State of game/ cheats

I love how they remove cheaters from the posts on here due to shaming. EA protecting cheaters.

To a certain extent I would agree to such policy...only to avoid like everyone posting everyone's name and endless discussion about who is right or wrong.

Yet what makes this policy as vague as smurfing: in one of the latest videos of Zeus on YT ex-#1 Xbox Pred openly talks about hacking and getting boosted by hackers -> I post that video link in forums -> it gets removed because of naming and shaming...that one did not make like any sense at all.

Pity.

I can tell from my experience in Quake that actually naming and shaming so to say or more precise thread in forums where names of suspects or proven hackers were available actually did work quite well.

a) you could easily just search for a name (back then even ip address because as admin in quake you could see all player IP addresses) -> confirm is the person on a list / is ip on the list (in case person changed nick name) -> make decisions to play with the person / accept him/her in team

b) threads in forums contained proof of accusation and proof of defense if any was present -> people cloud not only see the final verdict made by each team internally but also make up their own mind regarding the person if it was say 50/50 case

Yeah people did call out suspects in games especially if they did well but basically conversation was ended with the reference to the list -> not proved to be hacker -> end of story.

In this regards Valorant is doing better job - you can now download game replay, see POV of every player and decide to report or not sus plays / review what felt sus and see if that really was or just brain tricked you into thinking it was sus.

Respawn / Apex unfortunately is very closed system and nothing similar seems to be coming our way, Respawn = North Korea style management...unfortunately.

Personally, I feel like the cheating problem in Wildcard mode is getting worse every week.

Any longer and this mode will be completely unplayable for people who end up in the hardest lobbies.

No one, literally no one, misses any shots. This is a joke.

That's how aimbot works alright :D

And that's why I never tried to outaim aimbot or outsmart wallhack (unless I knew / saw that this player is bad even with wallhack and eats my fakes one after another).

It's bad enough that when I play solo, I'm constantly getting killed by three stacks of demons, and yet no one misses even with a single shot. Matchmaking lasts long enough for strong teams to line up again. And so on, and so forth.

Does no one really make mistakes in this game anymore?

I have to get 100-200 kills to win a single game because I constantly have either a very strong lobby or cheaters. It's crazy how poorly matchmaking works in this game.

"Does no one really make mistakes in this game anymore?"

No. No, they don't. Not even in scrub lobbies. I don't know if this is just who is left when all the genuine casuals have left for other games, or if this is what rampant cheating looks like. Could be either. Probably is a lot of both. All I know is that I go out of my way to stay in the lowest lobbies this game has to offer - matches that often have real bots in them - and by the time there are only three squads left it really doesn't matter what tactic you favor for end of game because the enemy (all three in perfect coordination) will teleport across whatever distance there is between you and one clip you before you can even raise your weapon. If you're shooting at them with a 4x scope over a healthy distance, they're shooting back with automatics that lock on. If you're in the middle of skyward dive re-position then they will shoot you out of the air.

How else are you supposed to get around cheat ban if you can't just fire up a secondary and continue on?

As I said many times before - it was challenging and fun to me at first back in season 8+ when I had to understand how ranked is played, what are usual soloq teammates, how to counter controller aim assist advantage (now thinking back it might be already hacks way back then), learn different legends and weapons.

Fast forward to numerous hardstuck D4 splits and seasons, mastering to at least decent level all legends, trying to find 3stack for 3 full seasons in all possible forums and discord LFGs (adding to my "not to play ever again" list more than 3000 people, not joking, glad it has no limit and actually works), almost reaching Masters when it mattered, reaching Masters when it was first free to take... there was already first signs of me quitting and I did eventually Because first wave of hackers (seasons 16/17/18).

Fast forward to now...I just see no point in being Master/Pred and other hacker cannonball meat. You can't even beat good 3stacks as soloq, not in Diamond+ lobbies, not to mention grinders with hacks or just blunt full on hackers or your top X Preds whom even aimbot would struggle to beat.

Idk why people still play knowing what is coming be it pubs, special modes or ranked. Apex is rotten due to hackers and poor management that adds fuel to the fire via matchmaking and reporting system being just smoke and mirrors.

Quit and save your nerves :) or go at least to other game to let other hackers kill you, will have at least some fun learning a new game, new mechanics :)

Not gonna lie I got a bit humbled lately when allocating much more time (left from not playing Apex) to aim training.

In many scenarios there you see like tens of thousands people in a leaderboard and in some cases that figure goes into millions (most popular scenarios you usually see in YT streamers).

My current skill and goal is to be top 10%, at this point my logic goes:

a) I have good enough base before aim training so I could break into top 10% same as I did in Apex (your D4+)

b) I assume that some  people above me are cheating (yeah unfortunately even in aim training cheats are possible) or exploiting some mechanics how scenario should not be played yet that yields legit (no cheating just exploiting) results, and some are just better than me

c) in aim training community many tailor settings per scenario that is beneficial yet I don't do that I play with my in-game settings every time to train for in-game performance instead knowing that in some cases it will hurt my score in aim training

Now to the humble part - after like 1+ month of aim training now and reaching my benchmark in basically every task I play for my personal needs / weak and strong points I bumped into what seems to be two legit CS2 pro player videos where they went into aim training to improve their skills and they also showcase actual footage of them doing some of the tasks.
One of the pros is constantly appearing in TOP3 scores, the other one was playing one of my favorite tasks where I have a score around 600, my best is like 609, his score was 890 = 46% better.

And then I realized the fact that even on my good days when I don't miss and hand-eye coordination feels on point I still do pretty slow in comparison to pros / my accuracy is falling if I start aiming faster.

Which just shows that in some cases people are actually insanely better than you, which might seem impossible, at the same time if you spectate those people you would see why not that bs that you see when you spectate hacker squad that clearly has no brain and cursor just flicks onto enemies and what not.
These pros also state that becoming CS now CS2 pro basically takes people approx. 10!!!! years in the game, with some odd exceptions where people have managed to break Tier 1 faster.
So comparing me who plays Apex since 2019 and aim trains for like <200h I guess it makes sense that people with 10 years under their belt can do 46% faster, but those are a few and far apart not like in Apex 1 squad at least in every lobby.

18 years of Halo, uncheatable for the most part for most of that time, proved beyond doubt that even the simplest of games have higher skill ceilings than most average players will ever realize.

So I'm not really trying to say that anyone who beats me is a cheater. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

And I appreciate players who want to turn the game into a job. In the loosest sense by endless practice and aim training and rank grinding. And in the strictest sense by leveraging all that work into a paycheck. More power to them.

The problem here is the inability (and unwillingness) of the developer to keep players of the highest abilities away from the weekend warriors. I don't really care if these players are highly skilled or cheating. Sometimes I can tell the difference, sometimes not, but the point isn't which is which. The point is: why is skill-based matchmaking so bad that bronze-to-master matches are a consistent fixture of this game? Part of is lazy matchmaking, which is on the dev, and part of it is a player pool of smurfs who turn the game into their own personal **bleep** show. Which is on the players. But also on the devs for allowing it. Unlike the cheating, smurfing is a fixable problem that Respawn chooses deliberately not to fix. In fact, I'm pretty sure they don't see it as a problem at all. Shame on them is all I can say. For a lot of things, but for smurfing more than any other.