It could be the ‘radar hack’ cheat. Supposedly the XBox controller can be “hacked” to intercept player position data, which can be displayed by the cheater. It’s an actual cheat that has nothing to do with the detectors or scopes.
How much time passed after you cloaked? Do you mean something like this?
Here are two videos showing extraordinary skill at aiming at a cloaked target, a whole 8 seconds after these players could hypothetically have seen me. It’s not humanly possible to track a target like this in a 3D environment after glimpsing it from an extreme distance for half a second or less, and predict its location 8 seconds later. Even an AI couldn’t do that. There are only two possible explanations:
- Magic.
- Cheating.
I launched a custom battle in order to trace these players’ positions based on the minimap.
The first example is from 2020.11.06.
SupremeRaider_ managed to almost hit me by shooting through a narrow space between two buildings that were in the middle of the Scorpion projectiles’ path.
At 04:49, he theoretically may have seen me for half a second or less. So why didn’t he stop there and wait for me to re-emerge from concealment? From 04:49, he couldn’t see me, so that was his best bet. Instead, he kept on flying, not bothered by losing sight of me.
At 04:44, I cloaked, and he kept drifting, at a slower pace, getting ready to shoot. How did he know where to expect me to be?
At 04:41, he shoots. Then keeps drifting, while the weapons are reloading. Keeps watching me from hundreds of meters - while I’m still cloaked.
At 04:38, moves forward a bit, preparing to shoot at me again, while the Scorpions are still reloading.
At 04:37, realizing that I’m driving behind the hill, starts receding, and probably already selecting another target.
At 04:29, shoots at someone else, and, according to my combat log, misses. Then proceeds to follow the team. Too bad combat logs aren’t recorded anymore.
Next, a player loved by the masses, and even more by himself, Friend Ciaw. The battle took place on 2021.09.24.
Theoretically, Ciaw could only see me for maybe half a second at 04:55, as he was flying out from behind the building. Let’s say that, from hundreds of meters, and through a narrow gap between structures, he was able to focus on the cliffside under the future-train rails, because he knew that’s the spot to look at. Let’s say that he saw me without a scope (scopes used to use 1 energy point back then). Yet, he chose to fly behind the containers upon the cliff, and all the way to its other side. At 04:50, he started to move back, flew out from behind the containers, and at 04:47, while beginning to duck back behind the containers, fired the shots, which flew for some half a second, to almost hit me at 04:46.
If he did see me for that fraction of a second at 04:55:
a) Why didn’t he stay put and start pre-aiming? That’s around 8 seconds of prime aiming time wasted.
b) If he did see me at 04:55, he was already at almost the same spot that he fired at me 8 seconds later. Why would an experienced player like that choose to abandon a convenient firing position and fly all the way to the other side of the container, to come back to the same spot a few seconds later? That only introduced unnecessary chaos. Unless he didn’t need to stay there, because the whole time he knew exactly where I was, after I disappeared from view and cloaked, and was waiting to shoot as soon as I emerged from behind a structure.
c) How could he see me at 04:55, if he didn’t have a scope? Below is a frame from the version on my HDD, before YT transcoded the file and reduced the quality. It shows what may look like a colossus. With 3 Executioners, that’s 16 energy points.
Also, Ciaw had a Listener - if it’s hard to discern in the YT version.
In a custom battle, I recreated my car’s movements, trying to find all possible gaps between structures they would’ve been able to see me through. In both cases, there was only one such gap. And in both cases, they shot at me a whole 8 seconds after they could have seen me last, for a fraction of a second, from hundreds of meters, and, at least in Ciaw’s case, definitely without a scope.
In both cases, someone on the team could’ve had a Doppler. But that doesn’t explain what happened.
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In both videos, I have a Doppler upgraded for more range of detection in cover (which I did back in 2017). Its range of 460 m is marked by the circle on the minimap. Which means that:
a) It’s the farthest any detector can see.
b) Someone with a similarly upgraded Doppler would be able to see me on the minimap too (or maybe even without the upgrade, hard to tell exactly).
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But, in order to do that, they’d need to have set their minimap scale to 1.0. Hardly anyone does that.
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But if they had set the scale to 1.0, and even the size to “Large,” why didn’t they patiently wait in one spot, preparing to shoot at me, and instead flew past that spot, just to return there a few seconds later, or to fire from a less convenient spot, with less preparation? That’s the logical thing to do when you’re a sniper and you glimpse an enemy on the minimap. You know where they’re going, so you wait for them to come into view again. The only explanation I can think of is they weren’t relying on the minimap. They didn’t even need to pay attention to it, because they were looking straight at me the whole time, using their precious cheats.
These two have been reported by numerous players, yet nothing happened. Am I wrong? Can a person shoot like this after losing sight of a target for 8 seconds? Do their movements prior to taking the shots match natural behavior of hover snipers?
Cheaters are best exposed by providing video proof. I record with OBS, because my video card isn’t powerful enough to manage recording with the capture widget included in the driver suite. Here’s a quick guide:
- OBS updates don’t always immediately get registered with Easy Anticheat, which can result in recording a blank screen. I still use version 27.0.1, that I had to revert to after an update resulted in that happening.
- Find the Windows sound option that reduces system sound by 80% for voice communication and disable it. Windows detects OBS as a voice call. If you don’t disable it, you’ll have to increase the sound volume of the video file by 16 dB - which value I arrived at by trial and error. My main channel video consists of dozens of clips, and a number of them had to have the sound volume increased, which was a hassle. Should you need to transcode the audio, I recommend setting the format to AAC (FDK), which should be the default format for OBS. Then under “Configure,” set to 160 or the value you recorded with, leave “After burner” on, under “Filters,” select manual amplification, set to 16 dB.
- The best resolution I can record at is 1280x800, that’s under “Picture.” I use the Lanczos filter. Under “Output,” I set the video bitrate to 4500 Kbps. The audio bitrate is 160 Kbps. The hardware encoder (AMD) seems better for my AMD 7770 card. The rest is set to default, IIRC.
- I transcode videos in Avidemux 2.7, which appears to be a 32-bit version, but it works fine. YouTube uses two codecs to convert videos to after uploading. One is better, the other is worse. In order to get the better codec, a video needs to be in 1440p. In Avidemux, I first choose the target format as Mpeg4 AVC (x264), then below, under “Filters,” under “Transformation,” in “Resize,” I upscale to 1440p (horizontal). Then, in this very order, I go to “Sharpening” and use Msharpen. My preferred values are: Intensity 200, Threshold 1. It took a lot of time to arrive at these values, but these are best for me. The sharpest videos I can get, with the best colors. This process makes some parts noticeably brighter, but that’s actually a nice effect. And the video filters have to be set in this exact order. Selecting sharpening first, and resizing as second results in slightly worse quality. On average, it takes me at least 100 minutes to transcode a full battle for uploading, but it’s the best way to do it.
Setting the minimap size to Large and scale to 1 will help with tracking cheaters’ movements. I started using these settings to make better use of my Doppler.
