Ridiculous times in leaderboard

[danhanly]

I checked on the Gilded Cage leaderboard and the person at the top has done Silent Assassin, both targets in 30-odd seconds. How is that even possible? I assume they're using exploits, or is there just some really efficient method I've not seen before?

[[☭]-Soviet-Triumph-]

There's no anticheat in this game, people were using trainers from the day 2 or 3 from release.

[Mr_Faorry]

It's not unknown for the very top times to be cheated, but I was able to find a video of A Gilded Cage being done in 0:46 so there are definitely some insane people out there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4C5nTQ2zSbY

[Hardware]

~0:30 can be totally legit on The Gilded Cage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX0MfURfqPo

This insane run required 8 weeks of work and retry. I've been following him all these weeks on twitch. IO Interactive was impressed by this performance

[Hardware]

When I see this kind of thing :

https://youtu.be/ALOu79_qNVQ

https://youtu.be/6vpzFTanAtk

I'm telling to myself, even the impossible is possible in Hitman. It's just a matter of time and patience, most of the top legit records require days, even weeks of retry.

[The Gat]

It's a combination of cheaters and speedrunners

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by ☭-Soviet-Triumph-:

There's no anticheat in this game, people were using trainers from the day 2 or 3 from release.

The previous two games (Absolution and Hitman (2016)) had no anti-cheat at all. It was not uncommon to see impossible times such as 0 to 9 seconds on the leaderboards.

Hitman 2 (2018) actually has a very very tiny anticheat protocol built in; while it unfortunately will not completely ban a cheater from the leaderboards, it will reject any time below a certain specific threshold (each location is tuned to a specific minimum time that will be rejected).

So, in Hitman 2 (2018) you will no longer see 0 second completion times, it will reject the bulk of impossible scores below whatever timed amount the developers have set per location (this functions for both missions and contracts, so the timer is not a perfect evaluation of what the minimum time for completion is, just an abstract minimum based on developer testing/opinion)

They can be barred from appearing on that specific leaderboard though if their time is found to be cheated, but they could still appear in other leaderboards (unless they cheat there as well); but the restriction is on a per mission/contract basis and not game-wide.

Originally posted by Poloski:

It's a combination of cheaters and speedrunners

I can tell you that the majority of the fastest times that appear on the leaderboards are actually speedrunners or are cheaters that manipulated their times to attempt to mimic the world record times. So while it is still possible to cheat, only the cheaters who go out of their way to appear legit will now show up on the boards. Any that simply cheat to get an impossible time are removed because they are below the minimum time allowed to be displayed.

The system is not perfect, especially on contracts, but the majority of story missions have been tuned with the help of actual speed runners to eliminate 99% of the impossible times. Unfortunately anyone who cheats and gets a time similar to a legit speed runner will still appear in the list.

If you are curious what a real legit time should be, all the well known speed runners and actual world record holders record their best runs and can be found on youtube, most perform their best runs in front of an audience on twitch so that there are witnesses.

There's at least a dozen well known speedrunners that I keep track of and nearly all of them appear in the top 20, with at least some of them appearing somewhere between 1st and 5th place on every story mission with a legit time.

For anyone else in the top 20 that you can't find a matching video for, decide for yourself if they are legit (if you care) or if they actually went out of their way to mimic a realistic time.

The most popular method for cheating in the previous games was to freeze the clock, you can still boot up Hitman (2016) and see 0 second completions, the most well known cheaters from the past two games almost never appear in the leaderboards of Hitman 2 (2018) after the time restrictions were implemented (some of them appeared on the boards at launch, the time restrictions were added later and huge portions of the leaderboards were deleted without much fanfare, it just kind of happened one day without much public discussion over it)

The best part of the current anti-cheater system is that the person who records something like say a 0 second completion time will keep that 0 second time on their permanent record, it will always be their best time and it can never be shown. Simply playing the mission again will not give them a new time. So any cheater who ever gets an "impossible" score, will forever have that impossible score for their best time and nothing else they do on that mission will lower it to allow them to appear on the leaderboards.

So yes, there may be cheaters on the leaderboards, but they'll have to have known what the minimum time for display is, because if they ever go faster than what is allowed to show up on a specific location, they won't be able to get a worse score to get it to show up later as a slower time will not replace their fastest time, which can't be displayed.

-------------
As a side note there's a similar thing in place for reported contracts. If a contract is reported as containing rude/inappropriate content (racism, etc) in the description, or if the contract is reported to have been created using cheats (impossible combinations of requirements) the contract isn't actually deleted from the server, it simply becomes hidden from the public.

In this way, cheaters on the leaderboards see their own 0 second or whatever impossible score when they look at their own times, because it's the best they ever did; but the public will not see it, because times under a certain amount can not be displayed. And similarly players who created rude or impossible contracts will have them for their own personal play from their "my contracts" list, but the public is not going to see them again (once they have been reported enough to be removed from public listing)

It's basically a shadow-ban, the person banned isn't even notified and still sees their cheated score/contract and can't just remove it to put up something else while the public won't see it.

The only way a cheater or rude contract maker will even know they were shadow banned would be to log in from a second account and go looking for their cheated accounts content, which they won't be able to see.

[Chris]

Still today there are ridiculous times in the global rankings. Do they plan to remove all these cheaters from the leaderboards?

[Kunovega]

Originally posted by Chris:

Still today there are ridiculous times in the global rankings. Do they plan to remove all these cheaters from the leaderboards?

No, they've long since stopped caring about monitoring it

Still though the majority of times are legit, you might be surprised what is a legit time

From a quick glance through the main missions, there's only a few that are obvious cheats to me, these are cheaters that took the time to find the minimum amounts and tailor their times to be just above what the game will display

Just realize most missions can be done in under a minute, legit. If you look at all 3 games together there's one mission with a legit 6 second completion time.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by Kunovega:

Just realize most missions can be done in under a minute, legit. If you look at all 3 games together there's one mission with a legit 6 second completion time.

Jesus Christ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYeCMfpDJWU

[LagMan_PT]

Imo Leaderboards are useless in hitman, their only cool if you have other people on your steam friend list to compete with, for me its just fluff mostly, youre better off just checking legit players on youtube if youre into that sort of thing