Latest Overwatch Ban Wave Results in Some Hilarious Complaints

[Sheo_Dagana]

However, I have been thinking as a person who buys and owns his own games. How DOES this affect people who have relatives who uses their PCs? There has to be some consideration if one person bought it and owned it, and another person in the household actually did the cheating.

The EULA of pretty much every online game stipulates that there is to be no more than one user per account key and it is usually said that way to cover who ever is running that game's ass in case a situation such as this arises. The one for Final Fantasy XIV definitely said that you are responsible for whatever goes on in your account unless you've been hacked. So technically speaking, another person in the household shouldn't have been playing on the account to begin with, and putting that in the EULA allows them to look at the end user and shrug their shoulders because they're not liable.

It sucks, but there's not a lot the kid in those posts can do. His brother's going to be pissed and he has every right to be, so he can probably look forward to getting thrashed. Cheating is very popular in older console shooters and I had families come in to my store to exchange Xbox 360's because their family account got banned by a 13 year-old using cheats in Black Ops. Front end sent them back to me and I had to explain how the whole process worked and that the account's ban will never be lifted, and exactly what had to go down for that to happen.

It IS a little shitty that all that money gets flushed down the tube just because of a bad decision, but if said decision can cause you to lose all the money and time you've put into an account, is cheating really worth that risk?

 

[WeepingAngels]

Half of those people act like it was their god given right to cheat in Overwatch and that Blizzard has no right to ban them, I don't know anymore, seems "fuk u i do wat i want" is becoming a very common conception to have

Hackers who go into public games are by definition complete arse holes with absolutely no sense of self awareness.

I looked it up and there is no mention of hackers or public games in the definition of asshole.

If we are just going to make up definitions, maybe I could make one up for people who make up definitions. No one likes cheaters but comments like this annoy me.

 

[MHR]

Half of those people act like it was their god given right to cheat in Overwatch and that Blizzard has no right to ban them, I don't know anymore, seems "fuk u i do wat i want" is becoming a very common conception to have

Hackers who go into public games are by definition complete arse holes with absolutely no sense of self awareness.

I looked it up and there is no mention of hackers or public games in the definition of asshole.

If we are just going to make up definitions, maybe I could make one up for people who make up definitions. No one likes cheaters but comments like this annoy me.

You're splitting hairs. The cheater is an asshole, and that asshole is a cheater.

 

[FalloutJack]

I must answer that with the proper video...


OT: Once again, I have to point out the one guy who thinks Anonymous is still relevent. That's just funny right there.

 

[Chaosian]

As great as it is to see the cheaters kick, I have a hard time joining in the celebration - especially when it's one of these automated type of deals.
Speaking from a place of having a friend soft-banned in Dark Souls 3 for having a poor internet connection AS WE WERE PLAYING TOGETHER, I can no longer support these automated systems and permanent bans. Clamping down on cheaters is great, but fuck you and your policies Blizzard if you managed to get a single false positive.

 

[Spider RedNight]

Because I'm a naive flower, I saw the bans and I was like "...the hell's an aimbot?" (I've never been a PC gamer, really).

That being said and feeling a little more educated than previously, HAAAAAAAAAAAAAH serves those suckers right. Now, it does frustrate me that because a bunch of idiots got banned from cheating, they decide to DDoS the whole system so *I* ended up being kicked out of my PS4 sessions for.... I dunno, three or four hours? And, of course, *I* had no idea what was going on (do consoles have stuff like that? If we do, I've never been privy and actual players don't need them anyway. To quote Junkrat "Eh, aiming's overrated"). I don't think I would've minded so much but that was RIGHT after the Olympics Event started so I was pumped up, ready to get some cosmetic crap... aaaaand there goes the server. Blast it.

But yeah no, those comments legit sound like they were written by my 9-year-old brother. Are people REALLY that stupid and entitled that they can basically say "Whaaat? I was just CHEATING, no need to BAN me"

As great as it is to see the cheaters kick, I have a hard time joining in the celebration - especially when it's one of these automated type of deals.
Speaking from a place of having a friend soft-banned in Dark Souls 3 for having a poor internet connection AS WE WERE PLAYING TOGETHER, I can no longer support these automated systems and permanent bans. Clamping down on cheaters is great, but fuck you and your policies Blizzard if you managed to get a single false positive.

This banwave is perma-banning people using external sources to cheat - they perma-ban people for leaving games too often regardless of the reason? I thought that was just a temporary thing that would go away

 

[The_Great_Galendo]

I highly agree. Good software design is helpful. Unfortunately, a lot of this comes in as attempts at lowering apparent latency. To achieve this, players would have to put up with a loss in the apparent response of the game. But a black box system is what games should be striving for.

