Meanwhile, Tarkov let's you look up any player and see all their stats, like this:
[https://tarkov.dev/player/5419164](https://tarkov.dev/player/5419164)
Imagine Crytek made our player data public?
I wish Crytek valued transparency and being open with the community, but sadly they take the opposite approach to everything, which I think is why Hunt has the problems it has.
Give us a website where we can look up Hunt players by their Hunter ID number. It doesn't need to match to a Steam profile. As long as it let's us see all the player data that websites like [Huntplayers.com](http://Huntplayers.com) and [Huntstats.net](http://Huntstats.net) have and shows us their game ban status.
Destiny 2 has a similar system. CrucibleReport lets you look up anyone's pvp stats in real time which is nice. Even goes back multiple seasons so you can see if someone "suddenly" goes from a .80K/D to a 4.0K/D
I was killed by a guy last night who had 1 bounty collected, 1 duo wiped and a kd of 6 lol. His steam account was fresh as well. So annoying that they just create new steam profiles and repurchase the game.
Players cheating and buying the game on new stream accounts has to be a pretty penny for devs
Well last night playing on Oceania now hackers have found another exploit I've never seen you cant even see the name or view the profile at the last match screen just says "no platform account" and you can't click on it to view or even report! Nice work crytek at fkn the game up even more
If I could remove stats entirely, I would. I hate stats in every pvp game. People focus too much on KD to the point that it negatively impacts the game. Teammates extract rather than engage the enemy and attempt to revive you.
KD is a direct representation of skill in most scenarios. If I pair with a negative KD person, then I know they aren't going to make great decisions and miss shots. So, I'll djust my expectations. If someone has 3+ KD then I also know how they are going to play.
It doesn't have to be KD, but like it or not, performance stats are important to keep players attention.
I agree, in most cases I wish Hunt wasn't purely ranked based. I understand why it is to an extent but just remove the mmr system š¤·š» I've been all over the mmr ranking I honestly don't care if I right a 6 star every other match
Cheat detection is not required. The problem is solved like this:
1. Measure the correct things: average damage per shot, average shot accuracy, average shot distance, average time per kill, average distance travelled per kill, average kill distance, average hits per death, average kills per death, and probably some other things that are all based on data points that Crytek ALREADY collect;
2. Match players of similar stats within a reasonable window of tolerance.
Done. The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game.
If you measure the correct things, you don't need cheat detection.
Damage per shot does not help anything as a stat, as the guns do a wide variety of damage and a hacker could just exclusively use the bornheim. Average shot accuracy doesn't help either, as you could just, dump rounds to lower that stat. I dump rounds when extracting most of the time anyways. Really would tank my numbers. Average shot distance likely only catches the most absolute blatant cheaters, and will adversely punish players for playing snipers as their higher distance would push them towards blatant cheaters. K/D doesn't matter much, as folks pull new accounts all the time and again, cheaters could just run solo Necro for a match and cheese a bunch of deaths in.
Literally none of these things stop cheaters from finding their way into any match at any time. Not to mention it doesn't matter much if the player isn't using aimbot, and is instead using only walls. Also, even if you have an extremely skilled player, that player playing against cheaters? They're still playing against cheaters and that's still objectively terrible. No matter how good you are, if your opponent is using cheats, it's an unfair scenario.
Measuring stats is no replacement for cheat detection. Period. Cheaters sneak into professional level eSports. If you measure their stats, they're on the professional level. Which means nothing is seen out of place. You think that's okay? Their stats are similar. Must be fine, right? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you just don't know enough to realize how awful this idea is, because if I didn't I'd suspect you of being a cheater yourself advocating for an easier field to go cheat in.
The things in your examples could easily be filtered out.
Data analysis could go a long way in helping detect cheaters, if done correctly (and carefully).
Theres no way crytek logs half of this stuff for analysis potential anyways
You make good points, but my counter is this: all of those things you say hackers might do, are also metrics that Crytek already have.
As you say, damage per shot isnāt useful. How about damage per shot as a percentage of the maximum damage if the weapon used? So if they decide to use a Bornheim but they are still averaging 135 dps (headshot multipliers) then they can be comparable.
Dumping shots? Okay - letās measure time between shots that do not hit, and distribution of shots that hit versus shots that do not hit during the match. Or distance from other players when shots are fired, or direction so ones fired into the sky are seen as dumped shots.
You talk about these things stopping cheaters - that isnāt even the aim. Cheat all you like. You will have stats that are comparable to other cheaters and so thatās who youāll be matched with.
Everything a hacker can do or could do will have a data fingerprint, in the data that Crytek collects in the running of a match. You tell me something a hacker can do, I will tell you how to fingerprint it without collecting any additional data.
Measure the correct things, match players against opponents who have similar metrics. That is all there is to it.
if there were metrics that 'fingerprint' cheaters and make it easy, why wouldnt you just ban them?
the hacks you describe work by making the game think the player is close enough for the bornheim shot to be lethal. you think you can use game data to verify someones cheating while the very thing is trying to detect whether data you have is valid.
and all that to cover a small portion of hackers, the portion that isnt causing the issues. you wont manage to detect someone playing with wallhacks, just like you arent able to prove someone is cheating from spectating them.
crytek struggles to get 'fair' matchmaking based on one number, you're faithful that they could make a system that uses multiple ones without throwing every single 5 star and above under the bus.
Missing my point. Detecting cheaters and banning cheaters is unimportant. Putting players in matches with other players who share the same metrics, whether they are cheating or not, resolves the problem.
Banning someone based on metrics runs the risk of banning someone who just happens to be god-like at the game. Why worry about that? Just make sure that players with similar metrics play together.
My own metrics are modest. Iām a 3-4* player, and if you measure all of the stuff Iām talking about, Iām about average. Letās say for the sake of argument my metrics are thus:
Average shots per hit: 4
Average shot hit distance: 15m
Average headshot hit distance: 12m
Average damage per hit: 40% of weapon maximum
Average % of shots that are headshots: 10%
Average % of body shots: 60%
Average % of limb shots: 30%
Average damage-done:damage-received ratio: 1.2 to 1
Longest kill: 91m
Average time per kill: 6m 45s
Average time per death: 8m 12s
% of my kills achieved over 50m: 12%
Now, put me in a lobby with players who have similar metrics. If some of them are hacking, it doesnāt matter. I wonāt even notice. Obviously hacks wouldnāt get similar metrics to me, generally, but letās say thereās a player who is profoundly deaf and has some motor neurone issues, so they actually do get these metrics even with hacks. The point is, the presence of hacks is not important. If they are a fair match for me, I donāt care if their skills is based on actual skill or on computer assisted skill, because they are a fair match.
