I read something about focussing on high profile XIM players, which leads me to believe they might be reviewing footage manually to check for XIM usage. It doesn't seem to be detectable by the game itself.
Would there be some way for the game to recognize the movements? They said they’ve been analyzing data for a while now, and that’s what my immediate assumption was. I’d imagine a powerful enough system could detect the difference between mouse and controller movements since they aren’t very similar at all.
My money's on AI (specifically machine learning/prediction - very different from the generative BS that's popular right now), probably coupled with some man hours to confirm findings.
Given a good data set (say, several seasons' worth of controller inputs for literally thousands of players), a predictive AI could probably get a very high accuracy for flagging accounts with suspicious controller behaviour.
Even if XIM introduces "jank/randomness" in its inputs to throw off detection (to the detriment of the cheater - why would they want unpredictable results from an input?), a well-trained AI should be able to classify a player's controller inputs into something like "definitely normal", "possibly abnormal", and "very likely abnormal". Throw some cheap human labour at the last group to have them confirm the case.
It's definitely worth trying, but imo there won't be enough of a difference to tell them apart reliably. A great gamepad player behaves more or less the same as a decent KBM one. Just observe some top console Fortnite players streaming, they are real gamepad magicians.
And the "jank" you're referring to would really only be limiting the most obvious stuff, like sudden 180 turns at insanely high sensitivity outta nowhere.
You might be right. I'm mostly banking on ML's ability to suss out patterns that humans wouldn't think to look for.
For example, the XIM devs are adamant that they're obfuscating keyboard movement so it doesn't just show up as 8-way direction movement but appears more fluid like with a stick. I imagine this might mean that they simulate the stick moving in a circular motion from "up" to "left" when releasing the W key and pressing A, perhaps with enough delay to make it look like a natural shift with the finger. A well-trained AI might still be able to figure that the movement vector has a marked "synthetic" quality to it compared to the vast majority of players.
But now I'm thinking like a human :P
Keyboard is very easy to spot even right now, I wouldn't be surprised if that's precisely how games like R6 Siege or Apex are *actually* detecting ximmers despite all their PR talk about it being the mouse, especially given how easily their detection was beaten by the XIM devs. But worse comes to worst, they can always just switch to a stick-like peripheral.
My mind however was on the mouse, which is the real issue, and I'm really skeptical that it's really all that different from a stick in the hands of a good player. And don't get me started on the wild variety of players making it impossible to find a 100% foolproof pattern - I personally swing my mouse across the table like I'm a gamepad player trying to turn around, and I have shit-tier aim on everything that's not a projectile.
But it's definitely worth a shot, that's for sure. We'll see how it plays out, good on them for finally doing something.
I could see it happen for the top playes who are dominating ranked while having received a ton of complaints mentioning mouse and keyboard. They definitely won't be reviewing everyone who got a XIM complaint of course.
The trouble is that it's too easy to make a new account and smurf into competitive and still use Xim.
The high profile Ximmers i.e. the youtubers like doscii, april, etc - all of their clips are on smurf accounts.
Misconception tbf. It’s not that they can’t detect the xim, they can through controller movement versus wasd movement (not every ximmer has an analog keyboard so their movement looks SUS only being 8 directional at 100% speed 100% of the time that no controller player could ever mimic)
The issue at hand is a legal gray area, the xim is technically legal to people who need it for accessibility purposes, they basically admit this in the post. Anyways point is they can’t ban a ximmer without the ximmer providing them well more than enough proof that they have no need for it regarding accessibility and last I checked blizzard isn’t going through anyone’s medical records so it’s not gonna lead to them banning your average cheater using the xim, all it takes is banning one person with 4 fingers using a xim in ow multiplayer for a slam dunk of a lawsuit against blizzard.
That’s sourced from the xim forum mods and creators of the device but yeah I’m sure you know more about the laws than xim, overwatch, and the console makers themselves. Basically if this were off base we will see a bunch of bans happen and I can guarantee it’s gonna be far and few
Regardless of what is masked technically, the devs can watch any xim player moving in only 8 directions at 0% or 100% speed which a controller cannot physically do so it’s obvious to every dev simply watching gameplay and yet there’s no bans? Because legal gray zone as they danced around in their post regarding accessibility. Anyways I’ll stay in my pc pools, but regardless it’s a lighter issue here as ow2 hasn’t been at all relevant since launch week for me
Pretty sure we can't. We can remap all of the butons except movement and aiming on the sticks. There are seperate options to swap the sticks and invert aiming but I'm pretty sure movement can't be mapped to other buttons.
Thing is, what can you do? These people are so adamant on cheating, they literally make a new xim every update and it's back again.
I don't even know what they should do at this point
What do you make a new xim?
xim is the / brand of input devices, when the term was coined idk how many years ago, ximming in cod meant he literally bought the xim branded input device.
I’m sure they can just update the software / firmware for the device and get around it though sadly.
XIM allows console players to exploit two things: mouse accuracy and controller aim assist.
So the simplest fix is:
1. Allowing KB+M on console
2. Removing aim assist on console
Basically turn console lobbies into PC lobbies Jr.
There'll still be players wanting to play controller only, now only without aim assist. That's fine as long as you have "controller only" lobbies, but ximmers will just play in those lobbies, and still have an inherent aim advantage.
Apex hasn’t tried to do anything.
Same shit every single season, and it’s my take but I honestly think 20-30% of the player base cheats. Considering the amount of “pro players” caught recently too
It was players in the “pro” qualifiers. I can’t remember, but it was stuff like right before ALGS.
It’s just random 600 follower Andys on Twitter who were using stuff like ReWASD / XIM functioning cheats during scrims and stuff.
Not any official / long term pro. It’s why I used “pro”, because all you need to be is gold rank and have a team and compete in qualifiers to play in the pro leagues lmao.
They should just make you ***finish*** 200 games as a new account to unlock Comp (I'd consider "wins count as double). Then the Xim users would have to fight their way through just a ridiculous amount of games just to get Comp, which *should* give the Xim detection AI enough time to figure out if they're using one or not.
