Originally Posted by
Vehl
To be honest i always find everything in this game takes bigger proportion than it should. Cheaters, sure, we've all seen our share. But the proportion of cheater is relatively low. And in all honesty far less game breaking than in other PvP games, say FPS where one guy can just anihilate the whole match.
During the first couple of years there was a lot of hacking accusation. But mechanics were so badly understood that it was just noise and suspicion. These last few years population has grown scarcer, but the tools at hand to spot cheaters aswell as a perfect understanding of game mechanics has spread. Making substantial a disease that has most likely always been there in a relatively similar amount.
Having cornered a few cheaters, on tape, makes cheating more 'real' and thus suspicions turn into often misplaced certitudes. Paranoïa spreads and has an actually worse effect than the few asshats using hacks.
I doubt anyone in their right mind would deny there is the possibility of encountering cheaters when playing an online video game. So what i'm saying is not, "NO ! AOC is cheater free !" it's just "don't spread mass hysteria".
As for funcom doing nothing, whether they do something about it or not they made the choice not to communicate about it. Maybe not the best option... who doesn't like a good public flogging aye ? Yet it makes sense. I doubt it's ever good publicity to acknowledge publicly you have a hacking issue. It would mean it's 'That' important it needs to be mentionned.
I'm usually an optimistic bloke but on this matter i'll settle for pragmatism. Given it's fairly unlikely to have an online hack free game, it's normal to have a few cheaters. I don't find AOC's cheater proportion to have increased that much during the years, nor to be at an unacceptable rate.
Therefore either Funcom is actually doing something about it (and it doesn't necessarly mean banning people, it can also mean fixing flaws/breaches to make hack programmes less likely to work), either the proportion of players likely to use cheats is stable. Either way, the few constant hackers make more noise than they should.