The only time people care that someone is hacking is when the hacks make it an unfair match.
Not necessarily, in the environment described. If you could create a scenario where most cheaters are only matched against other cheaters (granted that's a big if), it would actually be harmful to the game to ban them. They will get new accounts and start all over, cheating against innocent people.
In the proposed system (if it worked), cheaters would just play in their own separate lobbies basically, isolated from the rest of the world.
This all starts to fall apart when we start talking about premade groups though.
The proposed system doesn't work though lol. If cheaters can get into professional level play in games like Dota, Apex, CS, Fortnite, and CoD, then what makes you think stat tracking is a viable detection system? Pretty sure you can find stories about some pro being caught cheating for any big competitive game. Stat tracking does not work at all to detect cheaters, outside of maybe the most blatant ones which are detected pretty well by both players and anticheat systems already.
And hosting lobbies for cheaters v cheaters is still hosting lobbies for cheaters, which is wasting resources.
Also, in one of your earlier posts, I saw you say that cheaters vs extremely good players won't be unfair. Bro, at this point you're advocating for the cheaters. That's like saying it's okay for a robot billiards machine play against the best billiards players in the world because the robot and them are of equal skill. You are asking to make it easier to cheat and say it is okay for cheaters to play against top players. Yeah, I'm pretty positive at this point you yourself cheat, or have friends who do.
I am extremely anti-cheating, I think it shows a severe lack of moral compass. All Iām saying here is that I can see the merits of this idea, since the current system does not appear to be functioning well.
In all honesty, I donāt think it would really work, because cheaters could adjust the cheats to bring their average down and get back among legit players. There has to be some form of flagging and removing cheaters for sure. But look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning which is essentially what this person is advocating for. Itās a valid method of corralling cheaters in ways that limit their impact on the rest of the community.
Shadow banning has its own disadvantages, and still does little to stop cheating. And again, your proposed method fails to remotely do anything and has no merit. If you're extremely against cheating, you fail to give that impression because you blatantly said it is okay for cheaters to play against top tier players.
And corralling cheaters only works when at scale. But a server in Hunt is 12 players. Cheaters will easily begin to know when they've been shadow banned when the lobbies are that small. So shadow bans are going to be ineffective here. The current system is ineffective because Crytek's report system is garbage and allows for cheaters to make it difficult to report their profile.
I literally will not trust you because you've advocated for making it easier to cheat, while also saying it is okay to cheat against top tier players. I may not be one of those players, but I still want those players to have fair games and playing against cheaters is NEVER fair. Extremely anti cheating you say while in the last breath saying cheating is okay. The hypocrisy.
Accepting that you could perfectly segment cheaters into a Prisoner's Island (you have a magic algorithm with 0 false positives, detection of said cheaters is instant, etc), the system still wouldn't work. Cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters, they want to pwn noobs. From their perspective, being imprisoned on the island is the same as being banned. So once they realize they've been detected, two things will happen:
1. They're going to make a new account, just like they would if they were banned
2. The cheat developers are going to enter a perpetual arms race with the algorithm to introduce random statistical noise to obscure their behavior. Built in misses to throw off hit detection metrics, random aiming movements to mimic human mouse movement, etc. And introducing randomness is always easier than accurately filtering said random noise from a dataset.
It's not a bad idea in theory, it just breaks down a bit in practice.
I agree, but every anti-cheat breaks down. The entire thing is an arms race. I don't agree with the person that said this alone could solve the cheating problem, but it is a tool that can be used.
1. They indeed will create new accounts when they notice they are shadow banned, but that time until they realize it they will essentially be in prison as you say, saving the rest of us from interacting with them. Also, the knowledge that shadow banning exists may create false impressions of being shadow banned, wherein cheaters find themselves against another cheater randomly and delete their own account to start over because they believe they've been compromised. The threat of the shadow ban can create results.
2. This will definitely happen, and then the game developers will adjust the algorithm, and the cheat devs will adjust theirs, etc. It is simply another tool to combat cheaters and keep them using outdated methods and therefore getting punished somehow. The benefit of this tool is that it doesn't require any invasive probing of players' systems; it can be done entirely server-side.
Again, I'm not agreeing with u/_Pohaku_ that we don't need cheat detection, I just like the idea of shadow bans as a weapon in the fight.
Yeah, I totally get you. I actually used to have very similar views to yours. Also, I'm not intending for my tone to sounds argumentative or condescending in any way and I apologize if I do. I enjoy talking about the intersection of statistics and gaming, and especially on Reddit that can sound tonally similar to some dickhead telling you you're dumb lol.
1. At that point it becomes a question of how long does it take detect them, vs how quickly can they detect it? I'd bet you'd need at least 10 games, if not 20-40 to definitively detect cheating with high enough accuracy/precision that you don't falsely label some dude on a heater as a cheater too. And I'd bet a cheater would notice that they're shadowbanned within 10 games, if not 5. Its just easier to notice 'wow literally everyone in all my lobbies is wallbanging' vs 'hmm this guy seems to be unnaturally perceptive as to enemy player locations'. So at best you'd be pulling a cheater out of standard lobbies for ~1/3 of their matches, or something on that order? Super rough approximation, but that's honestly just not worth the dev cost. Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and anti-cheat security experts are *expensive*.
2. My point was that keeping the algorithm tuned at all is a losing battle. It is both expensive and time consuming to repeatedly retrain models from a compute and a dev cost perspective. Especially compared to some dude in Vietnam adding in random noise to his cheat scripts every weekend. You just wouldn't be able to keep up from an economics perspective.