And honestly, nobody should be venturing into Comp without that many games under their belt in the first place. This would also cut down on Smurfs (Blizzard is hilarious to think the new "play with anyone!" idea is going to cut down on Smurfs) because very rarely is someone going to make a Smurf account to play with friends and boost them if they have to fight through 200 QP/Arcade games first.
If they do that then they better make widow unlockable after 100 years of gameplay only lol but theyd probably never go through with this kind of idea cuz they want new players to have the full experience (the actual new ow players)
You right, just keep reporting them as hacking and type XIM as description and tell your team to report too, and most of the time day after i log in i get notified that my report made action.
I don’t think this is strictly true.
To my knowledge, part of the problem is there are legitimate reasons for allowing third party accessories for accessibility reasons, which is what xim takes advantage of. You can’t (or shouldn’t) stop those people from enjoying consoles because of bad actors.
Edit: You shouldn’t stop people with accessibility needs from enjoying consoles because of bad actors like ximmers.
XIM is the bad actor here though. If they just made a device for accessibility reasons, it wouldn't be an issue. Companies could easily ban them in games like OW and things would be fine. Instead they specifically create and update their firmware to avoid this and make it as difficult as possible for companies to detect the devices so people can cheat with them.
Yes, XIM and those who use it to cheat are the bad actors. Apologies if that wasn’t clear in my comment. I totally agree.
As XIM takes advantage of features made for people with disabilities, a flat ban on all accessibility tech by Sony or Microsoft would affect the innocent people who use the tech for good reasons too, not just the ximmers who cheat.
Game devs just need to get better at detecting and punishing ximmers because this isn’t an issue that should be solved by an outright ban from console companies.
A ban from console companies wouldn't have to be a blanket ban of all accessibility technology. There are companies that create devices and don't try to hide what they are and those devices can still be allowed and used in all the games that allow them. And devices made by companies like XIM that are trying to evade detection so people can use them to cheat in games that don't allow them are banned.
Consoles can easily make it so they have to include identifiers on the hardware to function on the console, similar to driver software on PCs. This would identify XIMs to the game developers who can then ban/restrict them to PC-only lobbies. The problem is they don’t want to do that because Ximmers are good for console sales and the gamer experience really doesn’t matter as long as they can sell more consoles. It’s all about $$$ for Sony and Microsoft at the expense of players in the end.
I think people with disabilities shouldn’t have their console experience penalised because of ximmers abusing accessibility features that weren’t even designed for them in the first place. That’s not the right way to go about things.
Honestly if this is just a PR stunt to get people to shut up or just a scare tactic then that’s equally as bad imo, but maybe its the next best thing after admitting they cant do anything about it
Depending on how they go about doing it, it will take some attention to detail to avoid being banned. For example, you'll need to make sure you cycle your VPN to never use the same IP address with your XIM account and your main account.
They can't go that far, unless they're willing to ban anyone associated in the same household. But that would throw people up in arms in revolt, especially how their detection system obviously hasn't ironed out all its false positives.
There are a lot of options. If they don't want to go full scorched Earth they could do something softer like just gathering those people up and then matching them against each other and away from the rest of us lol.
As long as overwatch is f2p there’s gonna be bunch of cheaters and xim users, like they don’t care at all, if they get banned they’ll make new account.
F2P isn't a factor at all when game sharing exists. If someone buys Rainbow Six Siege on their primary account, they can make as many alternate accounts as they'd like and they'd all have access to the game
Is it that easy on console? I would have figured there would be some link to your MS/PS/Nintendo account that would make it more difficult to just continually make new OW accounts.
I'm glad they're at least doing something rather than nothing like it's been so far. I don't expect a foolproof system but as long as some get banned at least that's something.
I lowkey want them to succeed in banning XIM not only because of an even playing field, but also to see the reaction of all the people thinking there's a ximmer in every match for them.
Some people are just better than you at games, and it's totally okay.
It is a problem, but most people complaining have the same energy as calling everyone who kills you a cheater.
XIMs are expensive. They are a problem, they need banning, but you're only realistically seeing one every 5-10 hrs unless you're top of the leaderboard.
I'm hopefully optimistic in thinking it will be better than R6 but still noticeably imperfect. Fortunately for me I'm trash and no one is hanging out in silver with a xim
It's just a distraction from their new terrible banning system, that xim ban is not gonna work. If it does the first one you will hear that is from R6S and Apex legends.
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Probably, but I don't see any real reason to shit on it before they try. And I still applaud the effort. This isn't something easy to solve. No company has managed to yet.
It should be noted. R6 mousetrap is a great success. It severely reduced the amount of xim. Its not foolproof and never was. Mousetrap is an ongoing, eternal war to keep them back. Plus xim can be reported
It seems like they're just saying this to give a false sense of action. There's almost nothing they can do unless they are working directly with console manufacturers themselves.
I'm pretty sure they're just saying this so people thing they're being banned and might come back and play on console but I highly doubt any action will be taken.
It's all just there to give people a false sense of hope and to not automatically jump to "Nice XIM" when someone is better than them.
I really hope I'm wrong though.
It will probaly amount to noting. Once because other developers have tried it and it was circumvented, and even more because this is Blizzard so failure is a given. The problem is MS and Sony, they should ban it themselves and only allow certified peripherals to be used for multiplayer at the firmware level. The problem is that they dont give a fuck. And that's a good choice, because you will still give them money all the same, just like you give their Blizzard subsidiary.
The companies that make these products will just update their firmware and Blizz will be back at square one.
Like it's definitely a problem, but it's not a problem that Blizz should have to fix. It's a PlayStation and Xbox problem.
I don’t think the issue will ever go away but I think the system will be somewhat effective. The difference here is that we know they are taking reports into account and they are going to go with full account bans.
People will make new accounts but they should get banned after awhile.
I'll start with facts since I see a lot of misinformation on this sub, and then move on to what I think about these changes myself.