How does that lower latency, though? Like, one system or another has to do the computations for what the player can see. Which computer's going to be faster at computing whether you can see the guy hiding behind the wall or not, your personal PC or Blizzard's dedicated server? Not only should Blizzard's server be faster, if anything it should lower latency by not needing to send unnecessary positional information. Am I missing something?

He's lying. He's posting on a hacker forum, by colour changing, he means that he's highlighting information that's usually invisible. He thinks he's allowed to change the textures to see through walls. He is mistaken.

That would make more sense, I suppose. I guess we'd need more information to be sure, but I get worried when companies start issuing permanent bans for anything that's not very, very well explained in advance. It seems like Blizzard's taking a "I'll know it when I see it" approach to cheating, which is fine in theory but questionable in practice. It's doubly questionable if they're banning people without human review of any borderline cases.

I would be happy to place money on this being a hacking issue and not a colour blindness issue. Fortunately, colour blindness is fairly well understood R/G deficiency, B/Y deficiency etc, and it's possible to include UI for this, and it's become common practice for multiplayer titles.

Does Overwatch have adjustments for this? I don't play many multiplayer games in general, so I don't know how common this actually is, but the few games I have played...well, let's just say that color adjustment isn't an option in the main menu. Maybe if you dig deep enough it can be done. I've never tried, because I'm not color-blind, but I have plenty of sympathy for those who are.

 

[Elijin]

While its amusing to see indignant hackers losing their shit...
I prefer the approach we saw in yesteryears. Servers run with actual community admins who catch those who fall through the gaps, while things like VAC or Punkbuster do the heavy lifting.

Mostly because hackers tend to largely be in two categories. Kids who make stupid mistakes and letting them play on unsecured servers or offline isn't going to hurt anyone, and douchebags who are out to spoil it for everyone and wont hesitate for a second to drop money on a new license to continue harassing the community.

So yeah....the ones whose intent is really negative will just come back for another round, while the kids are left with a dead product and a pretty shitty lesson. A lesson which severely limiting their experience would teach just as well.

I now fully expect to be replied to in a way which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for children and their lack of foresight.

 

[Spider RedNight]

Does Overwatch have adjustments for this? I don't play many multiplayer games in general, so I don't know how common this actually is, but the few games I have played...well, let's just say that color adjustment isn't an option in the main menu. Maybe if you dig deep enough it can be done. I've never tried, because I'm not color-blind, but I have plenty of sympathy for those who are.

Aye, there's several colour-blindness modes in the options depending on which spectrum you need - it's growing increasingly-popular in multiplayer games (Borderlands 2 rings a bell for one of the first that I can remember). It's actually kind of fascinating for non-colourblind people to see how the colours change. I'll never really get it but it's still interesting.

So yeah....the ones whose intent is really negative will just come back for another round, while the kids are left with a dead product and a pretty shitty lesson. A lesson which severely limiting their experience would teach just as well.

I now fully expect to be replied to in a way which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for children and their lack of foresight.

Yeahhhh maybe it's a LITTLE extreme (thought what little empathy I have sails right out the window when they complain in... such an entitled way). Kids gotta learn some lessons the hard way, anyway - if a pretty shitty lesson is getting perma-banned from a video game, I can't imagine what the military would do to them as far as shitty lessons go.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

Everybody point and laugh at those idiots.

Oh, I laughed. We all did. And then it dawned upon us that this is but a slice of a whole generation of self-entitled, self-aggrandizing cool dudes that honestly think botting is a legitimate part of their experience.

I invaded one of their threads and posited 'myself' as an outraged botting player, writing the most ludicrous things I could come up with... and they just ran with it. That's not how communication, competitive gaming or being human works. My misanthropy easily doubled after that. I think I need a new therapist.

 

[JamesStone]

Half of those people act like it was their god given right to cheat in Overwatch and that Blizzard has no right to ban them, I don't know anymore, seems "fuk u i do wat i want" is becoming a very common conception to have

Yes how dare these people want to play the game they paid for.

I pay for a meal at a restaurant. Do I have the right to shit on the floor because I payed for the right of having been served dinner?

And I'm not even reaching in this comparison. If I'm ruining everyone else's experience by being a selfish prick with so sense of respect for others, and then act like a self righteous **** while I'm at it because it's a natural thing, then fuck me with a rusty bat, I'll be out of there in a heartbeat with a boot mark on my ass for good luck.


EDIT: Damn, I posted it the moment I saw the reply. The shit comparsion really is the first thing which occurs when reading it, ain't it?