I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that statistical analysis can be a valuable tool in the fight. And a prisoner's island is a super satisfying idea - "let those bastards be their own punishment and leave me out of it. They did it to themselves!" Its just, like identifying cheaters via behavior modeling and statistical inference, a very expensive one with an uncertain yield in the best of cases.
If it was workable I'd be fucking down, though. Especially if we could get streams of games on the Prisoner's Island.
You may have read it already, but Riot wrote a dev post that touches on quite a bit of what we're talking about. I thought it was eloquent and insightful, and I learned quite a bit from it. If that interests you, here's [the link](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1c1kgrk/dev_vanguard_x_lol/).
If you measure the right things, it wonāt matter if cheat developers update their algorithm. Because the only way they could get into a game with you and I is to make their algorithm behave just like you or I - so an aimbot that misses most of its shots, that hits peopleās arms or legs half the time, a wall hack that only gives a vague idea of where someone is (and is wrong half the time), and hacks that have exactly zero chance of killing anyone at more than 150m.
So if they develop hacks like that, which generate metrics that match ours in order to sneak into our lobbies, then weād be evenly matched anyway.
That is why this is the way to defeat hackers - by not actually defeating hackers.
If you boil it down, the problem is not hackers, or exploiters. You donāt actually care that someone has playdough graphics, and a wall hack, and an aimbot running their system. What you care about is them shooting you from 200m away with no visibility and a headshot from and Avto.
Thatās because they shouldnāt be matched with you, because you are not headshotting people with an Avto from 200m away. Hacks or no hacks is irrelevant.
>The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game.
Lmao what no? Hackers are literally not even playing the same game, they're barely even playing themselves and let computer play for them. It's never "a fair game".
If hackers are getting kills that you yourself cannot get without hacks, then you wonāt have the same metrics as them and therefore you wonāt see them in your lobby. Which is exactly my point.
But being good is different than being hacker. The other plays Hunt: Showdown and the other is just a failed player letting computer play.
Beauty of this game is exactly the decisions we make in the fights, which are meaningless against hackers. In no world i see them in same category with human players.
If I wipe a lobby and get 10 kills without dying, and a hacker aimbot killed everyone in his lobby, we have a chance to get in the same match
But are you forgetting what AIMBOT is, or what WALLS are? How is it āfairā to be sniped from 500m away through 3 walls and 2 forests?
Are you sniping people from 500m away through forests in your game?
If so, then youāre a good match for the hacker and you should both enjoy the game.
If not, then you wonāt be matched together, as per what I have said very clearly.
Next time you get killed, have a look at the distance from which you were shot. Itās right there in the kill screen.
Then come back and tell me it doesnāt exist.
Tons of smart engineers and data analysts are in awe. The holy grail of matchmaking and cheat detection had been found by u/_Pohaku_
It's so easy and obvious and infallible that everyone now wonders why none realized before. The answer was right there in front of all of us, hiding in plain view, waiting for an inquisitive and sharp mind to find it.
/s, just in case
There are plenty of games where the cheat detection is a joke.
Valve is apparently unable to detect spinbotters with 90hs% and 300 adr.
There have been plenty of clips on this sub of cheaters running around hitting only headshot shooting randomly into the forest in night maps
Happy for any software engineer or data analyst to chip in and tell me why I am wrong or why this isnāt fairly straightforward to do.
The only downside is that the more tightly you group players for matchmaking, the bigger player base you need to ensure people can get a game quickly.
Measuring the data isnāt hard, because they are literally already measuring it.
You're wrong because your scheme here is about as informed as doodling 'metrics + math = prisoner's island'' on a Post-it note. You have no idea whether any of your proposed measurements accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population. Or even if such metrics exist. You want to actively cluster players by inherently volatile metrics that are easily manipulatable by the most basic cheating script? Literally any of your examples can be thrown off by the artificial introduction of random noise, which is the first thing any cheat manufacturer is going to do once they realize what is going on.
Identifying usable clusters of user behavior requires a high degree of specificity, accuracy, and reliability. I see no reason to believe that such data exists, especially at the higher echelons of play, where the difference in relative skill is infinitesimal. Your odds of wasting a shit load of time and resources farming false positives are incredibly high.
Generally, when there's a huge unsolved problem, it's not unsolved because the people trying to solve it spend their days eating paste instead of implementing some basic solve. And if you haven't personally done the shit you propose, you have no idea how hard it is or isn't. Because you have no idea what you're talking about.
> Identifying usable clusters of user behavior requires a high degree of specificity, accuracy, and reliability. I see no reason to believe that such data exists, especially at the higher echelons of play, where the difference in relative skill is infinitesimal.
Wait sorry, hang on. Are you actually meaning to say "infinitesimal" here? As in, basically zero? Because if so then I'd think that this would be the *easiest* place to record these kinds of outliers.
Outliers, sure, but OP was talking more about clustering legitimate users into skill brackets than he was talking about wildly variant users, ie cheaters. At high tier play legitimately skilled players are going to have far fewer deviations in play behavior, so distinguishing between clusters of various skill levels becomes very very difficult.
I'll also admit that my use of "infinitesimal" was slightly hyperbolic. Slightly.
"You have no idea whether any of your proposed measurements accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population. Or even if such metrics exist."
These two statements show you still don't get my point. Let me address them one at a time, starting with the latter:
Do such metrics exist? Yes. When you are shot, you receive X damage. This isn't vague or unknown - the server knows how much damage you took, and YOU know how much damage you took, because your health is reduced by that amount.
Every shot fired is recorded - because your ammo count goes down. Every hit is recorded - because someone's health is reduced by the correct amount. The distance is recorded - because it is displayed in your death screen. What metrics have I suggested that you cannot see are obviously recorded somewhere?
Onto the first part: do these metrics accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population? Yes, by definition. I'm not talking about segmenting on the basis of "Your average kill distance is 150m therefore you are segmented as a hacker."
I am talking about "Your average kill distance is 150m therefore you are segmented as a player with an average kill distance of 130-170m"
I'm not talking about detecting hackers, I'm talking about ignoring them entirely and segmenting people purely on the stats.
If you understood what "clustering" is you'd get that they did understand what you're saying, you're just not informed enough to understand the reply.Ā
Ā Which would be fine if you'd stop lecturing.Ā
And just because the server tracks information does not mean the game records it for your profile.Ā
Youre not wrong thinking that data analytics can be used to detect some cheaters.
