When is daybreak going to ban the cheaters?

''I'm convinced this game is overflowing with cheaters.''

When it doubt, just examine the evidence. Which is what several more irritated veterans passed on to me before they left - and I simply went further.

For starters; you can join cheat forums. Not with the intention of using them - but to ask questions. The creators of some of them are so brazen that they won't just describe in detail what you can do with this game; they'll tell you what cheats are still working as of the current date (even if their own websites one is being patched). There is lots of co-operation between cheat devs - and why not? It makes lots of money.

I once visited x22 cheats and asked a few questions. At the time his cheat was supposedly not working (slew of people asking for it to be fixed in the respective thread) and I noted the huge amount of subscribers to that particular forum (some few thousand).

Now when you take into account how many people log in on daily basis. Compare that to all the cheat sites and their ps2 views and visits that week - you actually get an 'overhead'. Or more people viewing the cheat updates, than are actually still playing.

So ofcourse you are going to have abundant cheating. I explained that over in ps2 you have many people saying that cheating or hitbox edits aren't a thing. And they could only laugh. As they said - if you are a paying member, with cosmetics (how much are those armor bundles again?) would you want to get caught? No you wouldnt. Don't insult cheaters intelligence by assuming that many aren't careful with their account and being 'subtle'. Because I've been in outfits that have admitted doing it on teamspeak -_-

Personally i think a good many members of the community lie, because they are using it. A lot even exposed themselves on streams over the years when they minimized the game like an idiot and revealed a cheat UI or two.

Lately, you will notice that its common to receive chunk damage. But as I noticed after a while - often from very specific 'elite' outfits. Im sure many have you have been there. A guy isn't even facing you, you get the drop on him clearly on your screen. He's visibly surprised (startled and hits his/her spacebar in panic) - a medkit can briefly be seen to be fired off (almost like its a macro without weapon swap) and then there are two plinks and you are instantly dead. My last experience of this being from a gauss saw NC heavy, which considering the damage/HS nature of the weapon, I made sure to experience several times (to eliminate server possibilities as much as possible.

Once you realise that this is an aging game, with next to nothing done about paying subtle cheaters, some with infantry K/D's in excess of 10 (even nucleartouch on cobalt is only sat at 5+ as a cheesy noob farmer lol). You can move on with the game and just trying to accept that it is how it is. Nothing is going to change and occasionally there is the odd nice battle without them in it.

Take a look at this clip from Reddit.

https://clips.twitch.tv/NiceFriendlySwordPunchTrees

It's incredibly demoralizing seeing stuff like this slip through Battleye and knowing that if this guy just tuned whatever he's using down a couple notches then he'd likely be written off as a great player. More and more I'm becoming suspicious of a lot of the better players around. This is another reason I'm a fan of a shorter ttk in games, as positioning and strategy starts to become a lot more important than chaining headshots.

What happens?
I have no sound where i am now.

I see a scythe that gets killed by an anni doing 15% damage, but no lockon warning which is strange.
However if you watch the full vid you see the scythe messing with their graphics settings, perhaps theyve altered something they shouldnt have in the ini that has removed the warnings? If thats even possible..
I also see an aspis AA turret doing 62% damage, but that secondary damage source disappears when the death screen fully loads.

Is it the Aspis thats cheating? I cannot tell where it is coming from.
Remaining health 23%, could have been taken by the mossy.

Again i have no sound, perhaps that reveals something, but tbh all i can see is a scythe dying to ground fire.
Perhaps shed some light on it for me, genuine question.

The only thing i find strange is i cannot find the mossy character on any stats sites, only the scythe, aspis, and annihilator users.
I did find this however https://www.planetside2.com/players/#!/search/angelamerkel, could be different people, but no 88 listed.

Like the reddit comment, I've encountered endless ESFs that land shots on me even though they are clearly not aiming at me. This is not new whatsoever and the fact that this has been going on for years says enough about the state of it all.

Kill screens are buggy. That launcher was the Scythe's previous death. The video shows a Mossy with not only impossible accuracy at that range with that gun, but dealing damage at a pace impossible for the Locust.

Has anyone actually confirmed that BE is running on their setup ? It's definitely not on mine.

As it stands, the cheating free-for-all is so bad that even the 'git gud' defenders aren't bothering to try and respond any more. It's so depressing to see a game I love go down the pan like this.


Maybe DBG need to focus their efforts on addressing the rampant cheats - a new continent is great for sure but will they have any paying customers left by the time it's introduced ? I'm still paying - but it's getting very very hard to justify...

I actually haven't noticed. Even if it does launch, there are some interesting workarounds on some of the cheat forums. They seem to be too simple to be true. This really seems to be Battleye's fault, not Daybrrak's. Either way, I hope they get this sorted out soon. I'm sure the BE group is on top of it, as some big titles pay a ton of money for their service.

So the mossy did 100% damage?
Wow.
Guess that explains why i cant find the character, must have been dealt with.

Any chance you could link the reddit thread?

EDIT: Scratch that, i found the character on FISU
https://ps2.fisu.pw/player/?name=angeiamerkel88

I reported that same dude twice(for exploit and the nick. Given his name he is political and the "88" got a meaning then.) during the last 2 days on Cobalt. Exactly the same happened to me like 4 times with him. I have seen it even more extreme than this tho...he shot in an entirely different direction and still one clipped me without of missing a bullet. Same with daltons. Never fails, no odd movement.
He claims it's his bad connection...but he actually is lagswitching or doing something with the hitboxes. It ain't his first account either.

