Top level player allegedly maphacking in CoH2

The only question here is how accurate the replay is.

A_E presented evidence that there is no difference in the fog of war between players, showing a game I played vs him, me in Greece and him in the UK, with a side by side comparison of the fog of war. You can see him show it in his latest video update on youtube.

Dude, seeking on twitch reviewed the clip and he himself said he wasn't going to fire at the 2 AT guns and he knew there was a blob around the area he was looking at. Feel free to go look up the stream and see for yourself.

I saw some of Seekings stream. I dont recall this clip in particular. But I also dont believe anyone could possibly remember these details in a rando game they played days or weeks ago. I played several games today and dont remember dick about most of them.

I am not trying to defend anyone. I am trying to learn and point out things people may be missing.

This whole topic is very important to RELIC AND THEY SHOULD BE READING IT TO LEARN WHAT CAN BE DONE IN FUTURE GAMES <hint><hint>


My point about the katy rotating is that without Seeking saying a word, we have no idea what happened here. Because we dont have sufficient data in the form of issued commands.

SO TO MAKE RELICS LIFE EASIER IN THE FUTURE THEY MAY WANT TO THINK ABOUT THAT AND ADDRESS IT. <hint><hint>

Regardless, you're grasping at straws. The Katy was commanded to fire before the 1st unit of the blob was spotted, that cannot be denied in any way shape or form. If you want to argue about this clip, start by addressing that point.

I just did, the katy could have been fired way before there was any hint the units may even go there.

Ah I thought it was because of the il2 overhead, I see the timing of it now actually. Not sure how he saw that blob incoming then

I had a nice and long discord call with seeking the other day about the whole case, and it was pretty insightful. However I can say my opinion didn't change much yet and I still lean towards the maphack verdict.

The biggest problem for me are still all the clips where it was argued "it happened on the edge of FoW, and FoW is badly synced in replays". Those are the katyusha clip, the volks sandbag vs pathfinder clip and the assgren sprint clip mainly.

In all of them, Seeking repeatedly said (even on stream), that he reacted that way because he saw the units. Which is kind of 100% debunked at this point as others mentioned... on top of the fact that there is still 0 proof yet that fog of war is poorly synced in a replay.

Btw have you seen A_E's follow up video from friday? I hate to say it but even if seeking would be innocent: his link to Deadbolt might punish him hard as well. He admitted that he played a lot of matches on that account, which now might be exposed as 100% maphack account.

I hadn't really noticed this clip before. But honestly, assuming replays are in sync enough to reliably represent the actual match (I have no idea if they are), then this single katy barrage is absolutely proof of a maphack. In the clip he clearly puts down the barrage order before seeing the infantry or at the very least in the same frame as a single Gren model appears, and there is nothing that can minimap spot in their arsenal.

The only question here is how accurate the replay is.

I'm not saying he's not hacking. But you have to consider confirmation bias. If there are enough instances of a katy firing you will get these insanely lucky moments. What really makes me think it's a maphack is that seeking claims that he saw the blob which is impossible.

I just did, the katy could have been fired way before there was any hint the units may even go there.

The only thing that could make this not map hacking is if he had just a wild guess the blob was coming, and fired randomly at the road, at just the right time, and just happened to get so lucky it hit right 100% accurately on the blob with absolutely perfect timing. Just out of sheer luck.

Except he now claims he saw the gren model first and aimed at it on purpose, which means it wasn't a lucky YOLO shot into the dark. There is absolutely no way he could have lined up that shot without maphacks showing him the position of the blob.

If there are enough instances of a katy firing you will get these insanely lucky moments

Fair enough, I do agree with confirmation bias being a real possibility and that was my initial stance too. But as I also said before, these moments simply seem to happen too frequently to be sheer luck anymore. And this wasn't aimed at a particular hotspot either, unlike for example the Brummbar on AoD firing into a chokepoint area that was the only place to put ATGs. It's especially damning when he now claims that he saw the Grens when this couldn't have been the case based on the video (again though, based on the assumption that the replay is accurate).

The biggest problem for me are still all the clips where it was argued "it happened on the edge of FoW, and FoW is badly synced in replays". Those are the katyusha clip, the volks sandbag vs pathfinder clip and the assgren sprint clip mainly.

Most likely the maphack used by Seeking and Deadbolt removes FOW so the hacker has to guess when units would appear on his screen if the game wasn't hacked. Seeking is obviously good at this and wanted to make his play look unsuspicious by not pre-firing the Katjusha barrage but was a second too early in this instance.