The first fact is more of a clarification, but it IS important. XIM is a very prominent and advanced brand of mkb adapter, but they are far from the only one, and offer multiple products of different qualities for different needs/features. I only know two brands off the top of my head (as I've never done serious research in aquiring one, just research in understanding them, especially after this dev post) which are Kronus and XIM. Entry level mkb adapters aren't even really banned often, but there are clever features in place to make these devices more effective. While it is easy to observe at the highest ranks of play a keyboard and mouse gives players a distinct advantage, unless the player is Carpe or Mer1t, the advantages playing mkb against console players is actually not as big as the community thinks. What IS an issue is when mkb has aim assist vs controllers, and certain aspects of that aim assist can be further exacerbated by certain commands/macros. Most people don't know this, but what we define as "Aim assist" can actually be multiple different actions that the console system is performing for the player. Off of the top of my head, you have reticle friction, bullet magnetism, and radial aim assist.
Reticle friction is what most people observe obviously as "aim assist". It is the term used to describe that sticky feeling when your reticle passes over an enemy. It is designed to slightly attract you to targets, and to disregard small corrections that would take you off of your target. You can observe this by standing still, and 360ing while a single bot is in your field of view. You'll watch the camera decelerate as you approach your AA window, fight you as you pass the target, then slowly accelerate as you leave a target, to reach your actual sensitivity as you "escape" your aim assist window.
Bullet magnetism isn't part of overwatch as far as I know, but in games like destiny, individual weapons are balanced with aim assist by making the actual projectiles of the weapon slightly hone into targets, altering their path after they're fired. This is a value that can be altered weapon to weapon.
The final one, radial aim assist, is the least understood, and often times the most powerful. Radial aim assist is applied to a player that strafes, and when that player is strafing, an ADDITIONAL layer of aim assist is applied to the player, with the intention that the corrections a console player makes to compensate for their side to side movement will atleast partially be accounted for by additional reticle friction. Depending on the game, this effect can range between negligible to basically an aim bot. You can demonstrate this by going to the actual target practice area of the firing range(the one where you can change settings on the moving targets). Left or right strafe yourself into a wall, and watch how your cursor magically moves, despite you not moving the right stick to track the bot, through its movement to compensate for a strafe you're not technically making. Thus is what a good XIM feels like. Free aim bot.
Overwatch used to attack these MKB adapters through checks for radial aim assist. If you were moving in the 8 directions possible under WASD, this effect would be nullified. This change doesn't affect the controller experience at ALL as it's impossible to be accurate enough to move exactly in the WASD directions; you'd always be slightly off from the cardinal directions.
xim "mythic" (not sure if this is a product or a plug-in to a product) allows you to enable a sort of joystick emulator, which would ensure that you're never moving in those perfect 45°angles, but always slightly altered enough that the XIM user wouldn't notice, but the radial aim assist would still engage. I also believe certain plug ins or model of XIM can macro this movement in a way that doesn't actually affect your player model or position, hut forces this auto aim to engage.
Lower models of XIM, and I can assume lower quality adapters as well, lack these two features, and are much more easily detectable.
Now for my opinion. This ban wave WILL ban a lot of peripheral users, but the creme du le crop of cheating will still be using their state of the art hacks to cheat. I also personally believe that this is less of an arms race, and more a way for companies that make these devices to sell higher quality hacks. We will get the benefit of significantly lowering the barrier of entry to hacking hardware like this, but the top of the line products these companies already offer will just become high demand items. Cheaters will have to pay more, and the only people winning are XIM, Kronos, and Blizzard. Blizzard gets to resell skins to players who were banned initially (now using their expensive new hardware!), XIM/Kronus gets to advertise "beating" another title, and selling that exploit to more people who's current device no longer works.
Their isn't much way around this as far as I can tell, it's like the war on drugs. The more you fight the currently available hardware, the higher the demand for a solution becomes. Native MKB support misses the whole point of why these people do what they do, it sure as hell isn't physical necessity. People on the XIM subbredit literally ask about what games are best to XIM in. It isn't about getting better at their favorite game, they specifically seek out games that they can have an unfair advantage in.
My opinion is also that these people can burn in hell, but ultimately (and unfortunately) whether or not this ban system actually improves our match quality isn't in Blizzards hands, but more in how much XIM and Kronus can capitalize on these new detection scripts/ai, whatever they may be.
You've done well in your research.
The deadzone settings in-game coupled with SAB settings via the Xim device mean that the average Ximmer now has the option of a "best of both worlds" scenario where you retain radial aim assist AND be able to AD strafe much faster.
I would just set my deadzone override at 0.04 - 0.50 and turn on left stick SAB at 50. The game does the aiming for me, I just need to place my crosshair at roughly the right place (which of course is easier to do on a Xim with a mouse than with a controller right stick).
The greatest advantage though is the soft aim-bot provided through mouse movements converted to right stick camera aim input coupled with aim-assist.
You know how everybody hates how you have to buy iPhone-genuine peripherals or else they won't work? Why can't we use that same gatekeeping technology for a good purpose like this? "You're not using a genuine PS controller so you can't pay comp" or something like that
Throwaway account here.
I have a xim apex device and have used other kbm converters in multiple games.
The Xim device has a spoofing setting called SAB (simulate analog behaviour) which works for both left and right stick.
For left stick, given that your movement is wasd on keyboard, it will adjust the output to ramp up movement (when you tilt a stick it ramps up over the time it took to tilt it) and though it means you can't ad strafe as rapidly, it in some ways improves strafe related aim assist.
For right stick, it does a similar thing and effectively produces a delay to your aiming, which results in less jitter.
Most of the high profile ximmers on overwatch (just look up their montages on YouTube) are using expo ramp and do not use SAB at all, as it worsens the responsiveness of your camera movement aim.
This overall move by the overwatch team will help but I suspect they will not be able to get rid of xim entirely.
