Overwatch Cheaters Are Getting Wrecked By Blizzard

[Balimaar]

Titanfall did it right.

 

[Falling_v1legacy]

Hm i'm not sure if this isn't going a bit too far. Sure, fuck cheaters and all that, but banning people when they buy a new copy? I haven't had all that many issues with cheaters, and it seems that as long as the devs care there's no need for draconian measures. Besides, if you start banning people when they buy a new copy of the game, you'll end up with lawsuits at some point.

Left to their own devices, hackers will tear down the game itself. Battlenet 1.0 has some scary hack floating around that basically denied all public games, rendering the server entirely unusuable because you couldn't join any games except privately. Others overran servers with hacks that either dropped or crashed the game. DDOS'ers and keystealers, Battlenet 1.0 was/is a nightmare.

Screw those guys.

 

[Tiamat666]

Cheaters are selfish dicks who ruin the game for everyone else. Personally, I think they should be publicly decapitated by Sean Bean. Banning them from their Battle.net account is the next best thing.

Too draconian? A step too far?
I don't think so. If you're a cheater you're an asshole to all the other fair players who don't cheat. People who payed money to play the game, and you are ruining the experience for them, practically denying them their game. So you deserve to be treated like the asshole you are.

My heart is in joy when I think of all the cheaters who have been locked out of their accounts. Justice is served.

 

[johnnyLupine]

On one hand, fuck hackers. They're the reason I quit playing MW2 back in the day.

On the other hand, banning them again if they buy a new copy of the game is unnecessarily harsh. If they buy the game again, they should be caught cheating again before Blizz starts to autoban future purchases. If they learn their lesson the first time they lose access to their game, let them enjoy your product; save the account-wide bans and bans of future purchases for the repeat offenders.

Honestly, locking out all of their Battle.net games AND publically shaming the cheaters is kind of a dick move, as well.

I respectfully disagree. FUCK THE CHEATERS. For ever and ever.

Edit: Just to put it in a nice perspective.

I dont cheat. Ever. So it presents ZERO problem for me. Cheaters do. If you dont cheat, its not a problem for you either. So, in short.

People suffering from this: Cheaters.
People not: everyone else.
As it should be.

Sounds an awful lot like if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear?

Don't get me wrong I hate feeling that I've been one upped by someone in an unfair or underhanded way, such as the methods cheaters use and certainly dislike it even more when it actually shuts down one team being able to play and enjoy the game properly but I'd have to repeat the concerns of a few other people I've read in this thread saying, how likely is it that the system Blizzard is using to find and ban cheats will inaccurately flag regular accounts too?

Mind you I agree with Blizzard banning cheaters 100%, they ruin games and poison the community, with Overwatch being so new I think blizzard has to put their foot down hard on people who would harm the game.

Overall I would say good on blizzard for doing this but some reassurance on how their cheat system works would be nice. I suppose there would be no official word on this to stop cheaters reading into it and finding a loophole though.

 

[Cowabungaa]

It's only a game.

Banning someone from playing Blizzard games wont negatively effect their lives, it wont tear apart families, it wont physically hurt anyone, at worst the cheater is out a few bucks. Blizzard cutting someone off from their catalogue because they were making it an unfun experience for other players seems perfectly acceptable to me.

The cheater can always just go play something else.

Except that it's completely unreasonable. Our annoyance can be solved just as well by restricting them to the bot mode. It gets them out of our hair just as well without stealing their purchases. If what you really want is not playing with cheaters any more that method serves you and everyone else just as well. But all this is, is vindictiveness. Not justice or anything reasonable. It's petty and unnecessary.

Or remember how Titanfall did it? Lump every cheater together. Basically hacking prison. Let them play the Wimbledon of aimbot contests, as the devs put it. But I can get why a developer doesn't want to go through that trouble, so simply restricting them to the bot mode would serve as well.

Actually, cheaters have the potential to entirely ruin a game if they get a good enough foothold. If it's not curtailed, you will never find a game that isn't rife with cheating, and thus without cheating yourself you will never be able to actually have a fighting chance.

