What is being done about non-obvious cheats?

I think it's safe to say that if someone is running through a base 100% headshotting people with their aimbot, the turnaround on them getting banned is short because people can clearly see it and they're /reporting them.

What is rogue planet doing about the non-obvious offenders? Are they even taking half of what we /report seriously?

Wallhacking for example is super dubious because it still mostly relies on a player's aim, but very often I get pre-fired by players as I round a corner when there was no indication that I'm on radar or was spotted.

In the past few weeks it's been feeling like a lot of people just know too much about what's going on, and their aim is suspicious and their time to kill is extremely high. Like, I know nanoweave armor is a thing that people have at higher ranks, but just seems like lower BR characters get melted when in similar situations as higher BR players. Shooting the same hitbox and the same heavy assaults. I don't see why it should 50% or 75% longer in most cases.

Overall Planetside 2 has been getting so suspicious I'm starting to think I'm not getting a fair shake in all of this. That really takes a lot of fun out of my desire to improve and practice. Beyond the overall game balance, I just don't ever feel like I'll be able to achieve certain levels of play while just getting absolutely farmed by cheaters.

Would really appreciate some more transparency about what RPG is doing about this and what kind of data they can reveal. Banning random people coming in with aimbots is expected, but more needs to be done about the not so obvious cheaters. We know aimbotting can be throttled, as well as any other malicious software.

The bad news - PS2 is absolutely infested with cheaters.I would say that late 2018 / 2019 was when DBG lost the war and 2019 was when I decided to cancel my long running subscription https://forums.daybreakgames.com/ps2/index.php?threads/cheaters-and-cancelled-membership.252593/

Oh you'll get plenty of people saying otherwise - the 'git-gud' crowd with very dubious intentions who completely ignore the fact that you've played for over 7 years in my case (over 8 in the OPs instance) and have managed to hone the ability to 'smell a rat'.


The just-joined idiots tend to get banned - but not always. Yet you'll see the longer term players with exactly the same modus operandi continue to keep doing what they always did - cheat.


So - you either continue playing in the knowledge that cheaters are definitely a part of the furniture - or - you give up.


I keep playing hoping upon hope that they will both get a handle on the cheats AND do something about them (no matter what they've spent on PS2 - if I see an AE weapon I know damn well they will never be banned).


I still have fun as i'm in a great outfit with many friends - but a proportion of that is joking about the ridiculous antics of certain players and the inability of DBG/RPG to deal with them. Not sure that is a healthy approach to the game...

What is being done about it? Nothing!

In all seriousness though, if anything is being done they haven't told us in years.

It's a free 2 play game. That is the downside to any F2P game. A high percentage of trashy riff raff compared to games you have to pay for. Especially an old F2P game, that was once a super model that let itself go to $&@! like a bearded lady.

Most trashy riff raff won't spend $60-$80 on a game just to get banned.

What are they doing about cheaters? Giving you the chance to go pick carrots, that's what.

Is there a community analysis or something of common patterns of available cheat tools?

For instance a player always turns around to the right if you approach them from the back and to their right, even if you don't shoot at them or a spotted and drops you in exactly the amount of shots required. The same happens if you approach from the left. Which would indicate that the bot always picks the nearest target in the most efficient way.

Not saying there is such a thing, just asking if the community ever looked into these patterns?

All of the free / fee readily available hacks went underground post Battleye introduction (which - by FAR - made the greatest positive difference to the PS2 experience, for a while at least).

DBG did introduce a statistical auto-ban for new players pulling incredible scores but it was heavily discredited by vets who would create a new character and go on their killing sprees - get banned - showed the video. Shame really - it could certainly have been developed into something more reliable rather than pure stat based.

There's still plenty that could be done around the entrapment angle - but even then, it might not be considered 'conclusive' (everyone gets lucky occasionally). All of which requires development time and resource; therein lies the problem.
If companies like Epic struggle to cope and throw around lawsuits at kids, poor old DBG/RPG stand little chance (in fairness they have tried very hard - way harder than most think....)

Then maybe the community could start collecting data on cheat tool behaviour?

Announce in /yell that you are doing this, don't participate in the actual fight for a point and ask for volunteers to collect data, while you record the thing?

I've got 6k hours in here, probably 5500 of it on Emerald. Where do you guys see this stuff? Where is this cheating?

I've submitted maybe half dozen cheat reports of the *years* I've played. All but one of them resulted in a player vacation or ban. The one turned out to be a tech support related issue.

I think there is one guy I've seen that is honestly suspect that toggles an aimbot. And yeah he's probably getting away with it. It's one player and I rarely encounter him. Outside of that? What?

I seriously think people just can't wrap their heads around how good some people are at this game. There is no matchmaking so at times you are gonna face them and they'll obliterate you and your whole squad. They can't explain it and someone comes along and floats some massive cheating conspiracy and they're all like, "yeah that must be it".

I am on Miller and at times you have people, of all factions, basically headshotting everyone with perfect accuracy 9/10. Being good is one thing, being so good that you always hit the perfect amount of shots to kill at every range, in every instance starts to get kinda sus.

Connery biolabs and TI Alloys in the form of fresh accounts getting beneath the terrain and proceeding to plant Spitfires out of harms way that shoot through the floors or walls.

I've seen quite of bit of that and infils doing the same, getting under the terrain and proceeding to just unload on unsuspecting targets that can't return fire. The last month on Connery has been a circus with it.

I don't consider that "non obvious cheats". Send a clip to DBG and those people are gone permanently within the hour usually. Even if you're unable to catch a name, just give them a super accurate timestamp from your killfeed. Send it straight to customer service, and not the /report function and it's done.

