Gaming
Gaming
How to spot a hacker in Overwatch
Cheat script or just an Overwatch hero’s unique ability? As we discover, it’s a fine line.
With Overwatch’s competitive scene giving players a brand new reason to keep playing Blizzard’s foray into the world of first person shooters, the behemoth developer has turned its attention to addressing a major issue that perennially plagues all the biggest first-person shooters: hacking.
Over the past few years we’ve seen top CS:GO players barred from competition, for instance, and thousands of accounts VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) banned for installing third-party software onto their accounts. Whilst we’re yet to see any high profile players caught cheating in Overwatch, Blizzard have confirmed they have removed players for cheating, issuing lifetime bans as a penalty. It’s a problem that’s never going to go away, on PC at least, but Blizzard have at least proved that cheaters will not be tolerated and should be reported straight to their team of analysts.
Here’s the thing, though. Detecting hacking is not always easy to do, especially in a game where there’s so much going on. Complicating matters further compared to other competitive multiplayer shooters is that what may look like a common hack or script in another game might actually be the effect of one Overwatch hero’s unique ability. With that in mind, let’s take a look at those hacks you’ll most need to watch out for, and which kills you never saw coming were about your opponent’s pure skill or character selection.
Wall hack or Hanzo?
Where did that shot come from? Is there someone behind me? Another cheat often seen in first-person shooters, wall hacks allow players to exploit the terrain in order to gain an unfair advantage. There are many ways to do this in PC games – in the clip above you can see a hacker effortlessly shooting training bots thanks to clear vision of them.
Now typically, this hack is usually much easier to spot than an aimbot, and replays will quickly indicate that you’re getting picked off unfairly. In Overwatch, however, they are trickier to spot, with so many crazy abilities that come of nowhere. Literally, in some cases: assassin hero Hanzo’s Ultimate, Dragonstrike, does pass through walls naturally, and he also has an ability that pings the map and legally shows people behind walls, but this is on a cooldown. What we’re saying, is that you’ll want to make sure you’re not just getting picked off by a skilled archer before you start calling for the ban hammer.
Is it an aimbot? Is it a hacker? No, it’s superman
You’ve probably fallen victim to an aimbot in other online shooters. They’re perhaps the most popular hack tool players use to boost their in-game performances, giving them godly targeting skills by forcing their cursors to seek out and snap onto enemies. What started out as simple colour recognition programs have now developed into sophisticated processes that can read a game’s memory files to track player movements or hijack information from the graphics rendering software.
How can you tell if someone is using an aimbot? It’s not easy. Players pull off outrageous shots all the time, that’s half the fun of playing shooters. At higher levels, where players actually have outrageous targeting skills it gets even harder. Indeed, Blizzard warns in their guidelines that players should not report others just because they look too good to be true.
“Some players are just really good at first-person shooters,” Blizzard warns in a forum post. “Through practice and years of experience, these players’ movements and reaction times can occasionally appear unnatural (if not physically impossible) to those who may not have been exposed to that particular level of play before.”
In other words, if you’re facing an opponent who’s pulling off ludicrous aerial headshots with astounding regularity and doesn’t seem to misplace a single round, don’t fire off that email to support unless you’re absolutely sure – they could just be one of the world’s top players letting off some steam solo. That said, if you want to check for these kind of shenanigans, keep your killcam on. In the video above, you can’t immediately tell that the player is being killed unfairly… until the killcam, where the aim snaps like crazy, and clearly shows things aren’t right.
Speed hack, killcam or Crossfade?
Typically if you see someone charging around the map like Usain Bolt, you can put it down to cheating, and of the most blatant sort. After all, top players can aim better and pick their movements well, but they can’t make a character move faster by pressing W harder. Another hack that’s been often seen by trolls in the CS:GO scene, speed hacks ramp up a game’s processes, boosting all of the player’s interactions including their movement, fire rate, and reload time. Players using running speed hacks can zoom around a map obliterating their slow-motion enemies with ease and effortlessly dodging any return fire.
Usually, this is a hack that’s blatantly obvious and players using it are probably on smurf accounts, expecting a ban after a few matches. Don’t assume that’s the case in Overwatch however, as Lúcio’s Crossfade ability not only amps up his own movement speed, but those of team-mates around him, so any hero could be charging around at a clip without cheating.
Don’t rely on replay footage alone either: Blizzard have admitted that the in-game camera system does not play back footage with the same accuracy as real-time game-play, so keep that in mind before shopping anyone faster than you. If this is a problem in Overwatch, it’s extra hard to spot, too, since Lúcio can boost the speed of everyone near him, and the latest character (Ana) has an ultimate ability that boosts damage output, health, speed – the works.
Skill script or excellent timing?
Skill scripts are not something we’ve seen in many FPS games before – chiefly because there’s no magic in Counter-Strike, just a trigger to pull – but they’re fairly common in MOBAs like Dota 2. But with team shooters like Overwatch drawing heavily from MOBAs, particularly in each hero’s multiple abilities, we might well see them cropping up. In the clip above, you can see the player repeatedly activate Reaper’s ultimate (Death Blossom), often without getting any kills. There’s no feasible way this could happen legitimately without getting a stack of kills each time, and given that there’s only six on a team, there’s no way you could keep the ultimate streak going.
While we’ve not seen any clear evidence of this in Overwatch ourselves (we’ll put the above down to a bizarre glitch), it seems that the potential is there. We could see Tracer with a scripts that automatically activate Recall whenever she takes life-threatening damage or Reaper with a script to instantly run Wraith Form whenever his health falls below ten percent. This is another subtle hack that can be hard to detect, especially at higher levels, where a hero pulling off miraculous escapes with seemingly inhuman reaction times is par for the course.
Map exploit or just Widowmaker on the warpath?
There are plenty of different sorts of map hacks out there in popular multiplayer shooters, varying from scripts that track an enemy team’s movements to glitches that allow you to get outside of the map boundaries, as you can see in the clip above.
Whilst there are already plenty of heroes that can already fly, teleport, and run up buildings in Overwatch, you don’t need to be a trained analyst to work out something’s not quite right if Winston floats up through the floor of a building and squashes your hero, or if you see a Reinhardt blinking about like a Tracer there’s only one explanation, but cheats that give map information are a bit harder to spot. Don’t forget the game already has a built-in map hack in the form of Widowmaker’s Ultimate, Infra-Sight, which momentarily allows her entire team to see their opponents’ heat signatures.
For more eSports coverage, follow @RedBulleSports on Twitter and like us on Facebook.
