Lets end the cheaters in Overwatch debate right here, right now!

General Discussion
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Theres been a debate across threads about how that ‘50% of people are cheating’. I REFUSE to beleive that. So lets do the math and see who is really right.

(For abit of context the Defense matrix was a ban wave that banned roughly 540,000 accounts. This is not just accounts currently playing but accounts that could have been reported as long as a year ago. Also if you have any queastions or I’ve done something wrong please tell me cos Im not perfect I can make mistakes. Anyway hope this clears the water for some people on this matter!)

So Overwatch 2 has had over 100,000,000 accounts over its run time right? (According to there website anyway its probably a little more now but we will keep the 100 million so we have a nice round number)

In the Defense Matrix announcement, they banned roughly 500,000 accounts and roughly 40,000 who were getting boosted by cheaters.

If we take the upper and lower bounds for these we can say that they banned anywhere from
450,000 to 549,000. And 35,000 to 44,500. Making the minimum number of accounts banned 485,000 and maximum 593,000. If we divide the 100,000,000 ish players overwatch has had by those numbers. You get a percentage of 0.5935% for max and 0.485% for minimum.

‘BUT WAIT!’ I hear you cry! ‘Defense matrix didnt ban all the cheaters!’ Well my friend Ive gotcha covered.

Assuming that defense matrix only got say…a tenth of all the cheaters who have ever played, lets times those percentages by 10 and see how much we get.
We get 5.935% and 4.85%.

(Just a little side note: 8 percent-ish of those numbers above weren’t actually cheating but were getting boosted making the only cheater numbers 5.4602% at highest and 4.462% at lowest)

There you have it. Cheater percentage mathematics. Of course this didnt take into account that defense matrix isnt 100% accurate on who it bans sooooooo the actuall number is probably slightly lower but oh well, that would be too harsh of me wouldnt it?

Hope you find this helpful!

3 Likes
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Can never be sure of the numbers, but it’s nice to see some logical thinking applied.

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We can only draw estimates on how many are cheating based on the ban wave number, and if the game have about 4-5 million players, then that’s an insanely large amount of cheaters, and the worst part is that they won’t just get rid of them without doing 100% HID bans (I’m talking all the PC components not just the hard drive since most dedicated cheaters buy cheap drives to use for cheating) and IP bans.

They won’t get rid of the most dedicated ones by doing that but they’ll at least get rid of a large portion of them.

The other way is to make a lot of people angry by going back to the Buy to Play format. At least that shuts the door on most of them, since losing an account they paid for hits harder than losing an account they didn’t pay for. The main reason as to why there are so many cheaters in this game, as well as every other free to play online game is because the games are free to play. The free to play business model is an open invitation for them. It’s like the devs left them all a business card reading ‘We don’t care’.

Blizzard should also take a lesson from xDefiant, because from what i’ve heard, they are cracking down hard on cheaters, doing pre-emptive live bans, and it’s apparently working.

Of course, it’ll always be an up-hill battle, but that up-hill battle can definitely be made easier by doing things the right way, instead of the wrong way, taking one step forward and ten steps back, like Blizzard is doing with Overwatch 2’s cheating problems.

3 Likes
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if i remember correctly, blizzard has the problem of having cheaters who specifically want to hinder their video game business, starting from call of duty up to overwatch which (in some ways) has followed in many of the footsteps of COD. a few months ago there were actually articles by groups of cheaters challenging activision, there is no time when they don’t open a legal battle.

but anyway, i think there is a problem in strengthening the game’s defensive matrix program: this does NOT strengthen Blizzard support, which has dropped a lot in the last two years. support is perhaps the biggest problematic epartment of blizzard lately, because there are known cases of appeals in which they snub the help with increasingly automatic messages that even redirect users to talk about their problem in the official forum. but it is not correct, since it is in the forum rules not to talk about your appeals.

the worst part is the verification section for an incorrect ban: if I am reported for offensive chat for a gg or an ez (it is very common to see it reported in the “reasons for the ban”… a sane person knows that those words are not valid reasons for a ban, although often used incorrectly in the “etiquette” of the match. but the ban system that is increasingly automated does not have a mind with common sense, and very often it time the possibility of an incorrect ban. I literally see people scared to open the microphone today for the opposite problem of banning and it does not seem like a good prospect at all.

in short I want to say that it is good to strengthen the systems for finding cheaters… but it must also happen through a team set up for that purpose. because unfortunately it will VERY probably be an automatic system that can make its mistakes.

