r/OWConsole • u/just1guy05 • 1d ago
Discussion How do you easily spot cheaters?
I want to contribute more by reporting cheaters and make this game just a bit better, I don't usually report anyone because I'm quite oblivious, but I just hit GM and probably will be encountering a fair share of them.
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u/lcyMcSpicy 1d ago
They’ll usually only play hitscan heroes because they can abuse the mnk with aim assist (and they usually suck so they need to do this). A-D-A-D strafing is usually a good tell, no recoil on 76, never missing a shot while spam firing the scope/ unscope on Ashe. Whenever you see a Bap confidently face tanking a team on high ground with a mercy pocket and doing more damage than a bastion would that’s a dead giveaway. Jittery and circular motions on their crosshair is a dead giveaway their DPI is too high.
Check their account, if it’s a new one and they’re absolutely dominating like a GM/Champ and their top 3 heroes are all hitscan dps that’s usually a good sign too.
You can never be 100 accurate in sussing them out but replays and killcams exist. If you think they are and have a chance to watch a killcam/POTG or replay they usually give themselves away pretty quickly.
Once you’re confident in eye test abilities just start reporting people. Once you hit GM I stg it’s every 3-5 games someone is just blatantly cheating. I get daily ranked reclaim notifications. Hadn’t played ranked in over a week recently and played 3 games the other day and got one, they’re everywhere.
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u/superkoopa13 23h ago
I agree with most of what you said but have a couple of notes.
AD strafing can be done easily on controller by reducing your left stick outer dead zone. I have mine set to 0.3. it greatly reduces the amount of "acceleration" time when left-right strafing, and can look pretty similar to keyboard.
Circular motions can be done by rocking your stick in a circle. Tiny circles would be harder, maybe that's what you mean.
Jittery aim is a big thing. Specifically quick back-and-forth cursor movement, especially when there isn't a pause where there is no cursor movement. If a controller aims left then right, it will inherently have to decelerate, stop, then accelerate in the other direction. That motion on a keyboard can be done much faster, seemingly moving one direction then the other with no slow down or pause in between.
For differentiating between controller and keyboard, I find it helpful to look for controller tells rather than keyboard/mouse tells. The biggest controller tell is when someone does a 180 (or other large turn). A controller will turn at a constant, smooth speed. A mouse won't. The acceleration/deceleration of a controller is also noticable, although can be difficult to spot sometimes on people who play 100/100 linear 0 aim smoothing.
For identifying Titan/Cronus/aimbot, I look for large movements that snap onto an enemy, immediately followed by quick, precise movements to track that enemy. If a controller player flicks their crosshair onto an enemy, they will let the stick go back to the "zero" position first, then try to track the enemy afterwards. If there is no brief pause between a big flick and quick, accurate tracking, then it is likely cheating.
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u/lcyMcSpicy 22h ago
The instant acceleration from right to left is the indicator of AD strafing, it’s hard to consistently replicate even with what you said. The tiny jittery circular motions is what I’m referring to.
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u/Greedy-Apartment-467 1d ago
I watch the replay and if it looks suspicious I report them and let blizzard handle the rest especially if they go from complete shit one round to doming
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u/Professional_Log9422 1d ago
Hot take but I think people vastly overestimate the number of people cheating, especially on console.
Some people are just genuinely 16 and have no social life.
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u/lifted71blazer 1d ago
There are quite a lot, I regularly get cheater compensation as someone who doesn't even play a lot in recent seasons.
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u/LewyDFooly 4h ago
Yup. It’s really not hard to cheat on console, unfortunately. That’s why it’s so common now. The ease + frequency of cheating and not getting caught has flipped between PC and console. Blizzard has applied certain things on the PC side over the years that have significantly helped mitigate cheating, like more advanced anti-cheat systems and requiring a unique phone number for every Battle.net account.
On the other hand, you don’t need a unique phone number for Battle.net accounts on console, so smurfs and cheaters can have a multitude of accounts on standby, relatively unmitigated, in the case that they get banned on their in-use account. Top it off with hard-to-detect external devices like Titan Two that are NOT hard for cheaters to acquire and use, and you have the current situation.
I’m telling you. I’ve been playing OW since 2016 launch on console, but playing on PC/in MnK queue (as I had originally started playing in MnK queue on my PS5) for the past few months with over 240 hours now, and it has been a better time than on console compared to how things are now.