 

[bastardofmelbourne]

So yeah....the ones whose intent is really negative will just come back for another round, while the kids are left with a dead product and a pretty shitty lesson. A lesson which severely limiting their experience would teach just as well.

I now fully expect to be replied to in a way which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for children and their lack of foresight.

How dare you think of the children?! THEY'RE NOT PAWNS FOR YOUR POLITICAL AGENDA YOU HACK

(j/k)

 

[Truth Cake]

While its amusing to see indignant hackers losing their shit...
I prefer the approach we saw in yesteryears. Servers run with actual community admins who catch those who fall through the gaps, while things like VAC or Punkbuster do the heavy lifting.

Mostly because hackers tend to largely be in two categories. Kids who make stupid mistakes and letting them play on unsecured servers or offline isn't going to hurt anyone, and douchebags who are out to spoil it for everyone and wont hesitate for a second to drop money on a new license to continue harassing the community.

So yeah....the ones whose intent is really negative will just come back for another round, while the kids are left with a dead product and a pretty shitty lesson. A lesson which severely limiting their experience would teach just as well.

I now fully expect to be replied to in a way which demonstrates a complete lack of empathy for children and their lack of foresight.

Interesting attempt at a preemptive defense there- "Anyone who disagrees with me either hates children or expects too much of them!" (paraphrased). Had you not included that I probably wouldn't have bothered with a reply, but you did and that makes it a challenge that I can't ignore.

I would imagine that if those children already had enough computer savvy and poor morals that they knowingly installed a program that they must have known would give them an unfair advantage in the game (otherwise why the hell would they install it in the first place?) and were summarily punished for it... probably had some inkling that what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyways... pretty firmly putting them in your 'douchebag' category. The number of 'children' who can somehow manage all that and somehow NOT know what they're doing is in any way wrong is probably zero... well, that or they have a completely backwards notion of what right and wrong are, in which case you probably don't want them in your multiplayer game.

A couple other issues with that- first, how exactly can one tell the difference between these two types of cheaters? And even if you had a way, how are you going to stop the non-'children' cheaters from knowingly lying about their age or intentions or however you test for it (because with so many players and so much data, they're going to find out how you test for it eventually and they'll use that to their advantage) so they get out of a worse punishment?

Second, how is a game like Overwatch -a multiplayer-only game- going to implement that? There is no 'offline' mode for Overwatch, it's either you can play, you can't play, or you do a Dark Souls-style approach and have the cheaters only able to play with other cheaters, and there was a post on the last page then went over pretty well why Blizzard probably won't want to do that.

Also from my understanding even buying a new Overwatch license isn't enough to remove the ban. I assume either Blizzard checks the account, or more seriously they check IP or MAC addresses of the computer you use so there's no faking it so then the douchebags can't come back unless they buy a new computer, in which case good luck finding a way to figure that one out.

 

[Elijin]

Yeahhhh maybe it's a LITTLE extreme (thought what little empathy I have sails right out the window when they complain in... such an entitled way). Kids gotta learn some lessons the hard way, anyway - if a pretty shitty lesson is getting perma-banned from a video game, I can't imagine what the military would do to them as far as shitty lessons go.

Well, the military would give you a punishment (assuming we're still talking non-criminal things here) which sucked at the time, but would had an end point. Which is sort of my point, an open ended punishment like 'this product is bricked forever' is both super extreme from a child's point of view, and loses impact because it just shuts a door in their face. They're not going to have a moment of clarity where they go 'Hey this would be more fun with my friends/human players/ not hackers.' I believe those moments are required for children to actually come to their own 'cheating isn't okay because it impacts everyone's fun' stance, instead of 'when I cheat I get overkill banned.'

But overall, I should have communicated better. The nasty responses being showcased from that forum are not the ones I'm prepared to defend. I'm talking about the system as a whole. Kids who made dumb decisions since they lack the foresight and are still learning their moral compass, who quietly take their ban and now have nothing. Let them play vs bots, or in unsecured servers or something.

I mean I cheated at games when I was a kid. Main difference is my childhood pre-dated the internet, and I cheated solo or maybe the kid on the couch next to me. By the time internet gaming was a thing, I had decided it hurt the experience and should not be done. Who knows whether that experimental stage of arriving at that personal realisation would have involved online cheating had I gone through those years online.

Editing in because these boards don't have post previews:

I would imagine that if those children already had enough computer savvy and poor morals that they knowingly installed a program that they must have known would give them an unfair advantage in the game (otherwise why the hell would they install it in the first place?) and were summarily punished for it... probably had some inkling that what they were doing was wrong, but they did it anyways... pretty firmly putting them in your 'douchebag' category. The number of 'children' who can somehow manage all that and somehow NOT know what they're doing is in any way wrong is probably zero... well, that or they have a completely backwards notion of what right and wrong are, in which case you probably don't want them in your multiplayer game.