This is the only explanation that makes sense as the theory that replay and live game FOW are out of sync has been debunked already.

And then there are also the many many suspicious sniper plays on Wolheze, Eindhoven and Rails that have nothing to with the edge of the FOW. Not even talking about the AT-gun chase on Elst and the Brummbär on AOD which can just be random/game-sense.

I had a nice and long discord call with seeking the other day about the whole case, and it was pretty insightful. However I can say my opinion didn't change much yet and I still lean towards the maphack verdict.

The biggest problem for me are still all the clips where it was argued "it happened on the edge of FoW, and FoW is badly synced in replays". Those are the katyusha clip, the volks sandbag vs pathfinder clip and the assgren sprint clip mainly.

In all of them, Seeking repeatedly said (even on stream), that he reacted that way because he saw the units. Which is kind of 100% debunked at this point as others mentioned... on top of the fact that there is still 0 proof yet that fog of war is poorly synced in a replay.

Btw have you seen A_E's follow up video from friday? I hate to say it but even if seeking would be innocent: his link to Deadbolt might punish him hard as well. He admitted that he played a lot of matches on that account, which now might be exposed as 100% maphack account.

Yes I just saw it. Honestly I'm 60/40 on this now. On the one hand there's enough circumstantial evidence to make this serious, but on the other hand it could just be that timings were lucky for seeking (except for the katy and t70 instance)

Yes I just saw it. Honestly I'm 60/40 on this now. On the one hand there's enough circumstantial evidence to make this serious, but on the other hand it could just be that timings were lucky for seeking (except for the katy and t70 instance)

But then why is he not saying that it were merely the lucky timings? Why does he claim to have seen the units and reacted to them, which is objectively impossible?

That's what I don't get. He seems to be a proven liar as far as I can tell. 1. He's denying to have played on Deadbolt after the warning which is untrue. 2.The above mentioned claim about the vision.

In that katy clip u can see kimbo retreating his scot and jacksons too b4 the katy is shooting though. So i think it could be a legit play in this clip.

But then why is he not saying that it were merely the lucky timings? Why does he claim to have seen the units and reacted to them, which is objectively impossible?

That's what I don't get. He seems to be a proven liar as far as I can tell. 1. He's denying to have played on Deadbolt after the warning which is untrue. 2.The above mentioned claim about the vision.

"I saw them" would normally be a better excuse than "I got lucky lmao". The fact that he apparently couldn't have seen means he seems to have shot himself in the foot, though, and perhaps exposed that he likely was being a bit of a naughty boy.

In that katy clip u can see kimbo retreating his scot and jacksons too b4 the katy is shooting though. So i think it could be a legit play in this clip.

The Scott was barraging the ATG that then retreated and the Jackson engaged the Puma that also retreated. It's normal to pull your tanks back a bit after an engagement, especially with a damaged tank and with no infantry or recon support. That I would consider lucky timing / good game sense / circumstantial. I don't think that has anything to do with Seeking putting down the barrage before / at the exact frame a single Gren model gets spotted though.

In terms of the katyusha firing, to me it seemed as though he was firing on the retreating volks. I will admit the t70 sniper clip was odd. Especially since he didn't finish repairing it.

This clip, I tell seeking to push rn there because i am decrewing pak and the sniper is there, if he retreat he is dead. I was actually streaming that game.

This clip, I tell seeking to push rn there because i am decrewing pak and the sniper is there, if he retreat he is dead. I was actually streaming that game.

Ah, thanks for the clarification

Since this whole thing started, I had to reinstall Coh2. You guys always drag me back in

Most of you can just look at the picture and skip the rest.

My main interest is can the FOW get out of sync.

To test this I have played games and recorded them in OBS to then be compared to the replay.
I have also played with people and compared replay to replay.

At this point it appears:
- REPLAYS will usually match up perfectly because it is probably the actual data received from the server. Just a guess of course. But they are extremely close.
- OBS vs Replay matches very close. This may depend on your server/network connections.

Out of the 10 times I have looked at OBS vs REPLAY I have only seen three that had weird things happen:
1) The FOW was out of sync for about 1 frame of video (33.3 mS). Not very bad.
2) A unit was not visible for about 1 frame of video.
3) An M20 at the edge of the FOW was visible in the OBS video but was not visible in the replay for about 3 frames of video (100mS)



Trying to find these things is a lot of work. First I make two recordings then match them to a frame when the game clock changes so they are perfectly in sync. And after a few minutes they tend to wander out of sync by a few frames. It is also a pain since you need to use FOLLOW CAMERA in order to see the same scene all the time.

