Cheaters ruining multiplayer games [ Edited ]

[OopsWTFMyBad]

They should have learned from all the previous online games of this type. Players will not stay with a game full of cheaters. Players will tell their friends not to buy the game. Game fails. EA is in for a rude awakening. Social media has allowed players to communicate and realize just how bad these companies screw us over for every bit they can, with little care for quality or fairness.
If they can afford to pay design teams to create new content, they can sure afford to pay quality teams to make sure everything works as intended and that anti-cheats work properly.

[SaintGodfreyOmer]

Its at the point I have to record each game to catch all the cheating. EA Please Start doing something instead of nothing. Perhaps sending you a bill for my time would help the situation. Your cut and paste canned responsed are obvious to those of us with professional work XP. Getting ready to report another batch of cheaters. Next step is determining whom the bill should go.

[ivrognard]

Sadly, this is a common problem in other (non-EA) games, too. It's a losing battle, as the people creating cheats and hacks do not care about the players that want to have a fun and a clean game. Even worse, they profit from selling the cheats/hacks to the players that can't live without seeing themselves in the top of the leaderboards/scoreboards.

I am old enough to remember the times when we, as players, had a lot more power. Servers where you could vote to kick a cheater from the game, well administered and maintained by the players. 

Most gaming companies are using a third party anti-cheat solution, which means that they have to wait until the devs of that software are updating the anti-cheat tool. COD series also has this kind of complains and that extends to pretty much every MP game out-there. Because some people can't help themselves, but to be quite the arses and ruin everyone's fun. 

One of the reason that i've almost gave up playing MP games was cheating. The other was the increasingly toxicity of the gaming communities. 

Yes, you can always vote with your wallet, but in the long run, the cheaters win. They are pushing us back to SP games only and at some point, people will give up on even trying to play an MP game. It's a sad state of affairs and no one seem able to do much about it. WoW bans yearly thousands of boting farmers, but those are back in the game in no time. Epic, in a desperate try to stop cheating from their last MMOFPS, started to sue cheaters. The cheaters do not seem to care about that, either. So, yeah...nothing seem to work against those people.

[4921875]

i have read a couple of these cheating questions and the answer is word for word the same, players are scratching there heads as to why a player reported by  multiple  players is thumbing there nose at them and just plays on.

one can only assume that the player in question has been found not guilty, but we don't know that as any thing to do with cheating is a very closed shop.

my own view is go after the hacking software makers and sellers.

[OopsWTFMyBad]

Yep. Months later and the issue remains a game breaker.
EA/Dice just continue to give us the same nonsense cut and paste replies, or say they take something seriously when they obviously do not because zero progress has been made on the issue.

The same cheaters who were running around months ago making the game pointless for people are still running around cheating.
The same two guilds/clans that are very well known for cheating in both BF1 and BF2 are STILL running around cheating in bf2, and EA does nothing!

This is the main reason I have been telling all my friends not to buy the game. I can't in good conscience recommend a game which will just frustrate people because the anti-cheating support is a complete joke.

[Pleeeaaaase]

Good post but i gave up on this.

These players will never get banned cuz there is no cheating evidence ,just  you know that they are not legit. But there is nothing you can do against that. Youve got to swallow it.

In my case i have accept the fact that i wasted over 20.000hours in a game or more in a game to get into the highest level of e sport.

But at some point youve to realize pc gaming is like a  competitive sport.

And like in any other sport people will do what they can to win. I think you get my point here. Btw Dont come me with "this and that sport is clean because... "

Its a fact but its forbidden to rly talk about. Weve got client sided anti cheats and they are not bad, but if somebody really thinks that a top level - client sided -  anti cheat will detect everything than he is just delusional. (Btw in my opinion punkbuster isnt even worth mentioning. Its just as useful as valves counterpart or battleeye. lol)

Anti cheats are searching for specific patterns/behavior. Like for example your anti virus does. But to detect something you need to know what you are looking for. And thats the reason why cheat coders always are one step ahead.

I didnt even want to write that much. haha Seems like you hit a nerve with this post.

So if you want to play a cheat free game, go play offline.

Or play with/against your friends.

Or in general stop playing games in which you are playing against another person.

I really wish we'd have some serious laws against cheating in competitive gaming.

Like a few years in jail or something like that.

I mean in general it is a mix of harassment and manipulating the gamecode and so on. So for example we basically have some kind of law against cheating in online games.

But to bring politics attention to this the game developers would have to speak up. And i dont see this happening.

So thats my point of view. Probably a bit to the extreme but hey youve got to deal with that scum somehow.

[JanePhoenix]

Just an idea I'd like to share here, for what it's worth. Since humans are fundamentally better at spotting cheaters than software, perhaps the problem requires a human touch? I'm thinking a position of employment. Just a handful of EA employees whose sole responsibility is to join in-game on servers and look for evidence of cheating, banning offenders on the spot. Gaming police so to speak. @Straatford87, could something like that work?

[ivrognard]

@JanePhoenix The private servers usually have a few people (the server owner included) that try to spot cheaters. But for EA, that would be harder. The amount of people that they would need to police all the servers...And humans are flawed, too. Some may abuse their admin powers. Sadly, there is no simple solution to the problem. I like the idea, though, as in the old days there where dedicated servers administered by volunteers (most of them decent people and great players that could spot a cheat quite well). One of the reasons that this won't work is the sheer number of players and servers. Back then, the numbers were lower and it was easier to have a human team to deal with cheaters.

[JanePhoenix]

@ivrognard I haven't done multiplayer gaming in such a long time, so I'm not really familiar with how much things have changed. But I'm thinking that private servers would be "at your own risk" and potentially volunteer-based, but out of EA's hands. With virtualisation and powerful machines, shouldn't EA be able to run a good amount of dedicated servers across a smaller number of machines though? EA staff could then police only those dedicated servers, and others would be up to the community to run how they see fit, but perhaps include a list of quality-control criteria in order to be listed on EA's platform for public discovery.

[OopsWTFMyBad]

I'll be honest, most people I know stopped playing this game if they were PC players. We tell people not to waste time on it, and even steer them towards other games by other companies that might actually give a care about stopping cheaters. 

At some point the staff member who replied with that nonsense in the first page even marked his answer as an accepted solution just to make this thread go away.

I undid that because players don't want some nonsense response that shows us they don't care. 

I have seen proof with my own eyes they do nothing. I have spotted the same guy for months in GA. Not going to name him as that would violate the TOS and give them an excuse to try and hide this thread again. He always finds a nice open spot where he has no cover and is a total sitting duck. Then just stands there taking enemy fire for a minute or two. No damage taken at all. Then he starts one shotting people through walls and from clear across the map. I know he has to have been reported hundreds of times by now, as I see him so regularly and his cheating is undeniable. I still run into him at least a few times a week. Even talks in chat bragging about how his cheats are awesome and everyone else should just give up and log out.

This is the kind of anti-cheating support we get. I think the only time they really care about people cheating is if they try and cheat their way into having something that could be bought with real money.