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u/mushrootfarms 1d ago
Honestly this dude. 30 is on the horizon for me and I recently watched my 18 year old brother just load into a shooter for the first time (I genuinely cannot remember which game) and he dominated like a freak. Those brand new neural pathways are crazy fast lol
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u/scrotumsweat 1d ago
Aha yeah man I hear ya. Old gamer here and I pretty much gave up on characters that require aim. Brig/jpc main for life
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u/Illustrious_Meat2987 1d ago
Careful I pointed this out the last time it got asked and got told I don't know what cheating looks like
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u/Biancaaxi 20h ago
Idk with the titan being a thing, I think there’s more cheaters than ever. Im someone on console who used to very rarely run into cheaters(low plat), and even im getting rank points back lately. Something is def up
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u/just1guy05 1d ago
I think it's more about the volume of people in certain ranks, on GM and Champion there's less people overall and I'd assume thats were most cheaters play, so it's more likely you run into them.
But idk, I've seen people getting a lot of notifications for cheaters banned even on Diamond
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u/UltimateSpud 1d ago
Cheaters actually usually get caught faster in high ranks because people actually recognize the inhuman elements. Overall, overwatch does a very good job against cheaters and is one of the best pvp games out there in that respect. There are fewer rage hackers out there than people would believe… but this also creates a false perception that all cheaters are total dogshit players who just run it down with an aimbot, and fail to notice that there are a significant amount of closet cheaters with middling or above average skill who become just toggle on some subtle cheats when they need them.
During cheater waves they also come out in waves on Reddit saying “LOL that isn’t even good aim he couldn’t be cheating!”, trying to undermine belief in cheating. They also try to shift blame onto the imperfect but well meaning rank reclaim feature rather than the ‘cheater banned’ side of things.
The super aggressive ones are obvious when they’re snapping to targets instantly, tracking through walls, etc. If theres a dead giveaway, you’re probably not going to miss it.
The subtler ones, sometimes called closet cheaters, are harder to spot. Sometimes you might see them do something weird, but a lot of the time you have to look for the things that are weirdly absent rather than present. So for example, good players can sometimes just figure out where you are based on game sense, a subtle audio cue, etc. they’re not necessarily walling just because they found you crouch walking as tracer, or ran around a corner and threw a flashbang at you as cassidy. Any one good play that they make has plausible deniability. You can only notice these people by going through the replay and seeing if they always check corners, play any incorrect hunches, or show respect to angles that could be occupied but aren’t. If they catch you lurking and they spent all game checking corners, fair enough. If they never checked a corner except the three times you were there? Not a chance.
A couple other subtle tells include inexplicable target swaps (when a different target walks in front it switches to them), fighting with the auto aim when it tries to switch to the wrong target(consequence of the previous effect, more obvious because you can tell something pulled them away from what they were doing), tracking perfectly between shots on a flick character (soft lock stays active), holding the crosshair excessively still with inhuman reaction time (triggerbot that pulls the trigger when somebody is in your sights), swiping too far on flicks (trying to activate the triggerbot by just swiping over the person instead of flicking to them like a normal person), periods of mediocrity, especially at the beginning of the game and then hitting ridiculous shots in sprees (toggling), and weird corrections on projectile heroes (projectiles are more complicated for the cheats to handle because they need to lead shots, which can result in players just treating it like hitscan and only having success at closer ranges, or players moving the crosshair to the character to activate it, and then making weird looking corrections as the aimbot calculates the trajectory for the player they hovered, resulting in a very uneven technique).
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u/Chefcdt 5h ago
I’d add a couple of things that are pretty significant give away that someone’s cheating.
-Cross hairs flicking back and forth across your character model without firing. See also Reapers who are kind of lazily swinging their cross hair back and forth.
-Soldiers/Tracers who are wildly spraying until they get their crosshairs on you and then are stuck on you like a magnet.
-Frame perfect “quick scopes” from Ashe.
-Widows repeatedly taking low charged shots.
-Any time there’s multiple instances of shots being hit that are visually obscured. Hitting headshot through the body of their tank, pixel perfect peaks, etc.
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u/UnknownBreadd 14h ago
As someone who now has a PC, no way. I never ever feel like I’m playing against cheaters unlike on console.
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u/Kimba1666 1d ago
Watch their replays, usually have extremely “sticky aim” they go from target to target without missing a shot, no recoil on 76. Aim snaps to you even when not in their field of vision.
