Hacking or lagging?

Just now I was defending a Tech Plant against TR and noticed that one guy on their team was getting the overwhelming majority of their kills. I saw some guy who basically flashed in and out - he would one moment appear somewhere and then half a second or so later he would appear again elsewhere. It didn't seem like he was moving any faster than anyone else, just that he was somehow lagging between two locations. I was sitting a way back and watching. He started running directly away from me (so that his position in front of me would not have changed, other than getting further away from me). I started shooting at him. The first shot hit and then he disappeared. I kept firing. Finally, he reappeared further away and took another bullet (I was near the end of my magazine). He disappeared again and I lost sight of him. I eventually chanced upon him while he was shooting at someone (he never seemed to disappear when he was shooting). I was 2 m behind him and opened up on his head. He died. I think that was the only time he died that whole fight. After that, I was killed by him multiple times, rarely seeing him. At one point he appeared to be continually falling from a ceiling strut that he couldn't have normally reached (he wasn't LA, he was a medic).

In the end, we lost the base and I'm confident in saying it was solely this guy's doing. He certainly wasn't the only one there, but without him, the TR would never have got the base in that battle.

I've never seen this happen before. I play on the Australian server (I'm in Aus) and on a US West server and I've not seen this before, making me think it might not be simple lag.

So, was this guy genuinely lagging (or something else going wrong) or was he hacking or cheating in some way? For the record, his name was DirtyHarry (TR on AU server).

Yeah, this doesn't seem like the normal warping issues the game is having. And it doesn't surprise me that this guy may be hacking on AU servers. Lastly, just be careful with naming people; i know, it sucks but its may be against forum rules, which I never understood especially when you have video proof.

I've seen this before. Not often, but it happens.

It looks like extreme lag and you seem a glimpse of them, then they go invisible, then reappear a few metres away from last position. Last time I saw this was roughtly 14-15 hours ago (last night) when I was defending a biolab with my engineer friend. He had a turret up and covering a staircase, getting alot of kills from VS zerging in. I was in my Scatmax behind my friend covering the top entrances.

A few minutes after getting the turret up, a VS infil "lagged" up the staircase, just like you described. My friend couldn't nail him with the turret since he only saw a glimpse of the guy halfway up the stairs then he vanished and reappeared behind my friend. I dispatched the guy with my Scatmax, but that wasn't the last time we saw that guy. Same guy, several times during that fight would "lag" his way around, reappearing behind other players and shooting them in the back. Wasn't a big issue for me in a MAX suit.

However, it's extremely annoying cause people resort to emptying their clips in an arc around them just to hit the invisible player, often resulting in teamdamage and/or teamkills.

Maybe it's lag... but I have strong doubts that it is.

Why does this only happen to a very few players, often with high kill counts?
If they lag, how are they managing to fire accurately at you since you should be "warping" around like a slideshow on their screens?

Hopefully SOE knows about this and can look into it. They say they are working on anti-cheats, but who knows... no company can admit that they aren't and they haven't said much about the anticheats, amount of cheats, how many accounts have been banned or anything.

We're left completely in the dark when it comes to information about cheating and how it's dealt with.

I had, too, strange experiences yesterady evening on Woodman - Esamir. A guy had killed me twice in a row just when I respawned inside a normal spawn point in a structure owned by my faction. It seemd he was shooting through the wall and directly to the spwan point - I couldn't even get out from the spawn point. The second time I tried to move out as soon as I could and noticed that if I moved a little from where I was he couldn't shot at me anymore, but moving again to get out from the spawn point made me be shot again and die. Third time I respawned I just changed spawn point.

Lag switch, google it. I find that the people you see doing this are using a digital "switch" which changes several times a second making them appear to blink or warp around.

i've recorded a dozen or so of these "hackers" and it is hacking fyi , also your post will be deleted for naming the guy , soe doesn't have a system for accepting videos of the hackers either you have to submit a /report "player name"

well they say they don't i think they just dont want to admit they have a hacker problem so early in release

I've seen this happen four times now. The character flickers as if it's in two or more places at once. You can't hit him but he has no problems hitting you, although I've also seen it used to effectively warp past people rather than kill them.

+'s for this post right here..

Not being able to tell if it's because of poor game optimization or because of hacks is the most frustrating part of running into these situations..

There are definitely hackers in this game. Today was in a max suit and was blowing away at this infiltrator...and he wasn't taking any damage. He was just standing there melee'ing me to death. Hackers are such fail, they suck at games, so they have to cheat.

There's a BUNCH of lag switchers and I'll be honest, I've only seen it with TR. I play on Connery and there's a metric pantload of it.

Yes it is a hack and also it seems the lag hacks are very popular with the TR, maybe cause of the very controllable recoil most of their guns have. I would not be surprised if many of the lag switchers are using this very particular hack that also comes with other 'addons' a player mini map, seeing through walls and even an aim bot, that seems to struggle with recoil their page says

Thanks for all the responses. So I guess it was hacking then. Regarding the /report functionality - do I just type their name and that's it? Like, nothing else happens? I don't get to say why I'm reporting them or get notification that it even does anything? I've never tried it before but I will. Is there some place in game where I can find these commands? I keep learning new ones and then forgetting them.

I can edit my post if it's frowned upon to name hackers. I'd definitely like to hear from SOE regarding what they're doing about hackers and how to better report them (videos, etc).

You would hit the ESC key and on the lower left hand corner of the screen would be a support button. Get the players name and report him/her in there. Furthermore, you probably won't hear from SOE on the outcome, but they will receive the ticket. If nothing else comes out of this behavior, maybe this will show SOE that the game is having a weird latency issue.

I see it with many many players from all factions on Miller. Don't know if it's the bad server performance, their bad internet connection or if they are hacking. But it needs to stop. If someone has a bad ping very often --> just kick him. It makes the game bad for everyone else.

Seen this to - was an NC guy on SolTech doing it. I don't recall the name but wondered if it was just lag... but it looks far too phase in phase out timed for it. Plus he sure had no problems pinning me down, if it was lag it should go both ways.

I see this a lot on SolTech. People will randomly disappear and reappear a few meters away. The most frustrating part is I'll have my crosshairs on someone (adjusted for bullet drop) with the SR-7 and I'll fire, but it appears to go right through them. A few seconds later, they disappear. I live on the east coast, pinged the IP of US East servers (199.108.194.40) and I get ~30ms, so it can't be my connection.

Is it other players that are having connection problems or is this some kind of issue Sony is having?

They need to have some ping limiter, if its purely lag issue. Its kinda clear if one out of 30 people is blinking its user side and should be disconnected.

I've seen a lot of people doing this. It's incredibly frustrating.

I have seen MANY people doing this today on Matherson. I reported one when it was finally clear to me that he was hacking. It seems that they are out in force today. Many more than what I usually see. It is a real problem...

There's a large outfit on TR Connery that warps all over the place, but they all say they're from China so that may be the reason.