A couple other issues with that- first, how exactly can one tell the difference between these two types of cheaters? And even if you had a way, how are you going to stop the non-'children' cheaters from knowingly lying about their age or intentions or however you test for it (because with so many players and so much data, they're going to find out how you test for it eventually and they'll use that to their advantage) so they get out of a worse punishment?

My pre-emptive defense was more of a resignation towards the people who measure kids by adult standards.

Which....you immediately did. 'Hacking' isn't hard, because its just running a script someone else made, which can be pretty easily googled. A lot of the concepts you're talking about are learned concepts, not inate truths we're born with. I've definitely known kids who didn't know better cheat at a game because they felt like they couldn't compete. Online interactions and things like fair play are learned through doing.

I also don't expect the system to differentiate at all. I was pointing out the system is harsher on kids who made poor decisions and have to live with it, than on actual trolls and griefers who move on to their next target or attempt.

 

[Truth Cake]

My pre-emptive defense was more of a resignation towards the people who measure kids by adult standards.

Which....you immediately did. 'Hacking' isn't hard, because its just running a script someone else made, which can be pretty easily googled. A lot of the concepts you're talking about are learned concepts, not innate truths we're born with. I've definitely known kids who didn't know better cheat at a game because they felt like they couldn't compete. Online interactions and things like fair play are learned through doing.

I also don't expect the system to differentiate at all. I was pointing out the system is harsher on kids who made poor decisions and have to live with it, than on actual trolls and griefers who move on to their next target or attempt.

No, hacking isn't hard, but they pretty much have to know at least some basic knowledge about what they're doing and the general results- again, they KNOW that they're downloading programs that they KNOW will give them an unfair advantage because again, why would they download those exact programs otherwise, naive curiosity? If that's the case then their computers must be completely riddled with malware for all the downloading random crap they must be doing.

If they can SOMEHOW get that far and it NEVER occurred to them that what they were doing was in any way wrong and that they may be punished for doing it, then chances are they have poor morals and I don't think a video game punishment of any sort is going to fix that, so it's best be rid of them.

And this system isn't harsher on children than griefers... what? It's the same punishment for both, that they can't play the game anymore because they've been banned... Blizzard obviously can't stop those griefers from just moving on to their next target since they only have jurisdiction over their own games, but obviously those children can just go and play different games just the same then... soooo what's your point?

Those kids in question probably learned their lesson after that punishment anyways (if they were ever going to learn the lesson, that is), and their only punishment is that they can't play Overwatch anymore? That's a pretty minor thing in the grand scheme of things, I'm sure in 5 or 10 years when they aren't children anymore Overwatch will probably mean nothing to them.

 

[Arawn]

"I cheat, therefore they ban"

Can't recall who said it, but I'm sure my friend was quoting someone when he told that. Seems rather cut and dry. You cheated so you get banned. Personally I don't see how anyone gets a sense of enjoyment from winning when they had an unfair advantage. Why are you playing said game? I play games for the challenge. If there's no challenge it's not worth playing. Sports athletes get banned (usually) when they test for steroids. My only guess is the desire to win overrides their sense of sportsmanship and fair play. Pride in winning, but not in accomplishment. I'm sure SOMEONE with a psych major could better phrase it. None the less it's scary how oblivious they are. They feel they've done nothing wrong, or they didn't expect any consequences for their actions. Or maybe they thought that they wouldn't get caught. Either way it's rather shocking.


EDIT: "I'm someone with a psych major.." Not sure how I missed that.

 

[Adeptus Aspartem]

What the hell is a 'semi-pro' gamer? Is that like being an amateur porn star or something?

I love hearing cheaters cry and whine when they get banned. They don't even regret that they were cheating; a lot of the responses were all talk of fucking suing Blizzard... BLIZZARD. The company that fucking prints money, and a bunch of basement-dwelling cheaters want to take on the legal team of a company that handles the most popular online games out there?

Actually, I hope that happens! I'd love to see these entitled whiners lose and have to pay the legal fees. Maybe that's harsh, but I can't stand people that cheat in video games, especially people that use Aimbots, which it seems like that's what the majority of these people got banned for.

Semi-pro is someone who earns money with the game but not enough to fully live form it. It's "not-quite professional".
Kinda what most players in my country (Switzerland) are, because there's basically no money in E-sports yet, but we're working on that.
There are good teams which win many Lans or online tournaments, but the prize money is usually just a few hundred bucks. So it's nice to have, but that's about it.