Can / Do people cheat in AOE 2 online?

[Samtar]

I've seen a lot of posts about the cheating aspect of this game. I guess I'm more so wondering about how common it is. I really dont want to suggest my dad buy this game if he's just goin to run into the same problem he did ten years ago.
Is it possible and people do it? Because it's the reason my dad stopped playing the game about 10 years back. He wants to get back into it but is hesitant because of the cheaters.
I heard there's a mode where you can disable cheating online, but precise hackers can still hack through that... and there's the concept of being able to basically do no fog of war with recording. Back to my first question though. How often is it that people are cheating?

Thanks everyone,

Ess.

[Rusher]

Ok ... How about cheating with Cheat Engine? When I play in Single Player mode, i could change gold mine value from 800 to 9999999999 with Cheat Engline. Is Cheat Engine auto detected in MP? Because few days ago I play MP with some 4 guys and one of them was so ... all his gold mines near his town had (minus) -5000 gold, stone, wood and strawberrys. WTF Is he hack with Cheat Engine or had some stupid hack or nothing or wtf.

[Pantera]

there are no cheaters in this game......

[gagman]

Originally posted by The Rusher:

all his gold mines near his town had (minus) -5000 gold, stone, wood and strawberrys. WTF Is he hack with Cheat Engine or had some stupid hack or nothing or wtf.

sounds more like a custom map, i guess Cheat Engine would desync the game.

Originally posted by twitch.tv/eye32:

there are no cheaters in this game......

thats not true.

[Ashur_Arbaces]

Actual cheating ingame, almost nonexistent. Manually desyncing the game because someone can't stand that hes losing on the other hand happens from time to time (it's not always intentionally, sometimes it's just a bad connection or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ network code).
Rigged scenarios are also a problem sometimes but there you can just leave as soon as you think something is wrong without repercussions.

I would also advice to not allow ingame spectators since they can interfere with the actual game because of a few bugs.

[gagman]

if it was spectator and than closed that means normally that the host had kicked the spectator, most important question, do you have a recorded file of the game ?

[-Dare Devil/x/]

Originally posted by AL Ashur_LeVaar:

Actual cheating ingame, almost nonexistent. Manually desyncing the game because someone can't stand that hes losing on the other hand happens from time to time (it's not always intentionally, sometimes it's just a bad connection or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ network code).
Rigged scenarios are also a problem sometimes but there you can just leave as soon as you think something is wrong without repercussions.

I would also advice to not allow ingame spectators since they can interfere with the actual game because of a few bugs.

-We have a way to combat manual lag-switch desyncers.

[Ashur_Arbaces]

Originally posted by -Dare Devil/x/:

Originally posted by AL Ashur_LeVaar:

Actual cheating ingame, almost nonexistent. Manually desyncing the game because someone can't stand that hes losing on the other hand happens from time to time (it's not always intentionally, sometimes it's just a bad connection or the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ network code).
Rigged scenarios are also a problem sometimes but there you can just leave as soon as you think something is wrong without repercussions.

I would also advice to not allow ingame spectators since they can interfere with the actual game because of a few bugs.

-We have a way to combat manual lag-switch desyncers.

You mean the reporting thing or are you reffering to an actual way to combat it (like the macro one), cause incase of the latter it doens't always work (unless people found a miracle solution last month).

[Paracetamoule]

I have encountered a guy who (beside being a jerk and asking you to surrender even if i were in his team) use a hack to talk in the chat with your name. Therefore he was trolling other player with my username.

[SkyB]

Originally posted by BIG NOOB:

Kalavedet, one more thing your dad needs to know of is about drop-cheaters. They're not really hacking the game, instead they're exploiting bugs in the game's multiplayer network setup. By messing with their own connection in certain ways, they can force the game to desync. But since desyncing uploads the game files to the developers for analysis, this kind of drop-cheating is very uncommon. The more common one is forcing the game to freeze and end it with a disconnection, which leaves their Elo points unaffected. They use this to avoid losing Elo points when they are bound to lose a match. Overall, this is not very common anymore because the devs have released patches to deal with these issues. But it seems a few people always find a new loophole.

