Quite often on closed maps or nomad, on second minute you see spectator are people watching their own game on 2nd pc/monitor? Even watching replays where people ping enemy tc-s in fog of war.
Make spec delay 15min or something so sneak vils or surprise attacks can have more value.
5 Likes
Totally agree with this idea. Every now and then especially when the opponent name is Aisan Char, there would be spectator and they can ping your TCs and Dock in fog of war. I have stop playing nomad until this cheat is fixed
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Sure, lets buy another computer and put it right next to the screen and don’t forget to buy another copy of the game or use game pass to spec cheat in a 1100 tg game…
It might be something to worry about high level games, but for low elo matches and even intermediate it makes no sense to invest that much, also you need a lot of micro and attention to read other screen.
I guess instead of such investment a cheater would buy the cheats for 30 usd without needing another pc or game copy, i mean cheaters are way smarter than using spec cheat on daily games.
2 Likes
But why are people even watching these elo games? Why they pinging fog of war etc.
It would take me no effort to power up my laptop and watch the game, . So it wouldnt be an investment at all, just few seconds of work.
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I am sorry but is it too hard to do it? I find it is quite simple
Just to clear up the general question about whether it is happening…
Yes. it is happening, usually people don’t realize the advantage they’re getting.
– Streamers will have ten people watching, one or more of those ten will pull up the game to spectate and they’ll toss in the odd comment like “don’t worry too much though, he doesn’t have any eco to back this up because he went all in.” Which you should have to scout for, but your scout died and you didn’t spend the wood on a stable and the food on a scout… so unfair advantage. “he didn’t even get the relic over there” “haha you’re done for, he’s sneaking a vill!” which knowing three minutes late is still sometimes enough to know to at least start looking.
– a guy starts a game, his friend boots up 10 minutes later. they connect on discord, he speeds through the game since he’s waiting anyways and watches things unfold, getting overall perspective and perhaps valuable info about second bases, how many TC’s he has had for how long, etc.
Both of these things happen, it is usually connected with discord or streaming rather than one person with two setups. Is it a ginormous advantage? not really. It may get the guy placed 50 or 100 elo higher, but then he’s going to land where he’s having fair games with his unfair advantage because he is playing players who are simply better than him anyways.
Not saying definitive answer one way or the other as to what should be done, just responding to the people who don’t seem to believe it is happening with any sort of regularity. It is quite common, not even looking at other countries or anything. it’s happening here and you can easily find and watch people doing it, and may have even done it yourself without realizing it’s what you’re doing if you have friends you play with on discord.
I come here with actual experience doing the things you describe and have explored them extensively. On numerous occasions I’ve attempted to spectate a Ranked team game and provide overwatch details to my friends in the game over Discord. I hate to break it to you, ladies and gentlemen, this little phenomenon that you guys are deliberating and how it gives a game-breaking advantage has little to no basis in truth.
Let’s get a few things out of the way first.
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I am not contesting the suspicions you all have that this type of thing occurs. IT DOES. Just not as often, and not with the success rate you think it does.
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I’ll attempt to explain why this doesn’t work from my own experiences.
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Because these are conclusions derived from my own experience, I encourage you all to try this out for yourselves to verify my claims. Better yet, find a way to make it work in your favor, and prove me wrong.
Conditions of the experiment are as follows:
2-4 friends are partied together and queue for a Ranked Team RM game, while one player(Overwatch) spectates the game immediately after the game starts. All players are on discord and are in constant communication via voice comm. The time delay between spectator and the Live action is 180 seconds.
Findings:
- Information that you can gather with 100% reliability:
- A detailed overview of the entire map, resource locations
- The positions of your enemies and their civilizations
- The actions of the enemy as they happened 180 seconds ago.
- Information gathered that could potentially be used to predict future enemy actions:
- Build orders used
- Age up times
- Buildings that are immediately constructed upon reaching feudal
- Enemy population at key points in time
- Town Center counts
- Whether or not the enemy generally knows what they’re doing
- Army composition
- Information you’d think would help, but doesn’t, because of the time delay.