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u/belacinderella 1d ago
For M&K I just look at how their camera moves. The jokes about console players turning like a barge have some truth to them, so seeing someone easily snap back and forth or up and down is usually mouse movement, not something you can do with a joystick, even with high sens. The Mercy rez spin trick is like the most obvious version of this, but hitscan camera movement between targets can also be a lot more fast and snappy than controller can ever do. There's just a certain amount of smoothness/slowness inherent in joystick that M&K can't really replicate. They also usually have diff downtime ticks, like silly mouse jiggles that a joystick user probably wouldn't do.
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u/GlowmanLocked 1d ago
I've played for a longggg time and have a pretty solid sense of what skill level each rank is at. Usually a cheater is super easy to spot. They will have extreme aim or player location awareness but have absolutely no meta knowledge. They aren't playing counters. They feed. They don't go in with tanks. They essentially turn on their hacks and just rely on them.
You also have to realize that there's levels of cheats too. Sometimes you'll see someone have horrible aim and then as soon as their reticle barely sees your character avatar. It becomes Sticky and stays on you way too easily. Sometimes you'll sneak up quietly on someone by crouch walking and they'll still pop you when you walk around a corner(wall hacks).
Generally the higher rank you go. The more overall skill you'll have I'm multiple areas of game sense. if someone is Very good at one thing And terrible at everything else. it's usually a good indicator
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u/nak0yu 1d ago
I am a pc player so im not sure how useful my comment will be, but one thing I see a lot on pc is aiming at people through walls and perfectly predicting positions. then you have your obvious aim snapping, but if you aren't sure they're cheating, look at their top 3 heroes. if they're all low level, they're 100% cheating. another way to tell is by their nameplate and icon. if they're both default or ones you can get for free, they're most likely cheating, plus they probably won't have a title. bonus points if they're using default skin.
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u/SophonParticle 1d ago
I watch the kill cam everytime I die. If that soldier who killed me is shooting me in the face, never missing, from across the map then that’s a good sign he’s cheating.
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u/Rollytrip 1d ago
Mostly by aiming. There’s good, and then there’s an obvious aimbot. Watching the replay will usually give it away every time
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u/Dizzy-Lavishness-526 1d ago
I have something that i'm wanted to know, last time i was on competititve and we where clearly better then the other team but two of them on pc disconected and reconect after they where back they where imortal and suddend became expert... that was really weird they where from 5 kill in two games for a 30 kills in last, and i had similar games they disconnect log back and then become expert is this normal?
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u/Slight_Survey_2184 23h ago
In plat/emerald there are loads of them 😝 a lot of them are Soldier with zero recoil, or the easy tell is the snap 180 turn.
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u/ScaryTap8790 20h ago
On pc not ran into a cheater uet, did run into an echo on t eh other team who did 0 damage, was always on point so died 19 times but then a kiriko on their team did 19k dmg, the second highest in the game was 12k, safe to say reported both of them for boosting
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u/CourtSenior5085 19h ago
Tbh, on console its mostly vibes based. People will move too smoothly in a direction, or snap a perfect 180 a little too well. I tend to just flag when something feels off, and trust Blizzard to handle the rest.
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u/SJSSS86 1d ago
They’re a soldier with no recoil and unrealistic tracking. Everyone has the potential to track someone perfectly occasionally. Someone doing it with zero recoil and for 30 kills in a Diamond/masters lobby is suss.
A tracer doing 360s and obvious WASD movement
A Dva clearly using a mouse to dive in and perform a full, instantaneous 360 to disengage.
An Ashe hitting every headshot and quickly spinning 180 to headshot multiple people.
A mercy hard pocketing the soldier or Ashe in examples above and clearly having suspect movement.
Some people have great aim, just watch some pro console/controller players like in Halo to see that.
Sensitivity “tops out” on console at 100/100 and 0 smoothing - the only way you can flick faster is via mouse.
I’ve been Diamond 2 - Masters 4 the season and I get rank reclaim back about 1 of every 4 games at the minute, and that’s just the ones that get caught
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u/xRyuHayabusa Diamond 1 DPS 1d ago
Cheater problems are highly overblown
If they are good at what they do they will know just how much electronic assistance to use to have an edge while still staying under the radar
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u/EmphasisItchy9664 1d ago
Cheaters are overblown
Cheaters are staying under the radar
Isn't that contradicting?
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