect (scripted) cheaters and ban them. It doesn't calculate who to ban based on how much they spend lmao

Again, the devs can ban the cheaters and keep their money, because that account and everything in it belongs to DBG. So they should be instead banning these cheaters each time they create a new account, so instead of getting the revenue of 1000 accounts with membership, they get the revenue of 1000 x (insert amount of new accounts created with membership), which would return significantly more. I'm sure it would be great, because I'm certain at least one of these "subtle cheaters" that's been playing forever with dev support would have bought a lifetime membership. This would force the cheater(s) to make a new account with regular membership, which would offer more to the devs.

Hypothetically, if you weren't delusional or had even the slightest idea of what is going on, we wouldn't have to read this insanity. I seriously hope you were joking.

Since I'm not here to educate you on what cheating is, I'm just going to quote wikipedia:

"Examples of cheats in first-person shooter games include the aimbot, which assists the player in aiming at the target, giving the user an unfair advantage, the wallhack, which allows a player to see through solid or opaque objects or manipulate or remove textures, and ESP, with which the information of other players is displayed. There are also cheats that increase the size of the enemies' hitbox which allows the player to shoot next to the enemy, which would usually result in a miss, but the game would detect as a hit."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheating_in_video_games

These are of course just examples of classes of cheats, there are others such as the speedhack, which allows the player to move around really fast, and more advanced movement cheats that makes the player fly and/or clip through walls. Cyrious's video shows one such hacker. This is what I would call blatant hacking. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you could have a cheat that drops the extra speed and flying, adds in a few misses in the programmed aiming and firing sequence, but may also have other things you cannot see from a third person view such as wallhack and ESP. This would be a subtle cheater, from the outside it looks just like a regular player. When you are killed by such a player you may naively attribute it to skill. So in conclusion we have 2 types of cheating:

• Subtle cheating: Aimbots /w a few misses, Wallhack, ESP
• Blatant cheating: Aimbot all hits, Speedhack, Flying around

As Cyrious also says, this is not the same as exploiting, such as shooting from under the terrain or from inside a wall. Exploiters can, like blatant cheaters, also be recorded and any sane person would agree that DBGs terms of service were violated by that player. When dealing with subtle cheaters however, including but not limited to hitbox modifiers, such proof is harder to come by. The player moves like any other, aims like any other, and shoots w/ some misses like any other player. The difference is that it is all automated and gives the player an unfair advantage.

Here is footage from a montage, created by what, in my earnest opinion, is a subtle cheater.

Why do I believe this is a subtle cheater? Because the crosshair area of the wielded sniper rifle is 250px * 250px = 62500px^2 large, the head of the victim at most 4 pixels, which gives the odds of the bullet landing on the head to be less than 1 in 10.000. Yeah that's right, you could do the same jump 10.000 times and most likely you would never hit the victim like he did. If I were delusional, I would attribute it to skill, and if I were ignorant I would attribute it to luck. Consideration of the context, the stats of the player, and all else dictates my conclusion.

Battle eye does that, but also scans the system of suspected cheaters to detect new cheats. It is a manual decision which cheats to ban. Banning a player / terminating the service would end any monthly subscription I think.