- Troop movements
- Ability to anticipate when or where the enemy will attack
Conclusions: Of the 8 games we attempted to get this to work, we managed to win 5 of them.
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There was no way to determine if any of the delayed information given had an important role in the outcome of the game.
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In section 2, the info was gathered and used in an attempt to predict the enemy’s actions. Our success rate on this was a hit or miss because often times they would change tactics in that 180 second delay, thus making any preparations made in anticipation of their actions ended up being a wasted effort. In some situations, it likely had a negative effect because the player could not re-adjust quickly enough to adapt to the abrupt change in tactics because they had already spent the resources preparing for something else.
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There was no way to gain any significant advantage that would consistently alter the outcome of the game in our favor. Too much can change within those 3 minutes and by the time we made those enemy observations, the intel was no longer actionable because of the fluidity of battlefield circumstances.
To wrap up, I say again, try it yourself and prove it first before calling for unnecessary changes to the game. Going off of speculation is a poorly thought out method for introducing proposals.
1 Like
They ping the fog of war to coordinate their scouts in dark age, or their feudal attacks prior to building the market. That’s the only way you can do it, is by flaring in the dark so your ally can follow the marks to meet up with you. You can tell who the person is that issued the flare by paying attention to the color that it blinks to on the mini-map.
I agree with what @DMgCrowley say. Lets switch on another laptop next to the computer and use this assisting tools together in our team game nomad match to get the Vietnamese team bonus for free
1 Like
I think you test many things but in a wrong way. I try it with nomad 4v4 team game and go for Burgundians Cavalier rush to melt opponent TC without any vision works very great. Surely you need to avoid your opponent know what you are going for by the vision advantage and I cannot see you have done any of it from what you have mentioned. If you go for bloom with this tools it is definately cannot get much advantage on it.
I really love the idea that everytime I raise this issue in nomad team game 4v4 fog of war TC location, other people will mention APM, opponent build, lose to spectator game cry more, no one gonna use this cheat don’t be ego inflation. All are wrong focus. The problem is having a free Vietnamese team bonus while opponent have no idea you have this bonus. In nomad game even though you hide perfectly and with both Portuguese and Vietnamese in your team and you 100% sure no one know where you TC (and it really no one know via replay vision) and ready to go for some strategy, 14 knight with 2+2 PA come and eat all your TC and they ping fog of war in the replay. I am not even from Asia and I have no idea why I always encounter those asian char name Team. After that I try the same strategy and it does work and thus I stop playing nomad since it give a large asymmetry advantage and your opponent have no idea to know (as long as your player name is not with asia char) and don’t forget to taunt your opponent by saying “someone spec me because I am too good. No one is ghosting your via spec dude”
If you think I’m doing it wrong, then you do it, and do it right. Get data for yourself and detail your procedure for it so the results can be replicated. In the entire history of the aoe2 DE forums, I am the only one that I’ve ever seen openly admit to doing this practice and presenting the findings. Most people don’t have a second computer or a group of friends they can do this with over discord, sure I guess that could be the reason. But I think the real reason is that they think they’re going to get in trouble for doing so. The thing is, the dev team put the 180 second delay in for a reason, and it works.
I have just list what I have done and which part of your test is wrong in details. Repeat this step and win the game: go Nomad 4v4 team game and go for Burgundians Cavalier rush to melt opponent TC without any vision.
From what I learn from you you are more a solo player and I understand why you don’t understand. Since it affect nomad 4v4 the most and you and most of the people you know including the entire history of the aoe2 DE forums in your perspertive are just solo player but not 4v4 player who play nomad most.
I am a team game players and most of the people I know also can simply do the trick with discord or with another computer. Yes we will continues to use the trick for equilibrium since other people use that trick and there is no way to stop when solo people like you still dominant the discuession on the spec delay here
Your test is flawed in that it is nearly impossible to play 10 ranked nomad games in a row unless you are intentionally manipulating the results to make it so. That is not a controlled experiment.