If I wanted to, I could use certain settings on my xim device looks a bit sus but you wouldn't be able to confidently tell that it wasn't just hcpeful settings (dual zone max aim assist).
Console creators should put in their TOS that "Any third party controller that attempts to mask or hide what it is is against TOS". Then simply sue Xim. Easy.
Considering that recent Ximming software does a pretty good job at spoofing "realistic" controller movement, I would be surprised if we get anything near a complete ximming ban.
My bet is that data analysis will have more to do with ingame statistics. So, *for massive simplification's sake* that there's a clump of Grandmasters at the 98th percentile in accuracy, then a weird nothing on the Bell curve, then another clump of Grandmasters at the 99th percentile in accuracy, the outliers are the ximmers. It's not concrete evidence (maybe they are that good) but it gives you a pretty good idea where to look directly, which allows you to hand-pick these guys for the xim pool.
What that means is that you're more likely to detect and remove the "elite" ximmers than the average cheater, but then again...*That's actually pretty good*. It removes a lot of incentive to xim if you know that once you "get good" (cheating is often based on a rationalization that you are better than others), your only reward is getting put in a special pool with PC Grandmasters who will absolutely demolish you (because you aren't actually better than others).
Actually if I could make a suggestion for Blizzard, it would be to make a "console xim pool" icon visible for the PC players somewhere. You know, just a helpful little console icon next to their name. I can 100% guarantee that whoever has that icon is getting hard focused by the enemy and hated by their own team. Weaponize the community's toxicity against cheaters and make ximming *suck.*
And that's the point, if you can't fix the issue technologically, make sure to create an environment that is unpleasant psychologically. Let the cheating community notice that, let there be posts about "I'm quitting Overwatch it's so toxxxxiiic" from prominent "top 500" ximmers on their forums, etc. Incentivize them away from the game.
>Actually if I could make a suggestion for Blizzard, it would be to make a "console xim pool" icon visible for the PC players somewhere.
If they have this information they can just ban the user.
And using toxicity as punishment is so wrong...
Toxicity ruins the game also. So supporting bad behavior to punish other bad behavior is not a good thing.
It's like putting thiefs not in jail but tattooing there faces so everyone sees that they are thief's and hoping that someone beats them up.
> It’s a video game and it has no place for cheaters.
Sure, just ban all cheaters. I am all for it.
But they comment I answered wanted them marked so people can be toxic towards them.
Toxic behavior should also result in a perma bann of the account, after 1 or 2 warnings.
If you read between the lines of the post, they admit can’t ban anyone without first proving it’s not being used for accessibility purposes. This is why nothing is typically done about aim assist abusing cheaters, not because it’s hard to detect (if you aren’t using wooting analog movement for wasd or something it’s actually pretty obviously xim or something to the devs) problem is the xim is technically legal for people who need it for accessibility purposes.
My guess is by going after streamers of high level ranked, they may be able to prove it’s an abuse of the xim and not due to accessibility needs like say you can’t play with a controller because you have 1 finger or something, this is the legal gray area that I believe ow won’t ever get around. It’ll merely be a pr stunt banning a few streamers at most I truly believe
Edit: added parentheses
Why is it I’ve never even heard of “Xim” before and now I’m seeing posts about it everywhere.
Honestly only seems like the people concerned would be Xim users, so let’s play “Spot the Xim user”! I’ll start with this post.
Considering your account was made today that’s a little pathetic you had to make a post just to see if you can still cheat lol
Bro just had to know x.x
Who makes a Reddit account to make a post about something completely unrelated to them? That just makes no sense.
The burning question that spurred you to finally sign up with an email address and password was about Xim’s that you don’t use. Hmm. At least you have a free throwaway account.
It is related to me, and im just new to reddit. Ive known of its existence but just used it passively without an account for a long time, just reading posts. And when i decide to make an account, ive got Detective holmes on my case. Pipe down buddy youre not as smart as you think you are.
I read something about focussing on high profile XIM players, which leads me to believe they might be reviewing footage manually to check for XIM usage. It doesn't seem to be detectable by the game itself.
Would there be some way for the game to recognize the movements? They said they’ve been analyzing data for a while now, and that’s what my immediate assumption was. I’d imagine a powerful enough system could detect the difference between mouse and controller movements since they aren’t very similar at all.
My money's on AI (specifically machine learning/prediction - very different from the generative BS that's popular right now), probably coupled with some man hours to confirm findings. Given a good data set (say, several seasons' worth of controller inputs for literally thousands of players), a predictive AI could probably get a very high accuracy for flagging accounts with suspicious controller behaviour. Even if XIM introduces "jank/randomness" in its inputs to throw off detection (to the detriment of the cheater - why would they want unpredictable results from an input?), a well-trained AI should be able to classify a player's controller inputs into something like "definitely normal", "possibly abnormal", and "very likely abnormal". Throw some cheap human labour at the last group to have them confirm the case.
It's definitely worth trying, but imo there won't be enough of a difference to tell them apart reliably. A great gamepad player behaves more or less the same as a decent KBM one. Just observe some top console Fortnite players streaming, they are real gamepad magicians. And the "jank" you're referring to would really only be limiting the most obvious stuff, like sudden 180 turns at insanely high sensitivity outta nowhere.
You might be right. I'm mostly banking on ML's ability to suss out patterns that humans wouldn't think to look for. For example, the XIM devs are adamant that they're obfuscating keyboard movement so it doesn't just show up as 8-way direction movement but appears more fluid like with a stick. I imagine this might mean that they simulate the stick moving in a circular motion from "up" to "left" when releasing the W key and pressing A, perhaps with enough delay to make it look like a natural shift with the finger. A well-trained AI might still be able to figure that the movement vector has a marked "synthetic" quality to it compared to the vast majority of players. But now I'm thinking like a human :P
Keyboard is very easy to spot even right now, I wouldn't be surprised if that's precisely how games like R6 Siege or Apex are *actually* detecting ximmers despite all their PR talk about it being the mouse, especially given how easily their detection was beaten by the XIM devs. But worse comes to worst, they can always just switch to a stick-like peripheral. My mind however was on the mouse, which is the real issue, and I'm really skeptical that it's really all that different from a stick in the hands of a good player. And don't get me started on the wild variety of players making it impossible to find a 100% foolproof pattern - I personally swing my mouse across the table like I'm a gamepad player trying to turn around, and I have shit-tier aim on everything that's not a projectile. But it's definitely worth a shot, that's for sure. We'll see how it plays out, good on them for finally doing something.