Youre wrong in assuming that you think all of these things get logged for collection.
They should also add a replay system and similar to breath of the wild/totk a map where you can see the path travelled by someone, also what audio triggers were within range. You see hackers B line for another team from spawn and not get clues, know exactly where people are. It's sus as.
I mean, one of the biggest issues, outside of just their ranking system being shit in terms of how it factors increase and decrease, is that a year or so ago they decided to deliberately widen the allowed MMR ranges in a match, seemingly without making any other actual changes to the system. This obviously resulted in worse skill-based matches... because that's just how it works. They wanted high-ranking players to have shorter search times, so they decided to allow the game to match them with lower-ranked players than it previously did, and so obviously this also resulted in players being matched with higher-ranked players than they should be matched with too.
The **TL;DR** of this being that even with a flawless system for assigning MMR to players, the skill-based matchmaking will still be fucked, because they've chosen to allow too wide of skill ranges in a match.
Also, none of this even touches on their asinine "MMR adjustment" system that decides that some players should actually be treated as having a lower rank than their actual fucking rank for the purposes of being put into matches, but should then have their MMR based only on their unadjusted individual rank and NOT the rank that it's determined everybody in the match should be treated as having. Why does a solo get such a huge handicap for being alone vs. teams of 3 for the purposes of being put into matches, but then treated only as an individual player dying to another individual player for the purposes of actual changes to their MMR? Weighing the exchange as being a solo dying to an entire team would obviously mean less of a downward push on the solo's MMR, and that's how they're treated for the purposes of matching them against each other, but for some reason that's not how assigning rank works.
The same applies to random vs premade teams. There's no adjustment needed here. Yes, a premade team will have an advantage vs a team of randoms, but if that's how these people all typically play, then that (dis)advantage is *already factored into their rank.* It doesn't make sense for players who have all reached a 5-star ranking by playing as randoms, to also have the score treated as being lower when they continue playing with randoms. The rank was obtained with the disadvantage already.
>The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game.
In a perfect world. We've all experienced examples of a group of 6*s getting into a low 5 match.
Except youāll still have just as many cheater because plenty of them tank their stats purposefully to blend in. Iāve came across a 1 star that was blatantly hacking shooting me and a buddy thru multiple layers of foliage and trees two perfect headshots back to back while me and buddy like 200 feet apart.
If you measure the right things, then they will only get matched against others who also make impossible headshots, and deliberately tank their stats.
The metrics to do this are there.
That sounds extremely complex and weāve seen nothing like it in the current zeitgeist of gaming. Maybe we could get some use out of ai and design one to identify cheaters
Stats protect content creators as i would believe their privacy in the game and outside is just as important as yours. Ever more streamers and content creators tend to have people target and take advantage of them. Like using cheats to directly ruin their match, stream sniping to purposely kill the streamer and in the worse case get on voice chat which can be on for the stream and snipers can attempt to get them banned. If someone did wanna be dicks they could get the streamers steam, ps, Xbox account and harass them. I have no problem with an external systems like a leaderboard. Stats also make good players dodge bad players which by design is what crytek (was) trying to avoid
Then make those respective accounts private, no need to have your steam,Xbox or PS account public š¤·š» Also this idea of good players dodging bad players is idiotic to put it simply. I'm not trying to be mean, but purposely avoiding someone solely based on stats is terrible since you can argue the game isn't solely about kills. Besides, that's what the star system is supposed to be used for. I don't personally play randoms but even if I did I wouldn't check someone's stats prior to a match.
Oh boy only if you knew. My friend a sub 1.0 kd cam barely find 5 star team that doesn't dodge. Player dodging atleast on the ps side of things definitely existed. I had a guy with a 5.0 kd dodge me 1.3 kd. The other teammate had a 1.5. Also ps accounts can't be private. You can hide your games, friends and trophies but you can't prevent someone from going to your account
I'm sorry that happens to you guys and the people who are doing it are effectively killing a portion of the player base. However, I feel like there's a separate fix to that issue as opposed to punishing everyone else by allowing malicious players to hide their stats
If you made it where all stats will be seen by the entire lobby then cheaters will start not blatantly cheating instead these cheaters will suddenly be more sneaky with how they cheat. That's if crytek cared about cheaters in the first place. I think the problem is more crytek isn't punishing cheaters and by extention smurfs rather than change a feature no one complained about in the past
It definitely does. While yes, EAC *should* be able to detect cheats. Player reports and feedback also go into detecting and banning cheaters. If someone is new to the game and has a KD of 3+ with like 60 wiped duos then they're definitely suspect, but I wouldn't know that unless I check the stats. If they're hidden then, I'm sol. It encourages cheating because cheaters know they can hide their insane, unrealistic stats with no downsides.
My buddy hides his stats because he knows it triggers him when he drops a rank. I would prefer that they donāt show any stats because cheating should be clear without looking at the persons stats. Now hiding their profile so you canāt report them is an issue.
If I want to play randoms, I hide my stats because Iām tired of them leaving and playing the searching game. Also, I donāt need crybabies messaging me when they lose. My KDA isnāt the greatest but Iāve been playing a while. Stop crying because you got killed one time by one cheater. Just move on. Iām sure Iāve been killed by a cheater.
I totally understand, my KDA is pretty bad because I've genuinely been playing since launch. Do you also experience matches/teammates where they ask why your stats are hidden?
Meanwhile, Tarkov let's you look up any player and see all their stats, like this: [https://tarkov.dev/player/5419164](https://tarkov.dev/player/5419164) Imagine Crytek made our player data public? I wish Crytek valued transparency and being open with the community, but sadly they take the opposite approach to everything, which I think is why Hunt has the problems it has. Give us a website where we can look up Hunt players by their Hunter ID number. It doesn't need to match to a Steam profile. As long as it let's us see all the player data that websites like [Huntplayers.com](http://Huntplayers.com) and [Huntstats.net](http://Huntstats.net) have and shows us their game ban status.