We are at the point they are just making new accounts with the same number configuration. China88, Taiwan88, etc. They are gone, til they make a new account.

I am going to assume that RPG/DBG has no capability of spending at least 1-2 hours a week to do this, but I'm going to suggest it anyway.

If /report does anything well, it at least paints a trend of who is getting /reported the most. This is really important because even though most people can't see s****, most people can smell it.

• Take your top 5-10 /report offenders each week and have someone in QA directly monitor
• Determine a trend for this character. What they being reported for mostly? What are people actually saying?
• Use whatever development tools available to root out foul play. Create new tools if necessary.
• If no foul play is detected, whitelist the player from /report for 1-3 months
• If after whitelist period the player is still there, repeat investigation

While people care about those guys that come in and 100% headshot an entire platoon while teleporting through the sky, those are the obvious ones, they get banned eventually, sometimes the same day. What we should be concerned about are the people who are trying to fly under the radar. People that we know are probably doing something rotten, but do it to such a degree that you can't prove it with a video, where maybe they got people in their pocket that might also be cheating that are vouching for them.
I know it's a lot of tinfoil had stuff, but this is probably one of the biggest barriers for new players. Like I said, you might not be able to see the s*** going on, but you can usually smell it. Having a process that creates regular checks for top offenders is going to be a big help to keep things clean and fair.

...you mean like this guy -


Who has been deleted but may or may not be related to this guy -


...and all the iterations in-between (some are deleted and some are not - don't know why).


What I fail to understand - that people can openly acknowledge there are cheaters when they are deleted (so - no point in denying is there ?) - yet state there's "hardly any cheaters" or "haven't seen any in 6 years" when there is clearly a significant problem.
Likewise the assumption that all cheats are going to be so utterly blazen with their antics when the slightly smarter ones will know that they need to cheat only when they really really need to. Look up toggle aimbot.

The sophistication of the open hacks pre-battleye was astonishing - I despise these people yet have to acknowledge their skill and ability. If anyone really thinks that they just threw in the towel post-battleye - delusional.

Sweeping it under the carpet is just not helping.

I find it amazing that others tell me what I do and do not see with my own eyes.
There is some subjective interpretation though.
Although I'm too old/slow to be one of them I hang out with some reeeally high KD players. I see what these coaches teach, the techniques they master that others don't even know of, the hours they put into the game... and not just any hours, hardcore-get-better-at-1v1-infantry hours. Scrim time on Jaeger and **** like that. And I've watched them over the course of just a few months turn another player from 0.9 KD fodder to 2-3KD beast running 100-150 kills per hour easily. And it's progressive... not some sudden jump like when aimbot.exe is turned on or something.
So when I see a video clip of someone clearing a room, I'm looking for the techniques I've learned or been taught, and I'm checking their prefire, and minimap, and above all, movement.

And 99 times out of 100 I don't see a speck of cheating.
But show that same video to others and you will not be able to convince them in a million years that someone isn't cheating. And I get that.
What I don't find productive is people reassuring new players that it's cheating as far as the eye can see. It's not. When new players get dunked on it's because the guy that did it is good. Telling them otherwise will discourage them from playing the game, discourage them from seeking out a way to get better, or (if they have that dark personality) encourage them to go and try to cheat on their own.
TL;DR:
When you see blatant ****: Report it using customer service. They'll ban with a quickness.
If you see non-blatant **** like a guy dunking on a whole squad: Consider asking them for tips.

I still maintain that it's only 2% - 5% of the actual nightly population (depending on faction of course... TR seems to have the least... VS the most, NC definitely somewhere in between just due to how stupid the random spread of their empire specific automatics really are thus how strong the temptation is to compensate for that issue among players who can't be bothered to learn real trigger discipline)

...but I may need to revise that number up from "Regulars" to total weekly players at this rate.

In the Air meanwhile .... it's AT LEAST 10% of the so called SkyKnights are actually just cheaters who are very good at getting other people to believe they've just practiced way more and were really talented to begin with. Those ratios of course are waaay out of line with the real Numbers on human biological exceptional'ism and what ratios of our society can and actually has become terrific Commercial pilots or Jet Fighters. The actual percentage of hummanity with a full visual-cognitive reflex response time below 200 milliseconds is somewhere in the 0.2% category.

The usual Cheater-Sympathizers here can say whatever they want to in this thread but If it that was easy to push those numbers up in real life with just raw practice and determination to the current performances we see across planetside, then a bunch of Germans would have done it back the 40's and conquered not just many many more Gorillians but also the Russian Winter as well

.

Addendum: The solution is not just to go on more witch hunts though like Smedley was always doing. The Solution always has, and always will be for RPG to implement a proper server-side "Demo" recording option that spits out the absolute Vector data of the last 10 seconds of every client's life before they were killed and makes it re-watchable Offline so we don't have to rely on grainy CPU-robbing faulty Client-side recorded OBS video

I think the greatest thing that can be achieved from rooting out cheaters is the ability to actually acknowledge players that have put the time into the game to improve their aim. Unfortunately the current state of online gaming and the technology available has created too many monsters. Doesn't matter what online competitive multiplayer game you play, folks are cheating.

There will always be naysayers like you, but we'll keep fighting for fair play.

I mean its not something that is a novelty or uncommon in online games. Take for instance the game Destiny 2, hugely popular, created by a huge studio with resources and even they had a huge "cheating scandal" recently where a bunch of Destiny 2 youtubers basically went undercover into these websites and collected data and information.

That did the trick and the cheats were blocked and the sellers were threatened with legal action. Mind you that was only ONE tool, there are several out there, I know because I looked for it, its easy to find really.

For Planetside I only found two so far that are still maintained.