Aimbots Rampant

Every single game where this topic comes up has someone that says this. Simply put, yes, you probably have encountered hacks. The fact that you don't notice it means nothing, it is just far too unlikely that you haven't encountered any. The don't have to be blatantly obvious, any play can install an aimbot that improves their aim just enough so they look good, but not inhuman. And a wallhack can be just as discreet.

More likely: The person saying that is a hacker himself.


Or am I attributing to malice what incompetence sufficiently explains? No. I've seen enough super blatant kill-everyone-instantly-around hackers that I know this person is simply lying. Hacking and lying, it goes hand in hand.

I think we were discussing this one back on page ... 3 or 4... I call it packet spoofing/compression. The bigger problem with it IMO is that it also messes with the server when too many people are doing it. It's pretty easy to mess up the load balance of overworked servers like these. It would be almost like a small botnet was DDOS'ing them; and also explain some of the horrible server performance we'd see later at night when all the GM's went to bed. You'd think SOE would atleast try to detect the clients doing that regularly and Deal with Them for everyone else's sake. But no

No, it's because I feel there's a small segment of people who are either ignorant or overly paranoid. If I can't notice these closet hackers, how can you? Do you have magical hacker radar? More life experience? A diploma in hack detection?

What is the point of playing a game assuming people are hacking when they do overly well? How does that make you a better player and enjoy the game? There are of course obvious ones that should be dealt with, but the number is so ridiculously low right now I don't see how this is an issue.

It's annoying when I encounter paranoid people like that in-game so I vent my frustrations here.

i won't say this for certain, but it could have been scout radar. ESF can equip scout radar which detects infantry movement, and let me tell you proper use of radar combined with some basic knowledge of the terrain seems to be just as effective as any ESP hack. the scout radar on reavers looks like a flat spinning disc on top of the craft, but i don't know what it looks like for the other factions. there is also air combat radar that detects aircraft almost out to render distance at max rank, it looks like 2 angled fins off the top of the scythe (i have it equipped on my A2A scythe), although the air combat radar acts differently than other radars and does not put dots on your minimap, instead it puts symbols on your hud that show relative direction of enemies and their current distance.

i use proximity radar, which is similar to scout radar, on my skyguard and i regularly use it to hunt down cloaked infiltrators. as long as they are within 50 meters of me and moving occasionally i can find them. i have actually used my radar to aim my gun on invisible targets before. that is one of the many reasons why my lightning will always have the little rotating bar on the back.

You don't notice them, because you're a top level player who also never specialized in programming / modding. Would it be a surprise to you if you found out a lot of professional GM's working at SOE, are indeed not top scoring players like you are?

Yes I know that sounds backwards ... The urban myth has always been that the better player is / faster their reaction time, the better they are at spotting cheats as well. As an admin however who met regularly with lots of other admins to review suspicious plays/demo together, I found out that it would actually have the opposite results. I don't know what the psyche word for it would be, but it would definitely be a type of personal bias where they fail to account for the fact that they are in the top 0.5% of the total players skill thresholds. And not everything they see happen, is how the rest of the player base approaches a fight or executes finesse plays. And when you've got a server where a lot more than 0.5% of the players are doing this stuff, the simple reality becomes clear that some of them are faking it. I see this exact same conversation often when playing with really good players. It doesn't look the least bit out of the ordinary to them. They're biased towards rationalizing that performance because it's generally the same habits/snaps they do naturally.

We actually had 1 admin go rogue and all the "top skill" members of the admin team insisted he looked mostly legit to them. ....until a bunch of other Servers were all mass-banning this guy and then finally Steam banned him permanently.

This actually makes a lot of sense; I'm a lot less likely to find something suspicious of being hacky if it is something that I have done myself legitimately.

What do we call that? Skill bias?

I'll admit though, I do feel like there are a lot fewer hackers these days than around launch. No more flying no clipping instant headshot machines wizzing around anymore. Honestly the most annoying thing I've run into as of late is the occasional wall glitcher.

I find it plausible that there'd be this sort of a cognitive bias going on. Then again, in live (i.e. non-demo, real-time) situations your situational awareness is pretty much the only thing to go by. High skill comes in part from good situational awareness, so there still is an advantage there. How good a demo-reviewer or admin any of those high skilled players would make can be argued about.

However, I've seen plenty of bad players make a mess of admining simply because they have their own cognitive biases. For instance, in this thread there have been some people spouting non-sense such as claiming that up to 10% of PS2 players are hackers. Players with bad situational awareness and inability to recognise their own failures -> a metric ton of false positives... "I couldn't do that so it must be hacks". I've seen this in most games first-hand and "either you die a noob or get called a hacker" holds very true for FPS games.

Heck, I've even reviewed demos of my brother playing Day of Defeat and I remember being unable to explain some of the stuff he did except with hacks or repeat luck. Then again, that was the same computer and same DoD installation I used and I had watched him play clan-matches. I simply wasn't good enough to tell. I didn't have enough game-sense to tell where enemies shouldn't be at that moment and to arrive at correct guesses on where to pre-aim.

Did you know that 96.8% of statistics are completely made up?

I'm painfully aware of my own failures and short-comings , but there are still plenty of situations in which the likelihood of something being completely legit is pretty small, based on hours of time living in-game and witnessing not just my own capacities but those of everyone I run into.


While it's true that I'm not seeing the type of blatantly obscenely obvious hacks I saw at launch, it would stand to reason that even little hackers can eventually learn something. Evidently not actually playing the game, but buying and/or using more subtle hacks? I would find it way more surprising if they didn't.

