Besides, six new civilizations that have very bad balance we still have players using the map hack, and it has been more than a year.
Last week I played against a player, and it looked like everything was going bad, after the game I checked the replay, and what did I see?
The guy was checking all the time, the foggy areas.
He has two scouts that are targeted to pass close to all the sheep.
Two villagers stopped mining gold and went in the direction of my scout path to kill the sheep that were with the scout, this movement started before he could see the scout.
He sent his army to attack two prelates who were carrying relics before he even saw the prelates.
He always put his villagers to look for shelter even before he could see that the villagers were going to be raided.
I reported the player, but one week later the guy still playing.
The only conclusion that I can get is they don’t care.
I’ve been matched up with people who look into the fog directly at strategically relevant things or react with suspicious accuracy and timing about 1/3rd of the time I queue for 1v1s (plat 3 - dia 2). It hasn’t been consistent with the number of games played or country of origin. This is a problem that needs to be addressed ASAP. I also haven’t seen any sign of admin action against even the most blatant cheaters, some going as far as bragging about it in chat.
Not only are there many people who appear to be cheating, but I’ve also seen many accusations without evidence. This is something that deserves to be addressed through an official post or announcement… it’s really getting out of hand.
In my case, I was playing a 3v3 and a french would ever come to raid my villagers wherever they were.
For example, I was playing Abbasid and I collected stone to my second TC and I was building it near my main TC when he started to raid. I canceled, and when I’ve seen his knights in my neighbours base I started again, and then automatically they came again to the same location.
I tried to build the TC like 3 times and everytime I started to build, he came to raid at the same location.
I was on Diamond 1 and this player was on platinum III, I still won the match because despite that he was very very bad, so I assume he got boosted to platinum III just because the map hack, but based on their reaction time to things, their unit composition or building placement, he was really playing like a low gold.
After the match I watched the replay and I saw his scout was going to all the sheep, and he came to my villagers building TC without any scout or vision of any type.
Also, I had units in a silent forest and without vision he was targeting these units with the knights.
You are probably going to see it more the higher the rank is, since the guys have a huge advantage and are going to be winning more and getting fast better rank, and you have to check the replays to confirm the strange actions of the player.
I once played against a player who has an exceptional reaction time to move away his monk when my knights were approaching. Then I check his other games and his scouting pattern is, very outstanding or lucky, often make a turn at the a fogged location with sheep. However, it seems hard to prove he is map hacking, as it is possible he look at the minimap in the whole game and react accordingly.
The devs should find a way to detect map hacking usage. Provide tools for players to detect opponents’ map hacking, in order to make reports.
In fact the way to detect the maphack it’s pretty easy. Just make a few screenshots to the player in random moments between the first minutes of the game and with a simple computer vision algorithm check the amount of black in their minimap.
But being a game developed by them, and I assume there must be some variable that represents the fog of war and explored zones, why not just check these variables?
I know hackers change the byte representation of these memory address variables in the process. For example if the memory address who represents food is 004D, they would change the value in these memory address to whatever they like.
In fact, one of the reasons of the popular sync error is the alteration of these variables, because they are synchronized with the server and if it detects a difference between server and the user it throws the error and game crashes. For some reason, it seems the toggle of the fog of war or explored zones doesn’t cause a sync error (or maybe yes but hackers done a nice work to solve the issue), maybe, and just maybe, these variables are no synchronized to the server, hence they can’t detect the cheater.
Obviously all of this is speculation based in research I’ve done myself as a software engineer.
For sure there is something that can be done, but the problem is how much development will be needed.
But they can easily decrease the number of people using that hack if there is some punishment for the people who are using that.
This last guy that I spotted is using it for sure, since he is also using the other tool that comes together to have the extra zoom, as the others player that I saw, I also reported, but he is still playing.
I have checked your game (and other games) and it does indeed use cheats (and it is very easy to see). It won’t be long before you get the reports for the corresponding sanctions.
I already reported this one as soon as the game finished, I reported in the game, in the Age website and on steam, with the same highlighting all the same points that I mentioned here.
The one China has been advertising in the custom lobbies for well over a year now. Go take a look. 24/7 there will be one or two lobbies with chinese characters ending in a whatsapp # to contact for software. It’s been reported many times by me and others. The lobbies of the players I reported stayed up for WEEKS. I stopped checking and reporting after nearly a month of the same player with the same lobby being open 24/7 every day I checked. I’m sure they’re still up today.
How hard would it be to develop a solution? Well for the custom lobby advertisements I suggested a timeout after… 1 hour lets say of inactivity, just close the lobby or boot the player offline. They’re doing absolutely nothing to make it hard on them, they just openly allow it. It’s absurd.
unfortunately I play in Asia server and have to face map hacker regularly. A big problem is with my (low) skill level, I can’t even tell the opponent is win by map hacking, so I wouldn’t investigate at all, just think the opponent is a better player.
3 days ago, i lost a game by a mile to China player. Only when my mentor review the game he see the opponent did map hacking.
Only after that I studied the replay and figured he did map hacking for the whole game.
I don’t know how many games i lost in the past because of the opponents’ map hacking. It’s not fun. Feel like a waste of my time learning the game.
I am indeed very tire to have to spend a lot of time checking if the opponent is a map hacker and find proof to report him.
With Free Camera off, this guy, from China, for no reason, click on the black area with my TC there. And randomly view a black area with my scout over there. Is it enough to prove he is map hacking?!
I think I got one more today, the guy’s reactions are kind of suspicious, he just looks a few times at the fog areas, but then I realized that he got one relic that he didn’t know where it was, lucky for him, he sent his priest to past through this one relic.
as I am getting into a career of map hacking analyst, I discussed with people and was learned to enable the following “Show Waypint Markers for Single Actions” option for cheater verification:
does anyone successfully report map hacker base on the scouting pattern? even though someone use very aggressive pattern, not looking at the scout often, and make way points that cross many sheep, it could be just lucky, and is hard to prove he is map hacking.
I just played with one. He is not a berry brush civ but took an aggressive pattern go behind my base, and lucky collected all the sheep. And he is able to visit black area collect any remain sheep. He could be just picked two random points and very lucky the points have sheep over there.
One account I reported (which was clearly seen to have zoomhack and maphack) has been inactive for almost 1 month since it started reporting, so it does work, but you have to be sure that the accused player is cheating when reporting.