Lord knows I realize that, after playing plenty of shady free to play shooters and MMO's in the mid/late 2000's. That's why I'm absolutely for getting cheaters out of the general populace. But there's no reasonable ground to then extrapolate that to locking them out of every modern Blizzard purchase. Making sure they don't mix with the regular players can be done without being so draconian about it.

 

[Flathole]

Cracking down on cheaters/botters is more of a matter of resources (labor, mostly) and less "taking a stance"- of course they're going to ban cheaters. Especially since the banned don't get refunds, and are no longer taking up server space, and might purchase ANOTHER copy just to get banned again, hitting cheaters/bots in a fresh release is a no-brainer.

I wish Blizz would allocate similar resources to WoW/Hearthstone (don't know about other games) where bots and cheaters are just part of the game. Nothing ruins my day quite like a rogue in WoW interrupting a spell being cast within 200 milliseconds of it being initiated. The WoW PvP forums are filled with complaints about cheats and bots, and stories of competitive PvP teams (rated BGs, arena), as well as some "hardcore" raiding guilds, DEMANDING their teammates download and use specific "mod assistance" that automatically perform in-game tasks (explicitly against the rules.)

Bots are also both common and awful. It's sometimes painfully obvious when multiple characters are using the same botting software, since they perform actions and move in the exact same directions at the exact same time. And these are different classes from different servers, and none respond to chat, so I doubt they're multi-boxing.

And Hearthstone is outright INFESTED with bots. Most aren't too bothersome, even noticeable, but those that are simply ruin the game. The old "Secret Paladin" decks were so strong and obvious to play that bots using the deck pushed over a 50% winrate. The worst of the worst will do nothing their entire turn, make every play within the last 3 seconds, and end turn a fraction of a second before the game forces it to end. They're designed to just frustrate the human players, and either wait for a disconnect or a concede-from-boredom.

 

[shrekfan246]

It's only a game.

Banning someone from playing Blizzard games wont negatively effect their lives, it wont tear apart families, it wont physically hurt anyone, at worst the cheater is out a few bucks. Blizzard cutting someone off from their catalogue because they were making it an unfun experience for other players seems perfectly acceptable to me.

The cheater can always just go play something else.

Except that it's completely unreasonable. Our annoyance can be solved just as well by restricting them to the bot mode. It gets them out of our hair just as well without stealing their purchases. If what you really want is not playing with cheaters any more that method serves you and everyone else just as well. But all this is, is vindictiveness. Not justice or anything reasonable. It's petty and unnecessary.

Or remember how Titanfall did it? Lump every cheater together. Basically hacking prison. Let them play the Wimbledon of aimbot contests, as the devs put it. But I can get why a developer doesn't want to go through that trouble, so simply restricting them to the bot mode would serve as well.

Actually, cheaters have the potential to entirely ruin a game if they get a good enough foothold. If it's not curtailed, you will never find a game that isn't rife with cheating, and thus without cheating yourself you will never be able to actually have a fighting chance.

Lord knows I realize that, after playing plenty of shady free to play shooters and MMO's in the mid/late 2000's. That's why I'm absolutely for getting cheaters out of the general populace. But there's no reasonable ground to then extrapolate that to locking them out of every modern Blizzard purchase. Making sure they don't mix with the regular players can be done without being so draconian about it.

Again, this is hardly the first game that has done something like this, so I hope you're equally mad at every other multi-player game ever. Online games have always had EULAs, and those have always contained clauses that allowed the people running the games to remove your access for whatever reasons they wanted. We can question the morality and legality of that, but it's still something that's an inherent understanding that comes with the purchase of a video game.

For the record, I can't actually find any information from Blizzard themselves that corroborates the "banned from Battle.net" stories. The only thing I can really track down is someone who assumes as such because they only played Overwatch and the wording of the e-mail they got from Blizzard wasn't 100% clear. I'd say it's a little careless of websites reporting on this to continue stating that as hard fact, unless they have further information I've been unable to find.