Course, this all reminds me of the quote from Casablanca, "I'm shocked to find gambling in this casino!"

Funny. That is pretty much exactly how I determine if someone seems fishy to me or not, so there might be something to it.
If it is something I'd do myself I don't think twice about it as long as it does not happen to often from the same person. Someone noticing me twice while I am sneaking up on his tank is normal, I do a 360° thermal scan every 10 or so seconds myself when playing tank and being immobile and I've killed literally hundreds this way, someone doing it 5 times in a row no matter how impossible my angle and how short my approach is is fishy.


This is also why I asked for a video montage from the "hacks everywhere" people a few pages back. My guess would be that most of the things in there would be stuff I'd consider normal (and most probably would be normal).

Remember when stalker came out early this year and suddenly there were videos of people claiming "omg, with stalker you can find so my people using ESP" everywhere, yet when watching them 9 out of 10 clips were something completely normal (people bumping into them, clips with visible weapons) or the stalker doing it grossly wrong (spotting and then complaining when the spotee turns around and shoots them).

I'm guessing that a montage of hacker clips would be quite similar.


Most /tells I get myself are for stuff I'd consider common sense, like checking the popular hiding spots if I so much as suspect a stalker is in the building, or after entering an empty room doing a quick visual sweep of all the high LA camping spots.
Also killing the mentioned stalkers gives a pretty high time/tell ratio.

There are hackers that can be clearly identified - 100% invulnerable Mossies for instance.

In other cases, it is not easy, but usually stats to help a bit because we got a huge sample. If certain people do much better than the small group of good players, then they are most likely cheaters, at least from a statistical standpoint. You can actually assess a probability to it. In the end, even if the odds are 1000000000:1 you can never be 100% sure.

There are at least two commercial aimbots available from Russia and believe it or not, these guys really do have customers!

Besides that, there is another concept to think about. Even cheaters can be great players. Usually you expect the typical cheater to be a bad player who wants to be good, but even good player can cheat to become great. That's how steroid users broke the homerun records in Baseball - and that's how the Giants won 3 out of the last 5 World Series with an obviously mediocre team

That's a bug with the server zones / regions. It still think the player is at warpgate so it applies warpgate invulnerability to the vehicle. This is also why warpgates had invulnerability turned off for a while until they fixed it because something changed to make the bug pretty common.

There are hacks in PS2. To say there aren't would be ridiculous.

Client-side hit detection allows it and the player base is too "inventive" not to take advantage of it.

This is a game with a large population and large battles which can mask activities.

Hacks that aren't abused, but used judiciously to make game-play more palatable to certain folks are more common than people think.

Understanding how aimbots actually work would help a lot of folks understand that it isn't necessary to have a huge run of head-shots or "one-hit-kills" to identify possible users.

And that's the real issue.

No one can definitively say a person is aimbotting when used in a judicious manner, it's virtually impossible to detect.

Therefore it must be left to SOE, the devs and MODS to make that determination.

Even the instances which folks have discussed in this thread where a heavy runs into a room and pops his shield and shoots you in the face as a concealed infi before you can say WTF can be attributed to latency, for example.

Many times I've been called a hacker because I'm not supposed to be able to see the infi hiding in the corner and take him out in a spit second.

I've been playing the game for 2 years and more. I know every base (there are only a few types) like the back of my hand. I know where folks hide and know where most mines are placed and I know the main paths that folks follow to get from A to B.

Having this knowledge and a keen sense of human nature can go very far in giving the impression to certain folks that you are operating beyond human norms and utilizing a hack.

And I don't even have to be a good shot to further that perception.

So in the end you are left with the reality that hacking is there and you must learn to see it as part of your gaming experience. Report if you feel the need, but don't come here and make threads devoted to it.

It is also why games like this should never have a competitive nature with the focus on stats and self-aggrandizement as it leads to much angst and bitterness.

You seem to pop up complaining on the forums a lot lately. Ever considered in-game bugs and lag compensation?

Let me show you a magic trick... (go to the very end of the ammo pack one)

As I said, it is unlikely that you haven't encountered any hack users. I don't need a magical radar to know there are hackers in-game, they exist in every freaking online game, even games with VAC implemented. And since hacks exist, they work in the game, they are easy to obtain, and people are pathetic enough to use them, it is safe to assume that anyone who plays enough has come across a hack user at some point, even if it was too discreet to notice.

I'd say the number of noticeable hackers that I've encountered over the last 2 years can be counted on two hands. They exist, but aren't as common as some people like to think

I think what a LOT of people are attributing to what seems like an increase in aimbots lately, is the fix to weapon sights. My HSR has increased massively since the change, nearly doubling.

Yeah man, there's aimbots everywhere in this game. Especially in that AC clan.

While I can't say I've really encountered many cheaters in PS2, here's something that I can tell you: Cheaters with functional brain cells stay discreet. They will give themselves an advantage, but not so much as to blow their cover.

And yes, I'm speaking from experience of cheating in the Borderlands series (PvE coop game, no real harm done). Few suspect a thing unless they're REALLY paying attention, or until I straight up tell them for one reason or another.

Saw a hacker once or twice and it was pretty obvious. They were clipping through the ground and shooting everyone from below the geometry. But other than that never saw a cheater/suspected someone of cheating. Usage of macros? Perhaps. But not cheating.

Well cobalt seems to be badly hurt.. for instance today I was flying a blood sucker, and was evading really hard, but no matter what I did he would hit me. And to top it off I have fully upgraded stealth. Even I got confused over that he did not get confused...