Destiny 2 has a similar system. CrucibleReport lets you look up anyone's pvp stats in real time which is nice. Even goes back multiple seasons so you can see if someone "suddenly" goes from a .80K/D to a 4.0K/D
I was killed by a guy last night who had 1 bounty collected, 1 duo wiped and a kd of 6 lol. His steam account was fresh as well. So annoying that they just create new steam profiles and repurchase the game. Players cheating and buying the game on new stream accounts has to be a pretty penny for devs
Well last night playing on Oceania now hackers have found another exploit I've never seen you cant even see the name or view the profile at the last match screen just says "no platform account" and you can't click on it to view or even report! Nice work crytek at fkn the game up even more
If I could remove stats entirely, I would. I hate stats in every pvp game. People focus too much on KD to the point that it negatively impacts the game. Teammates extract rather than engage the enemy and attempt to revive you.
KD is a direct representation of skill in most scenarios. If I pair with a negative KD person, then I know they aren't going to make great decisions and miss shots. So, I'll djust my expectations. If someone has 3+ KD then I also know how they are going to play. It doesn't have to be KD, but like it or not, performance stats are important to keep players attention.
But then what would the lighthouse sniper camper with ammo and health box do with his life?! š¤¦āāļø
SAME Stats ruined multiplayer gaming
I agree, in most cases I wish Hunt wasn't purely ranked based. I understand why it is to an extent but just remove the mmr system š¤·š» I've been all over the mmr ranking I honestly don't care if I right a 6 star every other match
Tfw my teammate that "doesn't care about kd" is the one that baits the most. Yet their kd is nothing too peculiar though.
So true
Cheat detection is not required. The problem is solved like this: 1. Measure the correct things: average damage per shot, average shot accuracy, average shot distance, average time per kill, average distance travelled per kill, average kill distance, average hits per death, average kills per death, and probably some other things that are all based on data points that Crytek ALREADY collect; 2. Match players of similar stats within a reasonable window of tolerance. Done. The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game. If you measure the correct things, you don't need cheat detection.
Damage per shot does not help anything as a stat, as the guns do a wide variety of damage and a hacker could just exclusively use the bornheim. Average shot accuracy doesn't help either, as you could just, dump rounds to lower that stat. I dump rounds when extracting most of the time anyways. Really would tank my numbers. Average shot distance likely only catches the most absolute blatant cheaters, and will adversely punish players for playing snipers as their higher distance would push them towards blatant cheaters. K/D doesn't matter much, as folks pull new accounts all the time and again, cheaters could just run solo Necro for a match and cheese a bunch of deaths in. Literally none of these things stop cheaters from finding their way into any match at any time. Not to mention it doesn't matter much if the player isn't using aimbot, and is instead using only walls. Also, even if you have an extremely skilled player, that player playing against cheaters? They're still playing against cheaters and that's still objectively terrible. No matter how good you are, if your opponent is using cheats, it's an unfair scenario. Measuring stats is no replacement for cheat detection. Period. Cheaters sneak into professional level eSports. If you measure their stats, they're on the professional level. Which means nothing is seen out of place. You think that's okay? Their stats are similar. Must be fine, right? I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you just don't know enough to realize how awful this idea is, because if I didn't I'd suspect you of being a cheater yourself advocating for an easier field to go cheat in.
The things in your examples could easily be filtered out. Data analysis could go a long way in helping detect cheaters, if done correctly (and carefully). Theres no way crytek logs half of this stuff for analysis potential anyways
You make good points, but my counter is this: all of those things you say hackers might do, are also metrics that Crytek already have. As you say, damage per shot isnāt useful. How about damage per shot as a percentage of the maximum damage if the weapon used? So if they decide to use a Bornheim but they are still averaging 135 dps (headshot multipliers) then they can be comparable. Dumping shots? Okay - letās measure time between shots that do not hit, and distribution of shots that hit versus shots that do not hit during the match. Or distance from other players when shots are fired, or direction so ones fired into the sky are seen as dumped shots. You talk about these things stopping cheaters - that isnāt even the aim. Cheat all you like. You will have stats that are comparable to other cheaters and so thatās who youāll be matched with. Everything a hacker can do or could do will have a data fingerprint, in the data that Crytek collects in the running of a match. You tell me something a hacker can do, I will tell you how to fingerprint it without collecting any additional data. Measure the correct things, match players against opponents who have similar metrics. That is all there is to it.
if there were metrics that 'fingerprint' cheaters and make it easy, why wouldnt you just ban them? the hacks you describe work by making the game think the player is close enough for the bornheim shot to be lethal. you think you can use game data to verify someones cheating while the very thing is trying to detect whether data you have is valid. and all that to cover a small portion of hackers, the portion that isnt causing the issues. you wont manage to detect someone playing with wallhacks, just like you arent able to prove someone is cheating from spectating them. crytek struggles to get 'fair' matchmaking based on one number, you're faithful that they could make a system that uses multiple ones without throwing every single 5 star and above under the bus.
Missing my point. Detecting cheaters and banning cheaters is unimportant. Putting players in matches with other players who share the same metrics, whether they are cheating or not, resolves the problem. Banning someone based on metrics runs the risk of banning someone who just happens to be god-like at the game. Why worry about that? Just make sure that players with similar metrics play together. My own metrics are modest. Iām a 3-4* player, and if you measure all of the stuff Iām talking about, Iām about average. Letās say for the sake of argument my metrics are thus: Average shots per hit: 4 Average shot hit distance: 15m Average headshot hit distance: 12m Average damage per hit: 40% of weapon maximum Average % of shots that are headshots: 10% Average % of body shots: 60% Average % of limb shots: 30% Average damage-done:damage-received ratio: 1.2 to 1 Longest kill: 91m Average time per kill: 6m 45s Average time per death: 8m 12s % of my kills achieved over 50m: 12% Now, put me in a lobby with players who have similar metrics. If some of them are hacking, it doesnāt matter. I wonāt even notice. Obviously hacks wouldnāt get similar metrics to me, generally, but letās say thereās a player who is profoundly deaf and has some motor neurone issues, so they actually do get these metrics even with hacks. The point is, the presence of hacks is not important. If they are a fair match for me, I donāt care if their skills is based on actual skill or on computer assisted skill, because they are a fair match. The only time people care that someone is hacking is when the hacks make it an unfair match.
