Hackers ruin all the fun in the game

[arnobpl]

Hi folks, I previously tried to create this post in Reddit but the Reddit bot filtered my post every time. So I am trying post it in here. I wonder if the game devs can ban hacker in a scalable way so that there is less manual action needed to stop hacking. By hacking, I mean map hacking or zoom hacking in the game. Since in-game replay with camera-locked can easily identify hackers, that can be done in an automated way. Hope that game devs can plan such actions. The benefit of this is enormous. AoE4 players will rest assured that there is no place for hackers in this game. More players will be interested in the game.

I have encountered a few players that I know hacking (in-game replay for validation). If this post gets attention, I can share those player ID’s here (Aoe4world links so that changed in-game alias can still find those hackers). I did report the hacker players in-game but sadly, I see they are not banned and continue hacking in ranked matches with other players.

[MedicMaaan]

I would recommend not posting the IDs to the forum as it is generally not allowed, previous threads have been closed for doing so. I totally agree with you about this being an issue and feel that they should be making public commitments to addressing it.

Previously developers have made posts on how to respond as a user:

My Disappointing Experience with Support's Handling of Cheaters

Thanks everyone for your input and information here! We are always striving to do our best to find and ban any accounts that are cheating in Age IV and your help is vitally important with this. First of all, I’d like to thank Magges for starting this thread and submitting the reports through Support. We did need to gather additional information to positively identify the reported player and the match in which cheating was observed. The video evidence provided through Support was very helpful fo…

Hopefully they are noticing how big of an issue this is for the game. All multiplayer games experience cheating, but I think AoE 4 has more cheaters than average. I think the community could benefit from some level of transparency on where they are with handling it.

[arnobpl]

Since currently the zoom hackers do not bypass the camera view data in match replay data, the game developers can easily implement automatic scalable hacker detection system like checking the camera perspective values in the time series recorded data. Detecting map hacking is somehow complicated than zoom hack because that is not just looking for specific in-game internal values in recorded match data but I hope it is still scalable with some manual action from dev side. Probably using some kind of AI mechanism can fit into this automatic detection system.

Anyway, I am not sharing the hacker ID’s as suggested. The forums should not be meant for reporting specific hackers (otherwise forums would be flooded by hacker reporting) but the general issues in the game. I hope this post gets more attention from devs so that they can take some feasible actions to build a good anti-cheat system. Surely, that will attract more players and make the game more fun. I have faced hackers more than one time. I don’t want encounter any more hackers in the game.

[Iverson1711]

@MedicMaaan

Previously developers have made posts on how to respond as a user:

That post sounds like “Ok, we know, and we are going to do nothing”, because people have already been reporting for a long time but nothing is done, there is a guy for example that even uses the Zoom hack, and has already been reported several times and mentioned here in the forum, and he is still playing and using the hacks.