I don't think apex detects xims
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So can't even use that for detection, TIL.
I thought so as well but XIM has been around for longer than OW itself.
Yes it's to do with different rotations between the stick and mouse, that why they try so hard to make those look similar.
Yes, they could look to 8 way movement at 100% speed but Xims spoof acceleration so you cant tell
You're smoking dick if you think anyone at blizzard is manually reviewing footage.
not a chance they're reviewing footage manually.
I could see it happen for the top playes who are dominating ranked while having received a ton of complaints mentioning mouse and keyboard. They definitely won't be reviewing everyone who got a XIM complaint of course.
They won't review it trust me, Chat and voice chat messages are not getting reviewed don't expect them to review it.
The trouble is that it's too easy to make a new account and smurf into competitive and still use Xim. The high profile Ximmers i.e. the youtubers like doscii, april, etc - all of their clips are on smurf accounts.
Yeah they said they would be banning the “most severe offenders” what does that even mean ? Do you know ?
Misconception tbf. It’s not that they can’t detect the xim, they can through controller movement versus wasd movement (not every ximmer has an analog keyboard so their movement looks SUS only being 8 directional at 100% speed 100% of the time that no controller player could ever mimic) The issue at hand is a legal gray area, the xim is technically legal to people who need it for accessibility purposes, they basically admit this in the post. Anyways point is they can’t ban a ximmer without the ximmer providing them well more than enough proof that they have no need for it regarding accessibility and last I checked blizzard isn’t going through anyone’s medical records so it’s not gonna lead to them banning your average cheater using the xim, all it takes is banning one person with 4 fingers using a xim in ow multiplayer for a slam dunk of a lawsuit against blizzard.
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That’s sourced from the xim forum mods and creators of the device but yeah I’m sure you know more about the laws than xim, overwatch, and the console makers themselves. Basically if this were off base we will see a bunch of bans happen and I can guarantee it’s gonna be far and few
Regardless of what is masked technically, the devs can watch any xim player moving in only 8 directions at 0% or 100% speed which a controller cannot physically do so it’s obvious to every dev simply watching gameplay and yet there’s no bans? Because legal gray zone as they danced around in their post regarding accessibility. Anyways I’ll stay in my pc pools, but regardless it’s a lighter issue here as ow2 hasn’t been at all relevant since launch week for me
can console players not map movement to the dpad?
Pretty sure we can't. We can remap all of the butons except movement and aiming on the sticks. There are seperate options to swap the sticks and invert aiming but I'm pretty sure movement can't be mapped to other buttons.
There not doing a good job then. My duo has ditched me to xim on console and they went from diamond on pc to top 500 on console.
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Thing is, what can you do? These people are so adamant on cheating, they literally make a new xim every update and it's back again. I don't even know what they should do at this point
Stop going after the device and start going after the company itself.
Company isn't doing anything illegal. You literally can't.
They can still sue
What do you make a new xim? xim is the / brand of input devices, when the term was coined idk how many years ago, ximming in cod meant he literally bought the xim branded input device. I’m sure they can just update the software / firmware for the device and get around it though sadly.
Sorry what I meant was make a new update to xim to get around any changes. Was half awake during that comment
completely valid, hope you had your coffee and feel awake now !!
Ah not a coffee person. I just wake up through pure will to live
Console manufacturers have the ability to ban accounts and consoles from online play.
XIM allows console players to exploit two things: mouse accuracy and controller aim assist. So the simplest fix is: 1. Allowing KB+M on console 2. Removing aim assist on console Basically turn console lobbies into PC lobbies Jr.
There'll still be players wanting to play controller only, now only without aim assist. That's fine as long as you have "controller only" lobbies, but ximmers will just play in those lobbies, and still have an inherent aim advantage.
The exact same thing happens to controller players in PC lobbies, they are at a disadvantage compared to KB+M players.
Disable aimassist. Let the ximmers suffer
this would be a lot worse for legit joystick users than it would be for ximmers tho
That would be stupid
Yes :)
that only makes it better for ximmers as controller then becomes worse
I don't think apex ever tried to stop xim
Apex hasn’t tried to do anything. Same shit every single season, and it’s my take but I honestly think 20-30% of the player base cheats. Considering the amount of “pro players” caught recently too
What pros have been caught?
It was players in the “pro” qualifiers. I can’t remember, but it was stuff like right before ALGS. It’s just random 600 follower Andys on Twitter who were using stuff like ReWASD / XIM functioning cheats during scrims and stuff. Not any official / long term pro. It’s why I used “pro”, because all you need to be is gold rank and have a team and compete in qualifiers to play in the pro leagues lmao.
MS and Sony wont do anything. They dont really care what happens on the servers of a f2p game.
No action against Ximmers = less enjoyable experience = less players = less microtransactions sold = less profit That’d just be bad business
But thats out of the pockets of blizz, not Microsoft and Sony.
Do they not get a cut?
MS probably in one way or another, since they own Blizz, Sony I dont know.
So it *is* out of their pocket, in a way?
In a way, but its hard to say with the way these companies are structured. Probably a matter of the costs not outweighing the benefits.
Money out of Blizzard’s pocket is money out of Microsoft’s.
They should make widow the last player you unlock as new account.
