Cheating might win you a game, but it won’t win you any friends. In this case, the red-handed dickhead didn’t get either.




Overwatch player SixZoSeven recounted a recent incident in which their competitive mode team picked up somebody pretty obviously using an aimbot, a type of cheat that aims for you, as opposed to an AOL Instant Messenger novelty from the early 2000's. Normally, players would grit their teeth and bear it, but this time, both teams decided they weren’t gonna have any of the cheater’s shit. SixZoSeven explained in a post on Reddit:

“Immediately upon joining the game, people from both teams instantly call out a player on my team for being a blatant aimbotter over the course of multiple games throughout the morning. Someone from our team, despite having the cheater, threw out the idea of going for a draw. Sure enough, it was agreed upon that a draw would only be fair. Both teams just ran around doing silly things. Of course we did have to mitigate any shenanigans from the cheater, since he was still trying to go for eliminations.”


The cheater tried to capture a point for the first half of the game, but repeatedly came up against Reinhardt shields, D.Va defense matrixes, and you know, two whole teams cooperating to make their life difficult. “The cheater didn’t appear to be fluent in English, but would type in chat things along the lines of ‘im just pro-gamer’ or ‘WOW NO DRAW,’” SixZoSeven explained to me via DMs. Eventually, they switched to Torbjorn and just sat around until the match ended. As far as SixZoSeven is concerned, that was an admission of defeat.

Names censored by SixZoSeven to protect people’s identities and whatnot.

Both teams went on to report the cheater, but apparently they haven’t been banned yet. SixZoSeven is in the process of filing a more comprehensive complaint that’ll hopefully be the nail in this cheater’s coffin.



The bigger lesson in their eyes, however, is that it’s possible to clean up Overwatch from within and without. “I find it very interesting that us players were able to invent our own system of combating the cheaters,” SixZoSeven told me. “Blizzard’s job is to ban the cheaters, while ours was to maintain the integrity of our skill ratings! And to report cheaters, of course.”


SixZoSeven thinks Blizzard has the right idea in taking a hardline, hardware-ban-heavy stance on cheating, but there’s always room for improvement.


“I think Blizzard should definitely consider the idea of expanding their anti-hack/cheat/exploit team,” they said. “Automated systems are nice, but the addition of human hands to assist in tricky situations/reports would be extremely helpful as well. I used to be an Admin at the first and largest Minecraft Survival Games community, where I was responsible for handling tens of thousands of rule-breakers and cheaters.”



“In addition to this, I feel Blizzard has an advantage in anti-cheat solutions given their use of a custom-built game engine, rather than using the Source engine like in Counter-Strike or other popular game engines such as Unreal Engine or Unity,” they added. “Although I don’t know specifics of their situation, surely this has a possibility of being advantageous.”


Ultimately, though, SixZoSeven’s takeaway from all of this is a positive one. “The takeaway here isn’t so much that cheaters exist,” they said at the conclusion of their post, “but the fact that we as players can take steps to mitigate the damage they cause. After all, Overwatch is, without a doubt, a game of teamwork!”