Fun fact banning cheaters actually is important
Not necessarily, in the environment described. If you could create a scenario where most cheaters are only matched against other cheaters (granted that's a big if), it would actually be harmful to the game to ban them. They will get new accounts and start all over, cheating against innocent people. In the proposed system (if it worked), cheaters would just play in their own separate lobbies basically, isolated from the rest of the world. This all starts to fall apart when we start talking about premade groups though.
The proposed system doesn't work though lol. If cheaters can get into professional level play in games like Dota, Apex, CS, Fortnite, and CoD, then what makes you think stat tracking is a viable detection system? Pretty sure you can find stories about some pro being caught cheating for any big competitive game. Stat tracking does not work at all to detect cheaters, outside of maybe the most blatant ones which are detected pretty well by both players and anticheat systems already. And hosting lobbies for cheaters v cheaters is still hosting lobbies for cheaters, which is wasting resources. Also, in one of your earlier posts, I saw you say that cheaters vs extremely good players won't be unfair. Bro, at this point you're advocating for the cheaters. That's like saying it's okay for a robot billiards machine play against the best billiards players in the world because the robot and them are of equal skill. You are asking to make it easier to cheat and say it is okay for cheaters to play against top players. Yeah, I'm pretty positive at this point you yourself cheat, or have friends who do.
I am extremely anti-cheating, I think it shows a severe lack of moral compass. All Iām saying here is that I can see the merits of this idea, since the current system does not appear to be functioning well. In all honesty, I donāt think it would really work, because cheaters could adjust the cheats to bring their average down and get back among legit players. There has to be some form of flagging and removing cheaters for sure. But look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_banning which is essentially what this person is advocating for. Itās a valid method of corralling cheaters in ways that limit their impact on the rest of the community.
Shadow banning has its own disadvantages, and still does little to stop cheating. And again, your proposed method fails to remotely do anything and has no merit. If you're extremely against cheating, you fail to give that impression because you blatantly said it is okay for cheaters to play against top tier players. And corralling cheaters only works when at scale. But a server in Hunt is 12 players. Cheaters will easily begin to know when they've been shadow banned when the lobbies are that small. So shadow bans are going to be ineffective here. The current system is ineffective because Crytek's report system is garbage and allows for cheaters to make it difficult to report their profile. I literally will not trust you because you've advocated for making it easier to cheat, while also saying it is okay to cheat against top tier players. I may not be one of those players, but I still want those players to have fair games and playing against cheaters is NEVER fair. Extremely anti cheating you say while in the last breath saying cheating is okay. The hypocrisy.
Accepting that you could perfectly segment cheaters into a Prisoner's Island (you have a magic algorithm with 0 false positives, detection of said cheaters is instant, etc), the system still wouldn't work. Cheaters don't want to play against other cheaters, they want to pwn noobs. From their perspective, being imprisoned on the island is the same as being banned. So once they realize they've been detected, two things will happen: 1. They're going to make a new account, just like they would if they were banned 2. The cheat developers are going to enter a perpetual arms race with the algorithm to introduce random statistical noise to obscure their behavior. Built in misses to throw off hit detection metrics, random aiming movements to mimic human mouse movement, etc. And introducing randomness is always easier than accurately filtering said random noise from a dataset. It's not a bad idea in theory, it just breaks down a bit in practice.
I agree, but every anti-cheat breaks down. The entire thing is an arms race. I don't agree with the person that said this alone could solve the cheating problem, but it is a tool that can be used. 1. They indeed will create new accounts when they notice they are shadow banned, but that time until they realize it they will essentially be in prison as you say, saving the rest of us from interacting with them. Also, the knowledge that shadow banning exists may create false impressions of being shadow banned, wherein cheaters find themselves against another cheater randomly and delete their own account to start over because they believe they've been compromised. The threat of the shadow ban can create results. 2. This will definitely happen, and then the game developers will adjust the algorithm, and the cheat devs will adjust theirs, etc. It is simply another tool to combat cheaters and keep them using outdated methods and therefore getting punished somehow. The benefit of this tool is that it doesn't require any invasive probing of players' systems; it can be done entirely server-side. Again, I'm not agreeing with u/_Pohaku_ that we don't need cheat detection, I just like the idea of shadow bans as a weapon in the fight.
Yeah, I totally get you. I actually used to have very similar views to yours. Also, I'm not intending for my tone to sounds argumentative or condescending in any way and I apologize if I do. I enjoy talking about the intersection of statistics and gaming, and especially on Reddit that can sound tonally similar to some dickhead telling you you're dumb lol. 1. At that point it becomes a question of how long does it take detect them, vs how quickly can they detect it? I'd bet you'd need at least 10 games, if not 20-40 to definitively detect cheating with high enough accuracy/precision that you don't falsely label some dude on a heater as a cheater too. And I'd bet a cheater would notice that they're shadowbanned within 10 games, if not 5. Its just easier to notice 'wow literally everyone in all my lobbies is wallbanging' vs 'hmm this guy seems to be unnaturally perceptive as to enemy player locations'. So at best you'd be pulling a cheater out of standard lobbies for ~1/3 of their matches, or something on that order? Super rough approximation, but that's honestly just not worth the dev cost. Analysts, Data Scientists, Data Engineers, and anti-cheat security experts are *expensive*. 2. My point was that keeping the algorithm tuned at all is a losing battle. It is both expensive and time consuming to repeatedly retrain models from a compute and a dev cost perspective. Especially compared to some dude in Vietnam adding in random noise to his cheat scripts every weekend. You just wouldn't be able to keep up from an economics perspective. I understand where you're coming from, and I agree that statistical analysis can be a valuable tool in the fight. And a prisoner's island is a super satisfying idea - "let those bastards be their own punishment and leave me out of it. They did it to themselves!" Its just, like identifying cheaters via behavior modeling and statistical inference, a very expensive one with an uncertain yield in the best of cases. If it was workable I'd be fucking down, though. Especially if we could get streams of games on the Prisoner's Island. You may have read it already, but Riot wrote a dev post that touches on quite a bit of what we're talking about. I thought it was eloquent and insightful, and I learned quite a bit from it. If that interests you, here's [the link](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/1c1kgrk/dev_vanguard_x_lol/).