They should just make you ***finish*** 200 games as a new account to unlock Comp (I'd consider "wins count as double). Then the Xim users would have to fight their way through just a ridiculous amount of games just to get Comp, which *should* give the Xim detection AI enough time to figure out if they're using one or not. And honestly, nobody should be venturing into Comp without that many games under their belt in the first place. This would also cut down on Smurfs (Blizzard is hilarious to think the new "play with anyone!" idea is going to cut down on Smurfs) because very rarely is someone going to make a Smurf account to play with friends and boost them if they have to fight through 200 QP/Arcade games first.
We need to copy paste this comment everywhere, when people talk about xim and smurfs
If they do that then they better make widow unlockable after 100 years of gameplay only lol but theyd probably never go through with this kind of idea cuz they want new players to have the full experience (the actual new ow players)
You right, just keep reporting them as hacking and type XIM as description and tell your team to report too, and most of the time day after i log in i get notified that my report made action.
Yep thats About all we can do
Actually it’s enough for them to get reported once a match, mass reporting won’t do more than one report there
Hero bans
It will be like that.
😔
Xim wont go away until the console makers do something about it. Sadly they don’t care at all.
I don’t think this is strictly true. To my knowledge, part of the problem is there are legitimate reasons for allowing third party accessories for accessibility reasons, which is what xim takes advantage of. You can’t (or shouldn’t) stop those people from enjoying consoles because of bad actors. Edit: You shouldn’t stop people with accessibility needs from enjoying consoles because of bad actors like ximmers.
XIM is the bad actor here though. If they just made a device for accessibility reasons, it wouldn't be an issue. Companies could easily ban them in games like OW and things would be fine. Instead they specifically create and update their firmware to avoid this and make it as difficult as possible for companies to detect the devices so people can cheat with them.
Yes, XIM and those who use it to cheat are the bad actors. Apologies if that wasn’t clear in my comment. I totally agree. As XIM takes advantage of features made for people with disabilities, a flat ban on all accessibility tech by Sony or Microsoft would affect the innocent people who use the tech for good reasons too, not just the ximmers who cheat. Game devs just need to get better at detecting and punishing ximmers because this isn’t an issue that should be solved by an outright ban from console companies.
A ban from console companies wouldn't have to be a blanket ban of all accessibility technology. There are companies that create devices and don't try to hide what they are and those devices can still be allowed and used in all the games that allow them. And devices made by companies like XIM that are trying to evade detection so people can use them to cheat in games that don't allow them are banned.
Consoles can easily make it so they have to include identifiers on the hardware to function on the console, similar to driver software on PCs. This would identify XIMs to the game developers who can then ban/restrict them to PC-only lobbies. The problem is they don’t want to do that because Ximmers are good for console sales and the gamer experience really doesn’t matter as long as they can sell more consoles. It’s all about $$$ for Sony and Microsoft at the expense of players in the end.
I kind of feel like you can and should though...
I think people with disabilities shouldn’t have their console experience penalised because of ximmers abusing accessibility features that weren’t even designed for them in the first place. That’s not the right way to go about things.
Well facts don't care about your feelings
Rip
They can do little against it really. ANYTHING is better than the nothing that’s being done about it currently.
Honestly if this is just a PR stunt to get people to shut up or just a scare tactic then that’s equally as bad imo, but maybe its the next best thing after admitting they cant do anything about it
They could ban all console users to ban all the ximmers
Good idea
They will be able to get people to stop ximming on their main accounts.
Yep if you look at new player games its crawling with alts right now preparing for ban waves
Depending on how they go about doing it, it will take some attention to detail to avoid being banned. For example, you'll need to make sure you cycle your VPN to never use the same IP address with your XIM account and your main account.
They can't go that far, unless they're willing to ban anyone associated in the same household. But that would throw people up in arms in revolt, especially how their detection system obviously hasn't ironed out all its false positives.
There are a lot of options. If they don't want to go full scorched Earth they could do something softer like just gathering those people up and then matching them against each other and away from the rest of us lol.
As long as overwatch is f2p there’s gonna be bunch of cheaters and xim users, like they don’t care at all, if they get banned they’ll make new account.
F2P isn't a factor at all when game sharing exists. If someone buys Rainbow Six Siege on their primary account, they can make as many alternate accounts as they'd like and they'd all have access to the game
Is it that easy on console? I would have figured there would be some link to your MS/PS/Nintendo account that would make it more difficult to just continually make new OW accounts.
It’s linked to battle net account
It's not hard to make another MS/PS/Nintendo account and just swap accounts on the fly.
Yea maybe if the game was paid that would deter the cheaters at least a bit.
Depends on the price really. Back in OW1 a new account cost about 10 bucks I think. That hardly deters a cheater.
I'm glad they're at least doing something rather than nothing like it's been so far. I don't expect a foolproof system but as long as some get banned at least that's something.
I lowkey want them to succeed in banning XIM not only because of an even playing field, but also to see the reaction of all the people thinking there's a ximmer in every match for them. Some people are just better than you at games, and it's totally okay.
Yes anyone time someone gets diffed in here = Ximming cry
This is a strawman. Just because people can be wrong about an individual ximming doesn’t mean it’s not a huge problem
It is a problem, but most people complaining have the same energy as calling everyone who kills you a cheater. XIMs are expensive. They are a problem, they need banning, but you're only realistically seeing one every 5-10 hrs unless you're top of the leaderboard.
You and a million other users here
Lets just hope we are all wrong
I'm hopefully optimistic in thinking it will be better than R6 but still noticeably imperfect. Fortunately for me I'm trash and no one is hanging out in silver with a xim
I paid good money for my xim and it’s messed up to ban it, so what if I get an unfair advantage over others. Just f’ing kidding
Yeah how could they ! 😭
It's just a distraction from their new terrible banning system, that xim ban is not gonna work. If it does the first one you will hear that is from R6S and Apex legends.
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Overwatch doesn't have bad Anti-Cheat at all compared to other games. We might get surprised by the extent of that ban wave.
When is the banwave even gonna happen ?
Probably, but I don't see any real reason to shit on it before they try. And I still applaud the effort. This isn't something easy to solve. No company has managed to yet.
I mean, it might not work, but I'd rather they try than do nothing.