If you are truly interested in going through my entire post history, go to the Steam forums for AoE2 DE. Look for a player named DMg Halt, which is me, and view the post history for a more complete view. My posts here on the ageofempires.com forums make up maybe less than 1% of all posts that I have ever made. This should help minimize your speculation and help you go after me using some facts, instead of your emotions. Good luck sir.
At lower ELO-s, spec cheating has 0 impact.
What are you talking about? Nomad is 2nd popular map according to the team rank statistics
https://www.ageofstatistics.com/statistics/descriptives?period=p03_v09&filter=rm_team_all
If arabia have a huge issue, developers don’t need to queue into arabia 10 time in a row to fix it. I really love your logical argument with scientific terms but it does not work this game.
Although it is a nice attempt to appeal to authority, what your test from the beginning is wrong. Average player like you and me do not have enough APM to deal with the exceeded information like enemy build or res location. Thats why you feel painful and find the extra information is pretty useless. Therefore, I suggest a information that you can gather using this cheat which is extremely helpful for your game and it does not need too much extra APM, and also how to use a strategy which will make use of this information in a effective way.
Don’t want to be ironic but I think what you have done can shows that using a incorrect method to do the test, if it can be consider as a “proper test”, is not very helpful. Before that you can think ahead and find a good way to make use of this cheat. I think practicing is one way but I don’t encourage to practice a cheat method. So go nomad and use this would be a fastest way and more effectively way to doing do.
I was wondering what you are talking about. After checkiing DMg Halt I understand what do you mean. Yes I agree with you
As I said before in my initial post on this topic. If you think you can make it work, conduct your own experiment, and share what you found. I think if you could show that it can be used to consistently be used to win you the game, that would be a huge break through and be used as a reason to rethink the spectator system. As of now, all anyone has posed is their hypothesis and how they think they could use it to help them win, but never actually doing the experiment.
I can see how spectating could help in a game of nomad. But I think if you really wanted to prove that spectators can cheat, you would have to show that it can be done on a majority of maps. The only other map you might be able to do it on is Megarandom, but only for seeing the map layout, but knowing that information doesn’t automatically win you the game.
I was always wondering why you keep throwing scientific terms like hypothesis test control etc. I am sorry but as an avarage person with “scientist” in my job title, I don’t think your so-call testing make any sense at all. Because what me and OP say from the beginning, is not to PROVE that this cheat can be done in ALL map. We just throw an idea that this cheat can have a huge impact on closed map, and especially nomad team game 4v4. I try it a few time and it works very well and then I stop there because I don’t think it need to make more victim because of testing. Not to mention that everyone including you also can do the test with thought experiment and know how OP this cheat is, in nomad 4v4 team game with fog of war bungindians Cavalier rush.
I understand what you stand and what you mention. It is completely right if I was telling about spec cheat is burst in every single map and spec function should be perminately removed from the game. But what we say is that this cheat is really burst is in 2nd popular map of team game and we suggest that the spec delay can be increase so that it can bring back the fair game and let player enough the game play, once again.
For the map like Megarandom, people like me and you using this cheat will not have much impact becauase lack of extra information APM practice and I think it is fine. Althoguh I have play a megaRandom which generate a nomad type map and opponent have spectator and pull of fog of war ping knight combo. But it is the same story as nomad so I won’t repeat here.
I can understand why you’d want to increase the delay on a nomad map. The reason for my rhetoric being against this idea of changing the spectator system is that if you want to make a change it has to be done for all maps, or none of the maps. This is my general observation when it comes to changes to the game. You could very well be right that nomad is special, and they can make a single exception for this map by increasing the spectator delay. And in that case, they would have to look into reviewing all of the maps to see if it needs to be done for them too. I just don’t see that happening, but I would not be against your proposed change if it was for nomad only.