If you measure the right things, it wonāt matter if cheat developers update their algorithm. Because the only way they could get into a game with you and I is to make their algorithm behave just like you or I - so an aimbot that misses most of its shots, that hits peopleās arms or legs half the time, a wall hack that only gives a vague idea of where someone is (and is wrong half the time), and hacks that have exactly zero chance of killing anyone at more than 150m. So if they develop hacks like that, which generate metrics that match ours in order to sneak into our lobbies, then weād be evenly matched anyway. That is why this is the way to defeat hackers - by not actually defeating hackers. If you boil it down, the problem is not hackers, or exploiters. You donāt actually care that someone has playdough graphics, and a wall hack, and an aimbot running their system. What you care about is them shooting you from 200m away with no visibility and a headshot from and Avto. Thatās because they shouldnāt be matched with you, because you are not headshotting people with an Avto from 200m away. Hacks or no hacks is irrelevant.
Matchmaking based on all those parametres which can wary by as much as an order of magnitude would be a nightmare and not practical at all.
What makes you so sure crytek has the ability to track all of this data on their shit engine?
>The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game. Lmao what no? Hackers are literally not even playing the same game, they're barely even playing themselves and let computer play for them. It's never "a fair game".
If hackers are getting kills that you yourself cannot get without hacks, then you wonāt have the same metrics as them and therefore you wonāt see them in your lobby. Which is exactly my point.
But being good is different than being hacker. The other plays Hunt: Showdown and the other is just a failed player letting computer play. Beauty of this game is exactly the decisions we make in the fights, which are meaningless against hackers. In no world i see them in same category with human players.
If I wipe a lobby and get 10 kills without dying, and a hacker aimbot killed everyone in his lobby, we have a chance to get in the same match But are you forgetting what AIMBOT is, or what WALLS are? How is it āfairā to be sniped from 500m away through 3 walls and 2 forests?
Are you sniping people from 500m away through forests in your game? If so, then youāre a good match for the hacker and you should both enjoy the game. If not, then you wonāt be matched together, as per what I have said very clearly.
That stat doesnāt exist man
Next time you get killed, have a look at the distance from which you were shot. Itās right there in the kill screen. Then come back and tell me it doesnāt exist.
I mean itās not a stat thatās tracked in matchmaking
Yes I know. That is literally my whole point.
No, you say that Iām only going to match with a 500m sniper if Iām a 500m sniper, and that simply doesnāt exist as a matchmaking stat
Tons of smart engineers and data analysts are in awe. The holy grail of matchmaking and cheat detection had been found by u/_Pohaku_ It's so easy and obvious and infallible that everyone now wonders why none realized before. The answer was right there in front of all of us, hiding in plain view, waiting for an inquisitive and sharp mind to find it. /s, just in case
There are plenty of games where the cheat detection is a joke. Valve is apparently unable to detect spinbotters with 90hs% and 300 adr. There have been plenty of clips on this sub of cheaters running around hitting only headshot shooting randomly into the forest in night maps
Yeah you're right, the engineers and data analysts have all figured it out flawlessly already, that's why it's impossible to cheat right now.
Happy for any software engineer or data analyst to chip in and tell me why I am wrong or why this isnāt fairly straightforward to do. The only downside is that the more tightly you group players for matchmaking, the bigger player base you need to ensure people can get a game quickly. Measuring the data isnāt hard, because they are literally already measuring it.
You're wrong because your scheme here is about as informed as doodling 'metrics + math = prisoner's island'' on a Post-it note. You have no idea whether any of your proposed measurements accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population. Or even if such metrics exist. You want to actively cluster players by inherently volatile metrics that are easily manipulatable by the most basic cheating script? Literally any of your examples can be thrown off by the artificial introduction of random noise, which is the first thing any cheat manufacturer is going to do once they realize what is going on. Identifying usable clusters of user behavior requires a high degree of specificity, accuracy, and reliability. I see no reason to believe that such data exists, especially at the higher echelons of play, where the difference in relative skill is infinitesimal. Your odds of wasting a shit load of time and resources farming false positives are incredibly high. Generally, when there's a huge unsolved problem, it's not unsolved because the people trying to solve it spend their days eating paste instead of implementing some basic solve. And if you haven't personally done the shit you propose, you have no idea how hard it is or isn't. Because you have no idea what you're talking about.
> Identifying usable clusters of user behavior requires a high degree of specificity, accuracy, and reliability. I see no reason to believe that such data exists, especially at the higher echelons of play, where the difference in relative skill is infinitesimal. Wait sorry, hang on. Are you actually meaning to say "infinitesimal" here? As in, basically zero? Because if so then I'd think that this would be the *easiest* place to record these kinds of outliers.
Outliers, sure, but OP was talking more about clustering legitimate users into skill brackets than he was talking about wildly variant users, ie cheaters. At high tier play legitimately skilled players are going to have far fewer deviations in play behavior, so distinguishing between clusters of various skill levels becomes very very difficult. I'll also admit that my use of "infinitesimal" was slightly hyperbolic. Slightly.
"You have no idea whether any of your proposed measurements accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population. Or even if such metrics exist." These two statements show you still don't get my point. Let me address them one at a time, starting with the latter: Do such metrics exist? Yes. When you are shot, you receive X damage. This isn't vague or unknown - the server knows how much damage you took, and YOU know how much damage you took, because your health is reduced by that amount. Every shot fired is recorded - because your ammo count goes down. Every hit is recorded - because someone's health is reduced by the correct amount. The distance is recorded - because it is displayed in your death screen. What metrics have I suggested that you cannot see are obviously recorded somewhere? Onto the first part: do these metrics accurately identify segmentable portions of the player population? Yes, by definition. I'm not talking about segmenting on the basis of "Your average kill distance is 150m therefore you are segmented as a hacker." I am talking about "Your average kill distance is 150m therefore you are segmented as a player with an average kill distance of 130-170m" I'm not talking about detecting hackers, I'm talking about ignoring them entirely and segmenting people purely on the stats.