 

[Something Amyss]

OT: Good to see them actually make an effort about it. Some Youtubers I've watched have encountered a hacker about twice in the past week on GTA online, a game I think Rockstar I think said they'd be monitoring carefully. I'm talking adding in static items into the game and ruining races to straight up invincibility. Glad this game may remain hack free for a while longer.

Last I knew, Rockstar was still saying it was dealing with cheaters. While I haven't played in a couple months, I had managed to run into the SAME cheaters weeks apart sometimes. I think the part that annoys me the most is the claim of continued commitment to something they didn't seem to care about in the first place.

Which, you know, leads me to the same conclusion about this. Good for Blizzard.

 

[SlumlordThanatos]

Apparently everyone in this thread would rather go scorched earth on anyone suspected of cheating instead of at least trying to rehabilitate them.

I feel such draconian measures should be reserved for repeat offenders.

 

[Neverhoodian]

Pretty sure that Blizzard don't use an automated system, but work based on reports sent in by players to their email ([email protected] i think), and then they have people who investigate from that.

I'm not totally sure if there's any kind of automated system in place. Though I'm fairly certain that if you're falsely banned, a ticket or phonecall will solve it.

Fair enough. If there are such safeguards then that addresses much of my concern.

 

[kajinking]

Gotta say, totally fine with this. As someone who has encountered more than a few aimbot/outright immortal players in TF2, it's great to play a game were I have found zero cheaters so far.

It's probably for the best as well. Overwatch seems far more tense than TF2 and nothing would be a bigger mood killer for anyone playing than facing a Mcree with god mode and insta-charging ultimates.

 

[chocolate pickles]

Absolutely deserved. The complete lockout makes complete sense: if you cheated at one game, whose to say you won't do it again? As for public naming and shaming - Brilliant! Cheaters deserve every humation they get.

 

[Frost27]

Honestly, locking out all of their Battle.net games AND publically shaming the cheaters is kind of a dick move, as well.

Y'know what's kind of a dick move? Cheating.

When did fighting dick moves with dick moves become an acceptable strategy?

It has always been an acceptable strategy, It is never, EVER, a bad idea to not hit your enemy hard enough to end the confrontation. Most companies are too weak kneed to do it and the ones that don't still have player satisfaction problems due to ongoing cheaters. Overwatch will never have the Steam sale syndrome of waves of cheaters appearing over the holidays because the previously banned trolls bought new copies.

 

[RaikuFA]

Is this also for console players?

 

[DracoSuave]

Allegedly this is a hack that's so easy to detect that there's no chance of false positives.

 

[Panzervaughn]

The moral here is don't cheat. Don't talk about cheating. Don't even think about cheating.

Treat it like CandleJack, and don't even SAY the word "Che

 

[Davroth]

The public shaming is a step too far, but I wont lose any sleep over a hacker losing their account because they were in breach of the terms of use for a game/service. Just so long as false positives are able to contest their bans and get their accounts reactivated.

Blizzard has always been very good about rectifying false positives... wait. No, they weren't.

When the dick (cheaters) decides to be an asshole, and the other dick (Blizzard) fucks the assholes.

Class act, this one.

That's in essence how laws and rules work right?

Its a dick move to murder someone. But its also a dick move to stick someone in a 6 by 8 human cage for the rest of their life.

Its a dick move to disrupt a classroom. Its also a dick move to keep a person after class for 30 minutes.

There has to be a punishment for cheating in online video games that assures very little people do so. It can ruin communities of legit good games and for MP only games, that means a dead game quick.

I personally can never understand the mentality of people who cheat online. Its just so ruinous to the spirit of the game.

What kind of comparisons are those..? It just really seems off to me that Blizzard is able to tell if you have been previously banned for cheating, honestly. Do they hide shit on your computer to identify you? Read out data? It's just plain creepy.

And it's also unnecessary. If your copy becomes unplayable after cheating, that should be enough punishment. It's not like anyone is going to keep on buying copies of the game to cheat for a day to be banned again. I agree, punishment should fit the crime. This punishment doesn't really. It goes way over the top, which is undoubtedly a marketing ploy. I mean, look at all the free press they are getting for it. But I guess we all got used by now that we don't own what we pay for, just rent it.