So damn true ! God, i hate that.

[Heisenberg]

Well, cheating by changing something in the game is impossible as it is peer to peer and therefore all clients/servers have to agree on what's going on. If a player suddenly declares to have more resources than necessary other clients won't agree on it.

Therefore the only cheating type that is possible is seeing information you're not supposed to see, like other player's resources, techs, and most importantly, line of sight. However, that kind of cheating results in obvious advantages and can be evident to other players who play the game.

I guess there's another way to cheat and that is to have the AI play for you partially or entirely? For good enough players this isn't really an issue as even the hardest AI is trash, but it's still worth mentioning.

Anyway, I'm not saying cheating is impossible, it is just extremely evident and can be seen in recordings.

I don't think you'll find any cheaters.

[NIKFS]

in my 300 Hours of HD i only encountered 2 "real" cheater, able to spawn in units everywhere on the map in a random game

but if you play custom scenarios (namely CBA) you encounter some that change the map andthus cheat but not via hacking tools

[Maitah]

keep in mind that internet is never safe, and there is might be cheaters, but for now.
there is no cheat got exposed or published, which lead us that cheaters are very rare to meet.
Anyway whenever u find someone suspecios , go watch the recorded game and if u found that he is really cheating, report him on the cheaters thread.

[Whakahoatanga]

A not so funny example of one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/5xuuga/we_found_a_hacker_i_didnt_even_know_there_were/

[Maitah]

Yup. that's what i was saying :P

[Duck Twacy]

Originally posted by Mike Dyson:

I've seen a lot of posts about the cheating aspect of this game. I guess I'm more so wondering about how common it is. I really dont want to suggest my dad buy this game if he's just goin to run into the same problem he did ten years ago.
Is it possible and people do it? Because it's the reason my dad stopped playing the game about 10 years back. He wants to get back into it but is hesitant because of the cheaters.
I heard there's a mode where you can disable cheating online, but precise hackers can still hack through that... and there's the concept of being able to basically do no fog of war with recording. Back to my first question though. How often is it that people are cheating?

Thanks everyone,

Ess.

Hakcing's made a resurgence. Just this morning I reported a couple of players. One trolled then quit, another nuked the connection to the other team giving us an instant win. Another player was using one of the Meso American civs, and was beating the crap out of my Japanese champions and Samurai. That's important because fully upgraded Japanese infantry are the toughest hand to hand units in the game because of their attack bonus, and hardly any of his hand to hand units were dying. Another guy sent a single vill to plant a castle next to my TC and wooders in less than a second.

And then there's the revenge for reporting it, which is to have that group of players troll your game by either stealing your sheep, mining your stone or gold early, or hunting your deer and boars early on, and then walling off your stuff.

The ultimate hacker revenge is to just quit early after the one minute mark because their friends are on the other team, and they want to give them a one player advantage. That, and they can game the ELO ranking system by hurting other ELOs to keep theirs relatively and artificially high as they move onto a regular game to win, again sometimes using hacks.

My circumstance is a little different, because my net activity is being run through a military server, but it's like every hack or trolled game I come across, I report. And this last weekend it's gotten way out of hand.

I've threatened to sue Steam if they don't crack down, and looked for a lawyer.

I've played Age of Empires and Age of Kingdoms for years, and prior to the last few years, the game was never so hacked or screwed with like it has been now, and here on Steam. I enjoy a good honest game, but unfortunately there are a group of people that Steam is aware of, that are making this game exceptionally hard to play and enjoy by way of Steam.

If trolls aren't quitting, then they're stealing or walling off your resources. If they aren't doing that, then they're hacking your game.

So, yeah, hacking's here. And even in "away" or "offline" or "invisible" mode, I've got hackers and trolls in more than half my games.