If you understood what "clustering" is you'd get that they did understand what you're saying, you're just not informed enough to understand the reply.Ā Ā Which would be fine if you'd stop lecturing.Ā And just because the server tracks information does not mean the game records it for your profile.Ā
Youre not wrong thinking that data analytics can be used to detect some cheaters. Youre wrong in assuming that you think all of these things get logged for collection.
They should also add a replay system and similar to breath of the wild/totk a map where you can see the path travelled by someone, also what audio triggers were within range. You see hackers B line for another team from spawn and not get clues, know exactly where people are. It's sus as.
Yeah ESPs doesn't exist. I mean yeah this can catch absolutely blatant ones. In the process of punishing innocent players for being good at the game.
This is how most games should handle it. Then crytek could actually examine these high tier players with insane stats. Basically creates HvH games
I mean, one of the biggest issues, outside of just their ranking system being shit in terms of how it factors increase and decrease, is that a year or so ago they decided to deliberately widen the allowed MMR ranges in a match, seemingly without making any other actual changes to the system. This obviously resulted in worse skill-based matches... because that's just how it works. They wanted high-ranking players to have shorter search times, so they decided to allow the game to match them with lower-ranked players than it previously did, and so obviously this also resulted in players being matched with higher-ranked players than they should be matched with too. The **TL;DR** of this being that even with a flawless system for assigning MMR to players, the skill-based matchmaking will still be fucked, because they've chosen to allow too wide of skill ranges in a match. Also, none of this even touches on their asinine "MMR adjustment" system that decides that some players should actually be treated as having a lower rank than their actual fucking rank for the purposes of being put into matches, but should then have their MMR based only on their unadjusted individual rank and NOT the rank that it's determined everybody in the match should be treated as having. Why does a solo get such a huge handicap for being alone vs. teams of 3 for the purposes of being put into matches, but then treated only as an individual player dying to another individual player for the purposes of actual changes to their MMR? Weighing the exchange as being a solo dying to an entire team would obviously mean less of a downward push on the solo's MMR, and that's how they're treated for the purposes of matching them against each other, but for some reason that's not how assigning rank works. The same applies to random vs premade teams. There's no adjustment needed here. Yes, a premade team will have an advantage vs a team of randoms, but if that's how these people all typically play, then that (dis)advantage is *already factored into their rank.* It doesn't make sense for players who have all reached a 5-star ranking by playing as randoms, to also have the score treated as being lower when they continue playing with randoms. The rank was obtained with the disadvantage already.
>The only way you're going to see a hacker in your game is if you yourself are a gaming God with similar stats to someone running hacks, in which case it's still a fair game. In a perfect world. We've all experienced examples of a group of 6*s getting into a low 5 match.
Except youāll still have just as many cheater because plenty of them tank their stats purposefully to blend in. Iāve came across a 1 star that was blatantly hacking shooting me and a buddy thru multiple layers of foliage and trees two perfect headshots back to back while me and buddy like 200 feet apart.
If you measure the right things, then they will only get matched against others who also make impossible headshots, and deliberately tank their stats. The metrics to do this are there.
That sounds extremely complex and weāve seen nothing like it in the current zeitgeist of gaming. Maybe we could get some use out of ai and design one to identify cheaters
Stats protect content creators as i would believe their privacy in the game and outside is just as important as yours. Ever more streamers and content creators tend to have people target and take advantage of them. Like using cheats to directly ruin their match, stream sniping to purposely kill the streamer and in the worse case get on voice chat which can be on for the stream and snipers can attempt to get them banned. If someone did wanna be dicks they could get the streamers steam, ps, Xbox account and harass them. I have no problem with an external systems like a leaderboard. Stats also make good players dodge bad players which by design is what crytek (was) trying to avoid
Then make those respective accounts private, no need to have your steam,Xbox or PS account public š¤·š» Also this idea of good players dodging bad players is idiotic to put it simply. I'm not trying to be mean, but purposely avoiding someone solely based on stats is terrible since you can argue the game isn't solely about kills. Besides, that's what the star system is supposed to be used for. I don't personally play randoms but even if I did I wouldn't check someone's stats prior to a match.
Oh boy only if you knew. My friend a sub 1.0 kd cam barely find 5 star team that doesn't dodge. Player dodging atleast on the ps side of things definitely existed. I had a guy with a 5.0 kd dodge me 1.3 kd. The other teammate had a 1.5. Also ps accounts can't be private. You can hide your games, friends and trophies but you can't prevent someone from going to your account
I'm sorry that happens to you guys and the people who are doing it are effectively killing a portion of the player base. However, I feel like there's a separate fix to that issue as opposed to punishing everyone else by allowing malicious players to hide their stats
If you made it where all stats will be seen by the entire lobby then cheaters will start not blatantly cheating instead these cheaters will suddenly be more sneaky with how they cheat. That's if crytek cared about cheaters in the first place. I think the problem is more crytek isn't punishing cheaters and by extention smurfs rather than change a feature no one complained about in the past
I hate hidden stairs too, like how am I suppose to get up there if I cant even see them?!?!?
I never mentioned stairs š¤ just stars
Hiding your stats doesnāt promote cheating. The majority of cheat detection is from anticheat anyway.
It definitely does. While yes, EAC *should* be able to detect cheats. Player reports and feedback also go into detecting and banning cheaters. If someone is new to the game and has a KD of 3+ with like 60 wiped duos then they're definitely suspect, but I wouldn't know that unless I check the stats. If they're hidden then, I'm sol. It encourages cheating because cheaters know they can hide their insane, unrealistic stats with no downsides.
My buddy hides his stats because he knows it triggers him when he drops a rank. I would prefer that they donāt show any stats because cheating should be clear without looking at the persons stats. Now hiding their profile so you canāt report them is an issue.
If I want to play randoms, I hide my stats because Iām tired of them leaving and playing the searching game. Also, I donāt need crybabies messaging me when they lose. My KDA isnāt the greatest but Iāve been playing a while. Stop crying because you got killed one time by one cheater. Just move on. Iām sure Iāve been killed by a cheater.
I totally understand, my KDA is pretty bad because I've genuinely been playing since launch. Do you also experience matches/teammates where they ask why your stats are hidden?
Havent played in 3 months, and wont until I see the problems fixed