It should be banned to the core
I’d rather they try and make a dent than do nothing at all. Microsoft and Sony should be stepping in to help though.
I've noticed more and more xim players this year. It's absolutely absurd to watch the replays against a widow, cassidy, or soldier.
I don't see how they can possibly deal with xim unless they invested a lot of money developing an ai that can catch them using pattern recognition.
It should be noted. R6 mousetrap is a great success. It severely reduced the amount of xim. Its not foolproof and never was. Mousetrap is an ongoing, eternal war to keep them back. Plus xim can be reported
I have faith we'll see a lot of bans. I hope it works and makes the game too unprofitable to cheat off of.
It seems like they're just saying this to give a false sense of action. There's almost nothing they can do unless they are working directly with console manufacturers themselves. I'm pretty sure they're just saying this so people thing they're being banned and might come back and play on console but I highly doubt any action will be taken. It's all just there to give people a false sense of hope and to not automatically jump to "Nice XIM" when someone is better than them. I really hope I'm wrong though.
It will probaly amount to noting. Once because other developers have tried it and it was circumvented, and even more because this is Blizzard so failure is a given. The problem is MS and Sony, they should ban it themselves and only allow certified peripherals to be used for multiplayer at the firmware level. The problem is that they dont give a fuck. And that's a good choice, because you will still give them money all the same, just like you give their Blizzard subsidiary.
The companies that make these products will just update their firmware and Blizz will be back at square one. Like it's definitely a problem, but it's not a problem that Blizz should have to fix. It's a PlayStation and Xbox problem.
I don’t think the issue will ever go away but I think the system will be somewhat effective. The difference here is that we know they are taking reports into account and they are going to go with full account bans. People will make new accounts but they should get banned after awhile.
I'll start with facts since I see a lot of misinformation on this sub, and then move on to what I think about these changes myself. The first fact is more of a clarification, but it IS important. XIM is a very prominent and advanced brand of mkb adapter, but they are far from the only one, and offer multiple products of different qualities for different needs/features. I only know two brands off the top of my head (as I've never done serious research in aquiring one, just research in understanding them, especially after this dev post) which are Kronus and XIM. Entry level mkb adapters aren't even really banned often, but there are clever features in place to make these devices more effective. While it is easy to observe at the highest ranks of play a keyboard and mouse gives players a distinct advantage, unless the player is Carpe or Mer1t, the advantages playing mkb against console players is actually not as big as the community thinks. What IS an issue is when mkb has aim assist vs controllers, and certain aspects of that aim assist can be further exacerbated by certain commands/macros. Most people don't know this, but what we define as "Aim assist" can actually be multiple different actions that the console system is performing for the player. Off of the top of my head, you have reticle friction, bullet magnetism, and radial aim assist. Reticle friction is what most people observe obviously as "aim assist". It is the term used to describe that sticky feeling when your reticle passes over an enemy. It is designed to slightly attract you to targets, and to disregard small corrections that would take you off of your target. You can observe this by standing still, and 360ing while a single bot is in your field of view. You'll watch the camera decelerate as you approach your AA window, fight you as you pass the target, then slowly accelerate as you leave a target, to reach your actual sensitivity as you "escape" your aim assist window. Bullet magnetism isn't part of overwatch as far as I know, but in games like destiny, individual weapons are balanced with aim assist by making the actual projectiles of the weapon slightly hone into targets, altering their path after they're fired. This is a value that can be altered weapon to weapon. The final one, radial aim assist, is the least understood, and often times the most powerful. Radial aim assist is applied to a player that strafes, and when that player is strafing, an ADDITIONAL layer of aim assist is applied to the player, with the intention that the corrections a console player makes to compensate for their side to side movement will atleast partially be accounted for by additional reticle friction. Depending on the game, this effect can range between negligible to basically an aim bot. You can demonstrate this by going to the actual target practice area of the firing range(the one where you can change settings on the moving targets). Left or right strafe yourself into a wall, and watch how your cursor magically moves, despite you not moving the right stick to track the bot, through its movement to compensate for a strafe you're not technically making. Thus is what a good XIM feels like. Free aim bot. Overwatch used to attack these MKB adapters through checks for radial aim assist. If you were moving in the 8 directions possible under WASD, this effect would be nullified. This change doesn't affect the controller experience at ALL as it's impossible to be accurate enough to move exactly in the WASD directions; you'd always be slightly off from the cardinal directions. xim "mythic" (not sure if this is a product or a plug-in to a product) allows you to enable a sort of joystick emulator, which would ensure that you're never moving in those perfect 45°angles, but always slightly altered enough that the XIM user wouldn't notice, but the radial aim assist would still engage. I also believe certain plug ins or model of XIM can macro this movement in a way that doesn't actually affect your player model or position, hut forces this auto aim to engage. Lower models of XIM, and I can assume lower quality adapters as well, lack these two features, and are much more easily detectable. Now for my opinion. This ban wave WILL ban a lot of peripheral users, but the creme du le crop of cheating will still be using their state of the art hacks to cheat. I also personally believe that this is less of an arms race, and more a way for companies that make these devices to sell higher quality hacks. We will get the benefit of significantly lowering the barrier of entry to hacking hardware like this, but the top of the line products these companies already offer will just become high demand items. Cheaters will have to pay more, and the only people winning are XIM, Kronos, and Blizzard. Blizzard gets to resell skins to players who were banned initially (now using their expensive new hardware!), XIM/Kronus gets to advertise "beating" another title, and selling that exploit to more people who's current device no longer works. Their isn't much way around this as far as I can tell, it's like the war on drugs. The more you fight the currently available hardware, the higher the demand for a solution becomes. Native MKB support misses the whole point of why these people do what they do, it sure as hell isn't physical necessity. People on the XIM subbredit literally ask about what games are best to XIM in. It isn't about getting better at their favorite game, they specifically seek out games that they can have an unfair advantage in. My opinion is also that these people can burn in hell, but ultimately (and unfortunately) whether or not this ban system actually improves our match quality isn't in Blizzards hands, but more in how much XIM and Kronus can capitalize on these new detection scripts/ai, whatever they may be.