4 Likes
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This is incredibly misleading.
100,000,000 players are not actively playing the game. That number does not represent the actual size of the community which distorts all of your percentages.

According to multiple sites Overwatch 2 gets roughly about 25,000,000 players a month.
I’ll be using the numbers provided in the announcement to make it easier to follow (500,000 for cheaters, 40,000 who were being boosted)

540,000 divided by 25,000,000 gives us 0.0216 or 2.16%
Following you and multiplying it by 10 gives us 21.6%

So our cheater percentage ranges from about 2% to 20%

Perhaps not “50% of every game”, but a serious enough problem that needs to be addressed.

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It is a never ending fight. They will never solve it.

But for the numbers. 50% is nonsense, It is probably in the 2-5% range.

Saw this, as a reference, from a survey regarding cheating in online multiplayer games…
" The survey found that while 57% of multiplayer gamers say they have never used third-party tools to cheat in multiplayer games online, 12% of gamers admitted to regularly doing this (3% always and 9% often)."

So, if someone said about 5% in OW… I’d say that sounds in the rough window.

1 Like
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just another thing. do we know if cheating happens in some ranks more than other? this is exaggerated but if for example all cheating happens in plat for example the numbers would seem many times as high to anyone there

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Based on the their interview on match making the other week, all “toxic behaviour” (chat, cheating and all that) peaks in mid ranks. Which makes sense as that’s where most players are, and most frustrations are.

People can’t cope with not climbing past gold… Resort to flaming people, anger, making up stories about systems impacting them, and the extreme end, cheating.

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For a free to play game, the % will always be much higher than what the ‘normal’ person would believe.

In the majority of free to play games, the percentage is mostly between 10%-24%.

For a game like OW2, that’s a serious number, because it is a competitive game with a ranked system, and while you might be one of the few lucky ones to avoid them for the most part, far too many people are affected by cheaters every single day.

They might never solve it, but they can slow the influx of cheaters down by quite a lot by being far more aggressive and proactive and do actual live bans, not just a ban wave once per year. That’s like saying ‘Hey cheaters, you don’t have to worry about getting banned for a few months or an entire year’.

Suerveys like that doesn’t mean anything. It’s not even good enough as a measuring tool, since the majority of cheaters never bother with any of it and the majority of cheaters will never admit to have cheated.

I’d say all over the place really, but mostly in the lower and mid ranks, since most cheaters tend to get rolled hard in the upper ranks as they have literally the game sense and awareness of a wet noodle. There are of course outliers aka good players who use cheats. Those players are also harder to catch unless you really know what to look for, or they slip up.

We’re not talking about toxic players, we’re talking about cheaters.

1 Like
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and so was I, as I clearly stated. All toxic behaviour.

They do both. You just won’t see live bans often because they aren’t a big sexy number they can report to press, and as cheaters aren’t in every game like someone would claim, it is going to be quite a rare experience for the individual player. Personally I’ve seen it happen twice in OW2. Once in one of my games, once watching a stream.

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Kinda proving how much or rather how little you know.

Cheating is toxic but cheating is not the same as being toxic in chat, which is the whole point, and you’re also derailing the topic.

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Yes. Thanks for clarifying what I said.

But that’s what they were talking about, all toxic behaviour. Cheating, chat, boosting, throwing the whole rainbow of toxic behaviour in game.

Which, unsurprisingly they found is more common in gold/plat.

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Because that’s where the majority of players are. There’s plenty in the upper ranks as well, but most of them are in between low gold-high plat.

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Indeed.

Indeed.

They’ll be in all ranks to some level. But most of the bad elements of the player base can be found where most players are.

Tbf, I’m surprised they bothered saying it, as it should be obvious to everyone.

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I don’t know what is going on lately but just had my first 2 games of the day and both had blatant cheaters. Luckily, other people noticed as well so I’m sure they get banned.

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New cheats available + Blizz on skeleton staff over Christmas.

Same happens every year.

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That explains a lot :slight_smile:

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It isn’t really an “overwatch problem”. Any time there is a new cheat available, it takes a moment for a game to catch up. And then when they do the ban waves hit.

The hate should be directed at those making the cheats, and those buying them. They are breaking all sorts of copy right laws… Law makers should catch up and put more pressure on them. But they are all old duffers and probably don’t know what games are :rofl:

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This forum has a debate going? you do surprise me.
I see very obvious cheat users every time I play but thats just how it is with free to play games, Activitision is no exception, no matter what they may claim.

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Every game? I guess I must be lucky, I barely get any.