But whatever he is doing there, I'm quite sure it's something a lot of sky knights used before. I always wondered why certain people seem to have perfect aim against an evading ESF while I got like a 10% accuracy in such a situation.

It makes you wonder. I still think that there's far lass cheating in vehicles than on the infantey side of things. I got lag switched by a guy I previously killed in A2A two days ago, but it was at least a couple months after the last suspicious thing I saw in the air. But I rarely go a couple days without seeing something stupid at night on Connery regarding infantry.

When I die, it's because someone cheated.

When I kill, it's because I am awesome.

So you think the Mossy in that clip I posted was legit? Get out of here with your nonsense.

When I die, it's because someone cheated.

When I kill, it's because I am awesome.

Hitbox modification is pretty common, though most don't make their targets the size of the moon like that guy did. And yeah, it's pretty easy to notice who's using it in the air, as I notice that behavior all the time. (so glad a certain cn88 user is gone, they used it for the past 2 ~ 3 years straight) For example, if anyone is hitting you more than a couple times during a reverse maneuver that includes a corkscrew, they're likely using modified hitboxes. I suspect many just increase it to the level of what the pre-nerf Canis was, so all they have to do is 'try' to aim but not perfectly and then they're suddenly perfect.

Far as lagswitching goes, an object currently in motion stays in motion according to the client, so even if they do that, if they can't aim to save their life they won't get you anyway. Mainly the spawn room burster MAX lagswitchers are a problem, but thankfully they are rare.

Sadly, based on evidence and experience, those words are all too often true. I wish they were not.

I ran into the ESF hitbox exploit tonight - never noticed it before, but then maybe I wasn't looking. Scythe shooting 20 degrees to my reaver's left and still hitting me at a range of about 50m. He wasn't a bad pilot - he knew how to RM pretty well, but that was crazy to be hit when his nose is pointed 20 degrees away from me.

Last time I quit this game for a year due to too much hacking; I almost didn't return. I might leave again. It is quite frustrating because this game is like no other, but client-side hit detection just makes hacking too easy. I chalk it up to moral depravity in society where cheating is normal - even "elite". Don't get me wrong, cheating has been around since the concept of "rules" was introduced; it's just bad right now.

This is often just lag. Say you're reverse maneuvering up and over your target and the bad guy is rushing you nose up. It looks like you're getting top hits on him, but his client is a little bit ahead and he's facing right at you on his screen.

It doesn't look like anyone is gone, just not playing as much.

Same as above, this is possibly just lag. Just think of the infantry side of things, dying behind walls and ****. Getting hit by an ESF that isn't lined up is no different. And next time you drive for a gunner with high ping, take a look at his hits, they're often way off the mark on your screen. I do believe plenty of cheaters are out there, but lag and server performance is to blame for half the hackusations.

I feel like they’re losing the arm’s race.

The quantity has defintely risen since BE’s initial launch. While BE certainly helped, the hackers have seemingly caught up in some respect.

They need to do something more.

I've heard that there's an auto-kick feature when low BR players do suspiciously well. I propose that algorithm be cranked up unless that new character is linked to a high BR character. That would solve the problem of these guys just creating a new character when/if their old cheating account gets banned.

'Clientside' is indeed the second serious game problem in my mind, and yes many or most of those ESFs landing shots while clearly below me for a full second is probably because of some key ping difference between that player and myself (I have good consistent ping), but at what point does it cross into the ridiculous with someone cheating to induce some random packet loss to tank more damage than normal, to move in bursts that on my client looks like fast forward, to perform 3 game actions within the time frame of emptying a 35 round clip into them, to tank that damage, and to send packets of instant damage back?

The problem of 'clientside' leaves open the door to cheaters to abuse network hardware limits and consistently be 3 steps ahead of your player character. We are sometimes literally playing in the distant past. Something more needs to have been done to level the playing field in the build of planetside2 or a successor.

I play with friends from Europe, who have worse ping, but never observed their player character fast forward around, and even gunning for them there's rarely a lag spike to cause my position to 'rubberband.' I have yet to encounter them on opposing factions in big battles to see what our character actions look like to each other - knowing each other's ping.

Consider this: I also play a MMORPG, a dying niche game also with a North American server. At a few minutes past midnight local, 'something' in my network resets my internet for about 5 seconds. The ISP and line technicians don't know what causes it. In that game, everything freezes, I get disconnected every time, and simply log-in, load the character, and find myself back in the action, sometimes dead if it happens with enemy NPCs.

In PS2, enemies vanish, friendly players continue off into the air, a bunch of fast-forward type action and sound effects take place, and I'm back and alive even if the room was previously full of enemies. In Overwatch, I get instantly disconnected, and am able to rejoin the competitive match without penalty but from spawn room. Ping in the thousands during server-side lag shouldn't be permitted.

I know the difference between tick rates as well. Overwatch on release day had it very low, and the game was frustrating to play with the same old dying well behind cover etc., then they released competitive mode which has higher tick rate and the game feels good. Now, I still believe competitive has the highest rate, while all other game modes have it slightly below that, based on the responsiveness with which game actions are registered.

Whatever nonsense is going on in PS2 for certain players (or perhaps certain situations between two players) is sometimes more than just lag. Self-serving bias combines with denial and confirmation bias so ""there is no cheating/I never encountered it in PS2/get good"" while real cheaters exploit and hide in the lag, use subtle cheats, probably use endless smurf accounts to shadow for the group.