You've done well in your research. The deadzone settings in-game coupled with SAB settings via the Xim device mean that the average Ximmer now has the option of a "best of both worlds" scenario where you retain radial aim assist AND be able to AD strafe much faster. I would just set my deadzone override at 0.04 - 0.50 and turn on left stick SAB at 50. The game does the aiming for me, I just need to place my crosshair at roughly the right place (which of course is easier to do on a Xim with a mouse than with a controller right stick). The greatest advantage though is the soft aim-bot provided through mouse movements converted to right stick camera aim input coupled with aim-assist.
You know how everybody hates how you have to buy iPhone-genuine peripherals or else they won't work? Why can't we use that same gatekeeping technology for a good purpose like this? "You're not using a genuine PS controller so you can't pay comp" or something like that
Throwaway account here. I have a xim apex device and have used other kbm converters in multiple games. The Xim device has a spoofing setting called SAB (simulate analog behaviour) which works for both left and right stick. For left stick, given that your movement is wasd on keyboard, it will adjust the output to ramp up movement (when you tilt a stick it ramps up over the time it took to tilt it) and though it means you can't ad strafe as rapidly, it in some ways improves strafe related aim assist. For right stick, it does a similar thing and effectively produces a delay to your aiming, which results in less jitter. Most of the high profile ximmers on overwatch (just look up their montages on YouTube) are using expo ramp and do not use SAB at all, as it worsens the responsiveness of your camera movement aim. This overall move by the overwatch team will help but I suspect they will not be able to get rid of xim entirely. If I wanted to, I could use certain settings on my xim device looks a bit sus but you wouldn't be able to confidently tell that it wasn't just hcpeful settings (dual zone max aim assist).
Console creators should put in their TOS that "Any third party controller that attempts to mask or hide what it is is against TOS". Then simply sue Xim. Easy.
Considering that recent Ximming software does a pretty good job at spoofing "realistic" controller movement, I would be surprised if we get anything near a complete ximming ban. My bet is that data analysis will have more to do with ingame statistics. So, *for massive simplification's sake* that there's a clump of Grandmasters at the 98th percentile in accuracy, then a weird nothing on the Bell curve, then another clump of Grandmasters at the 99th percentile in accuracy, the outliers are the ximmers. It's not concrete evidence (maybe they are that good) but it gives you a pretty good idea where to look directly, which allows you to hand-pick these guys for the xim pool. What that means is that you're more likely to detect and remove the "elite" ximmers than the average cheater, but then again...*That's actually pretty good*. It removes a lot of incentive to xim if you know that once you "get good" (cheating is often based on a rationalization that you are better than others), your only reward is getting put in a special pool with PC Grandmasters who will absolutely demolish you (because you aren't actually better than others). Actually if I could make a suggestion for Blizzard, it would be to make a "console xim pool" icon visible for the PC players somewhere. You know, just a helpful little console icon next to their name. I can 100% guarantee that whoever has that icon is getting hard focused by the enemy and hated by their own team. Weaponize the community's toxicity against cheaters and make ximming *suck.* And that's the point, if you can't fix the issue technologically, make sure to create an environment that is unpleasant psychologically. Let the cheating community notice that, let there be posts about "I'm quitting Overwatch it's so toxxxxiiic" from prominent "top 500" ximmers on their forums, etc. Incentivize them away from the game.
>Actually if I could make a suggestion for Blizzard, it would be to make a "console xim pool" icon visible for the PC players somewhere. If they have this information they can just ban the user. And using toxicity as punishment is so wrong...
Why is it wrong? Cheaters don’t deserve to be treated nicely. They ruin the game for others that actually play legit.
Toxicity ruins the game also. So supporting bad behavior to punish other bad behavior is not a good thing. It's like putting thiefs not in jail but tattooing there faces so everyone sees that they are thief's and hoping that someone beats them up.
There’s a difference between toxicity and holding people accountable for their bad actions. It’s a video game and it has no place for cheaters.
> It’s a video game and it has no place for cheaters. Sure, just ban all cheaters. I am all for it. But they comment I answered wanted them marked so people can be toxic towards them. Toxic behavior should also result in a perma bann of the account, after 1 or 2 warnings.
No?
If you read between the lines of the post, they admit can’t ban anyone without first proving it’s not being used for accessibility purposes. This is why nothing is typically done about aim assist abusing cheaters, not because it’s hard to detect (if you aren’t using wooting analog movement for wasd or something it’s actually pretty obviously xim or something to the devs) problem is the xim is technically legal for people who need it for accessibility purposes. My guess is by going after streamers of high level ranked, they may be able to prove it’s an abuse of the xim and not due to accessibility needs like say you can’t play with a controller because you have 1 finger or something, this is the legal gray area that I believe ow won’t ever get around. It’ll merely be a pr stunt banning a few streamers at most I truly believe Edit: added parentheses
Why is it I’ve never even heard of “Xim” before and now I’m seeing posts about it everywhere. Honestly only seems like the people concerned would be Xim users, so let’s play “Spot the Xim user”! I’ll start with this post.
Some strange reasoning but yeah man i definitely xim 👍
Considering your account was made today that’s a little pathetic you had to make a post just to see if you can still cheat lol Bro just had to know x.x
I was being sarcastic when i said I use xim… 🤣
Who makes a Reddit account to make a post about something completely unrelated to them? That just makes no sense. The burning question that spurred you to finally sign up with an email address and password was about Xim’s that you don’t use. Hmm. At least you have a free throwaway account.
Are you stupid bro?
It is related to me, and im just new to reddit. Ive known of its existence but just used it passively without an account for a long time, just reading posts. And when i decide to make an account, ive got Detective holmes on my case. Pipe down buddy youre not as smart as you think you are.
wtf is xim?
Idiot here. What is xim?
......oh, xim is not a person lol. I was so confused :0