It has always been an acceptable strategy, It is never, EVER, a bad idea to not hit your enemy hard enough to end the confrontation. Most companies are too weak kneed to do it and the ones that don't still have player satisfaction problems due to ongoing cheaters. Overwatch will never have the Steam sale syndrome of waves of cheaters appearing over the holidays because the previously banned trolls bought new copies.

Oh is that why we execute every criminal? I mean, if a criminal is dead, he can't possibly commit any more crimes. Problem solved!

I don't think you are thinking this through. If they are already spying out their userbase, they could just invest in detection of third party programs rather then resorting to draconinan punishments and supposedly hiding files on a caught cheater's computer to identify them indefinitely. I really want to know how they do it.

 

[Frost27]

It has always been an acceptable strategy, It is never, EVER, a bad idea to not hit your enemy hard enough to end the confrontation. Most companies are too weak kneed to do it and the ones that don't still have player satisfaction problems due to ongoing cheaters. Overwatch will never have the Steam sale syndrome of waves of cheaters appearing over the holidays because the previously banned trolls bought new copies.

Oh is that why we execute every criminal? I mean, if a criminal is dead, he can't possibly commit any more crimes. Problem solved!

I don't think you are thinking this through. If they are already spying out their userbase, they could just invest in detection of third party programs rather then resorting to draconinan punishments and supposedly hiding files on a caught cheater's computer to identify them indefinitely. I really want to know how they do it.

You turned banning cheaters into a video game into a capital punishment comparison and you don't think that I am thinking this through? I think you threw up a straw man because you have a thin argument.

You think that the majority of these people would simply not cheat ever again because they got caught once? If you do, you are quite naive. The majority of these people had every intention of cheating again after they rebought the game as on the majority of the examples (If you want more, check the subreddit) removing the hack or modified DLL was one of the last steps taken to avoid the ban.

Blizzard has a responsibility to the paying customers that are not going to misuse this service and this responsibility is both in the interest to preserve the play experience of their honest customer base as well as to protect their own financial investment by retaining customers who will continue to financially support the product.

Now, I normally wouldn't do this, but I am going to address your fallacious comparison to criminal behavior in society.

Do we execute them all? No. But we sure as hell lock them away so they don't get to be a part of the same society as the rest of us that don't break the rules. That is EXACTLY what this is. Not a single one of these people cheated by accident. They all knew it was wrong. They all knew it was unfair. They all knew the consequences of getting caught, and they all chose to actively seek out ways to either take something that they didn't earn in the form of progression or to actively hinder the enjoyment of the millions of honest players out there "for the luls". They knowingly broke the law, and they knowingly earned their punishment.

As to the how: It is believed that they track the HWID of the user's machine, thus the only way to not be identified would be a full wipe and reinstall of your OS.

 

[Riddle78]

Good. Good fucking riddance. Hackers are a cancer upon any online gaming community. They tear down the potential of fun that regular users want and enjoy,and replace it with an endless parade of unwarranted dominance and curbstomping. I might not play Overwatch,nor will I ever (Short version; My Battle.Net was hit with too many false positives for my comfort),but this is an excellent stance. Cheaters will not be tolerated. It doesn't matter if those banned are truly penitent. They've wasted their chance. Now,they must suffer the consequences of their choices. Only the certainty of harsh,lasting punishment will deter cheaters. This is exactly that.

 

[Veylon]

Sounds an awful lot like if you've nothing to hide you've nothing to fear?

To play up the secret police angle a bit, anonymous denunciations have always been an easy form of revenge in police states. Have a grudge against your neighbors? Report them in as whatever flavor of political incorrectness the authorities are antsy about this week. And, of course, swatting is a thing as well.

How easy would it be to fake activity that gets someone else banned via identity theft? If I got someone else's credentials, could I nuke their entire game library in a single sitting? I imagine there are plenty of hacker-griefers that would experience intense schadenfreude at performing such an act.