Not everyone plays fair in Overwatch. Some people choose to download hacks that improve their aim, ruining the game for everyone else. Here’s how some of the most insidious Overwatch cheats work.
YouTube user Chuck Norris has a quick, informative video that shows you just how sneaky Overwatch cheats can be. Contrary to popular belief, aiming cheats do not always just snap your reticule to an enemy’s head. In this case, the cheat is more of an assist that gently guides your aim where it needs to go, so that the hack looks “humanised”. That’s what makes them hard to spot, at least for players.
Sure enough, as the video states, it is unfortunately very easy to find these cheats. On one forum alone, there are hundreds of thousands of views, meaning that Overwatch must have a sizeable cheating population.
I dug in a little bit and was amused by what I found. The most popular thread on a major cheating forum has a video displaying an aim assist cheat, and one of the top comments on that footage is a conspiracy theory that the cheat was actually made by Blizzard itself:
You gotta think, a lot of the people downloading this stuff must live with constant worry that they’re going to get caught, so this type of paranoia makes sense. Accordingly, some cheats are posted with testimonials from users who swear the hack is safe to use:
My favourite find, however, was noticing that one hack creator got so sick of trying to troubleshoot technical problems with cheat downloaders, they just straight up deleted the exploit to get rid of the headache:
Don’t worry. Despite all of this, it does seem like Blizzard is doing what it can to crack down on cheaters.
Comments
7 responses to “Why Some Overwatch Cheaters Are So Hard To Catch”
Reticule is a handbag. I think you meant reticle:
http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2014/08/whats-the-difference-between-a-reticle-and-a-reticule/
So I’m not as crap as I thought I was and everyone else is just cheating?
How should I react when my team wins (or loses, for that matter) and the chat scroll starts off about cheaters?
It’s difficult for new players especially to differentiate between someone who’s simply a sore loser, or not that knowledgeable about the game themselves, and someone who legitimately spots a cheater.
Blizzard is in an unenviable position here, but ultimately it’s Blizzard’s game.
Players who get unfairly targeted by the anti-cheat crowd filling up the chat post-game instead of gg’s and such (I propose we call them the Spammish Inquisition) should also turn the other cheek and not goad them further or encourage other silent players into joining in. Sore winners and all that.
It really doesn’t help that there’s something weird about the killcam recording. When it plays I definitely don’t always see aiming patterns that look like a normal mouse gliding around the screen. That combined with any sore-loser bias and it’s easy to start wondering every time if its an assisted cheater.
How insecure and pathetic would you have to be to actually download and use an aim bot… boggles my mind.
Now you see, Insulting them like that does not stop them from doing it, It only drives them to do it more.
Have come up against some blatant aimbotters in the past – it’s incredibly satisfying to win games against them despite the fact that they’re cheating. Forces me to play better in order to overcome the higher difficulty. One of the good things about Overwatch is that with some good teamwork you can focus fire on an aimbotter pretty well from behind a shield.
… Also the trash talk after winning against a group who’s cheating is so goddamned satisfying