THINGS OF NOTE:
1) Units, FOW, bullets, explosions, UI sprites, etc all appear to be very close between OBS and REPLAY.
2) Grass, dead bodies, etc are NOT similar at all.
3) The FOLLOW CAMERA position is in the wrong position about 10% of the time if you move it a lot.
4) In the video where the M20 was missing everything looked in sync. So it is not the whole system that gets out of sync and stays out. It was fine during and after the missing M20.


From all of this I guess what I have suspected all along:
1) The client sends data to the server. The client then starts to move units. When the server sends data back small changes are made to the units to get them in the right place. Since they do not move very fast the client should get several messages per second with position data.
2) The REPLAY is the data from the server. A weird thing that happens here is that the replay FOLLOW CAMERA is sometimes ahead of the OBS actual camera. Meaning data is out of sequence and Relic is stitching it together to be close to what it thinks happened.
3) How accurate is the actual game clock? Since videos tend to get out of sync, either the actual game clock or the video encoder is not perfect.

I also did some testing with the FOW:
1) In vCOH the FOW was not calculated all the time (for faster FPS most likely).
2) I ran a vehicle across a road to get max speed and recorded in OBS. The FOW appeared to only be calculated once every 5 frames of video (166mS) when in open areas. When the FOW hit sight blockers it appeared to be calculated almost every frame.
3) Open areas looked like the FOW was calced. Then recalced later. Three frames were then interpolated.
- 5 frames no change in FOW.
- 3 frames transition/interpolate/average to the new FOW.
- Repeat.

WHY DIDNT THE M20 SHOW UP:
1) I dont know.
2) Position was out of sync in replay.
3) To speed rendering Relic does not draw units at some distance. Did the CULLING code pull it out? The M20 was only partially drawn in its first visible frame. It is also important to note that the volks by the fuel were giving sight and were moving away from the M20. The M20 actually appeared then disappeared again as the volks moved away.

But then why is he not saying that it were merely the lucky timings? Why does he claim to have seen the units and reacted to them, which is objectively impossible?

That's what I don't get. He seems to be a proven liar as far as I can tell. 1. He's denying to have played on Deadbolt after the warning which is untrue. 2.The above mentioned claim about the vision.

It's not 100% proven yet. I've heard from some sources that he wasn't playing on deadbolt after the warning. I would wait until all the facts are presented before assuming everything is bad in his court. Obviously his case looks bad from the outside but I prefer to see all sides of the story first before making assumptions. We haven't heard everything from seeking yet about all of this besides the discord conversations he's already had with people. Some facts and contexts about events occurring, suspicions said, and clips shown are still missing or not 100% proven. I understand your point of view but until all the facts are on the table I'd wait before calling him a liar.

I'm just happy that deadbolt commit himself into the ditch when he start defend himself in my maphack replay of him or his clone (playing with Flap)

You guys said that Deadbolt is a " relative " with Seeking right? I don't know, I smell pitchfork lol

At this point any pro players will be free to use any non-blatant cheats. If I am the jury I would ban him to make an example but I would also consider this game is not really popular so no point banning big players right? It's a lose lose situation

At this point I think we should just wait for Seekings full defense, which I hope is being made public as well.

Regarding the FOV:
If this happens so frequently, it should be doable for him to replicate these setups and show that server lag/desynchronization allow him to see things earlier (plus react in time) than we would see in the replay.
If he can't, welp, he better have a damn good explanation for why he reacted that way.

snip

But all these delays should actually lead to a player reacting slower because he has less FOV than in the replay, shouldn't they? If your opponent send a unit forward, and the server relays this information to you at least half a second later, you will also see this unit half a second later.

The only way I can see this work in Seekings favor is if the opponent changes an order just at the edge of his FOV. So the information for Seeking would be that the unit is visible, until the server recalc and determines it is not a little bit later and corrects the position. But at this point Seeking often has already reacted with another squad, which is very suspicious.

So basically after originally casting doubt on the validity of using replays to spot map hacking, you are now closer to where the rest of us are, it is a very accurate tool for unit positioning and fog of war positioning. but has a very small margin of error that can be used in the defence of very marginal scenarios, and this margin has nothing to do with unit positioning or fog of war.

So at this point it doesn't look like it helps Seeking in the pathfinder, ass gren, katyusha clips specifically due to him reacting before the units are visible. Also it would be reasonable to suggest this margin of error is not enough of a defence when there are so many clips from so many replays?

Is that a fair assessment of your overall findings in the wider context?