Cheating, still

This thread went in a weird direction. But there are some valid concerns in the OP, so in the hopes of getting it back on track:

Flyhacks: We added some new functionality in 6.0 that lets us catch these much easier, by keeping track of areas that players should not be able to reach via normal means. If you do see someone who's gotten themselves to a location they shouldn't be, that just means we missed that particular spot. Let us know where it is (screenshots are super helpful!) and we can look into getting it fixed.

Kick bots: We've done a lot to try to detect these more accurately, and are still working on improving those algorithms. Every report we get helps, and I'll take the opportunity to mention hacks@blizzard.com again -- if you can get video (either on YouTube or even a clip from a Twitch stream), that's enormously useful to the hacks team.

That said, I also think that a lot of players get accused of kickbotting when they're actually just good at kicking (or maybe just lucky). A highly-skilled player will know when to watch for a cast based on what they're opponent is doing. To use an extremely basic example: when a healer is being chased around a pillar by a Rogue, and suddenly stops moving (but isn't CC'd), that's a strong indication that they're about to start casting. The Rogue can recognize this, anticipate the cast, and be prepared to kick.

In those cases, the Rogue might even use Kick before they even see the cast bar -- not because they're using a hack, but because it's just so obvious that the cast is coming, especially in high-pressure situations where the healer would have already used any instant-cast abilities they had available. Server latency and reaction times being what they are, it's highly likely in that scenario that the healer gets kicked instantly.

I'm not at all saying that kick cheats don't exist -- and as I mentioned above, we're still working on better ways to detect and combat them. I'm just saying that "I got kicked instantly" isn't automatic evidence of shenanigans. A lot of perfectly legit players get accused of cheating, and it makes me sad to see extremely smart and highly-skilled play shrugged off as "he must be using a bot."

As to players entering arenas late, that's kind of a weird one. I'll look into it some more.

04/10/2015 02:51 PMPosted by Zeth

Does reporting someone in-game automatically generate a ticket that is automatically sent to hacks@blizzard ?

It's not sent to that email address, but it is sent to the team that checks it. The big difference is that an in-game report doesn't include visual evidence. That means the hacks team has to investigate the player manually, and while they do catch a lot of cheaters that way, there's a decent chance that by the time someone gets to that individual report, the reported player has stopped queuing.

04/10/2015 02:51 PMPosted by Zeth

Also, what are your thoughts about the bots changing the mentality of this game? People who are getting beaten think they are being beaten by bots. And now we have multi R1 Gladiators who are admitting to using bots to get their multi R1 titles, thus totally invaliding the entire Gladiator title.

This is pretty much what I was talking about above regarding kickbots. The mentality of "If I win, it's because I'm awesome, and if I lose, they were obviously hacking." It's important to remember that the goal of the MMR system is to put you in matches against equally-skilled players. That means, once the system has a decent handle on where you and your teammates should be, you should be losing roughly 50% of your matches. It's easy to fall into the mentality of "we're so much better than them, so they must be cheating" when in reality, you just hit a really good team.

I also think that -- and you might want to sit down for this one, it's a shocker -- there are a lot of trolls on the internet. In the PvP community, there are several that love to make the bot problem (which is definitely a problem, so don't read this as me trying to deflect that) sound worse than it is.

Just the other day I was reading a thread where people were claiming that a kickbotter had gotten his ban overturned via some sort of IP-related tomfoolery. I checked with the hacks team, and the guy's account was (and is) still permanently closed, but the rumor was persisting and a lot of fingers were being pointed at Blizzard for "believing his lies."

Where I'm going with this is that I don't believe a multi-R1 player claiming they've botted their way to the top "totally invalidates" the Gladiator title. Heck, even if it's true (and if it is, I'd like to know more, so we can investigate those players), the vast majority of Gladiators very much earned their titles.

04/10/2015 02:51 PMPosted by Zeth

Are you going to strip away any achievements the cheaters received?

Heh. I've been burned in the past for over-promising on what we're going to do about the "filthy cheaters," so I'm a bit hesitant to say that we'll catch every single one. Fact is, catching them with hard evidence is tricky. But I can say that we do our best, and are actively working on methods to make our best better.

04/10/2015 03:03 PMPosted by Entrôpy

I Still want to know how they manage to kick a dragons breath from my mage.

I'd be interested to hear more about this, because from what I understand, there should be no possible way to interrupt an instant cast, regardless of latency.

I provided video evidence of a guy logging onto a bot and you reverted his ban because he said he was hacked and changed his IP.

If this is the report I think it is, that's completely false. That account was closed and remains closed.

04/10/2015 03:25 PMPosted by Triixz

All I know is that I've seen him tweeting that he got unbanned and was camping glad.

If not, then that's good to know and I apologize.

See my note in my second post about trolls on the internet. ;)

04/10/2015 03:30 PMPosted by Zeth

You should have a team that is dedicated to viewing the enemy's boards.

We do, I'm just not on that team, which means I'm often not immediately aware of stuff going on there.