The ranked ladder in Age of Empires IV is becoming really hard to take seriously right now. There’s a noticeable increase in suspicious gameplay, and it’s making matches feel unreliable and frustrating.
I know anti-cheat isn’t simple, but from a player perspective it feels like enforcement isn’t keeping up. Are there any plans for stronger detection or more frequent ban waves?
I’d honestly be willing to help review reports or contribute in any way if community support is ever considered. At the very least, some transparency on what’s being done would make a big difference.
Right now, the competitive experience just isn’t where it should be.
I am not sure if the situation is as bad as in AoE 2 DE but if it is then it won’t make a difference in regards to reviewing replays (I think that is what you meant? If not please specify), because if the cheating is similar to the cheating in AoE 2 DE then the cheater could make some units cost 5 less food or gold and it would be extremely difficult to spot by just using your eyes on a replay, I suppose sanity checks for each player could maybe work as a temporary fix, like the game checking if you are paying what you “should” be paying when you train a unit, it doesn’t have to be units, it could even be something less obvious like vision range which you would never spot unless they’re getting greedy with it (for example 10 tiles extra vision range instead of maybe 0,25 tiles (1 meter)).
You could implement a silent detect for cheaters and if it is very certain 99% sure then it shoves them into cheater’s queue and they get to fight each other and they won’t get displayed on the prestigous spot (if there is such a thing[1]?) and that way they only realize they got caught after a while…
[1]: League of Legends has a thing where if you click ranked on your profile you can view “top ranked” so it shows the challengers, so my idea in this example would be to exclude them from this “prestigous spot” list if they are in the cheater queue/group.
Alternatively something I personally find hilarious is if we implemented sanity checks like I mentioned earlier but instead of doing the previously stated stuff we just “copy” whatever their cheated buff is and we apply it to their next opponent in their next game. It would make them think they’re undetected but also feel like they need to “turn up” their cheat because they aren’t winning as hard as they had hoped they would and thereby they’re making themselves more and more obvious till the point the ban is self explanatory. Would also make for funny twitch clips if say BeastyqtSC suddenly found out his spearmen cost 40 food & 10 wood instead of their usual price haha (because that was the cheat the opponent used last game before this game).
Anyway hopefully I don’t get trashed on by community forum for writing this, I don’t mean these are perfect solutions, let alone good solutions, I am just popping out ideas out there for your reading entertainment.