My respond to the accusations

Hi everyone.

I know we've remained mostly quiet on this, as it's usually not our policy to comment on reports and account action, however given the circumstances here this feels necessary.

At this time, we can confirm that we have concluded our investigation and a ban has been issued to Seeking. We've recently brought in additional updates to our cheat detection system. With these in place we have reviewed historical match data and have instituted a ban wave for all accounts that were flagged as a result, including Seeking.

As a reminder, Relic has a zero tolerance policy for cheating in any form and their use will result in a permanent ban from all of our games. We appreciate the community's efforts to maintain the integrity of CoH2, but we would be remiss if we didn't add that we are a little disappointed to see how this has been handled by some of the community. We hope that moving forward we can rely on the whole community to handle report matters privately with Relic.

We now consider this matter to be closed.

How long will he be banned for?

How long will he be banned for?

Read again.
Any cheating (dropphack or maphack) lead to perma ban.

This is all news to me, and whilst happy to be proven right in this matter I truly think there are some community members that gave Sturmpanther and I undue criticism, stress, and they were ultimately wrong in doing so. We protected imminent community events the hard way and put our reputations on the line in doing so. Very upsetting to see the amount of distrust in us from a vocal minority after years of faithful service.

and..

but we would be remiss if we didn't add that we are a little disappointed to see how this has been handled by some of the community. We hope that moving forward we can rely on the whole community to handle report matters privately with Relic.

So given that there is little chance that this would have been retrospectively looked into and caught if it wasn't for the initial community investigation, (which only had to become public after we felt helpless with three cash events happening in a short space of time), we are now given more of a mention than the cheaters themselves? We should only be thanked!!!

I apologize for acting too quickly. After discussion with the parties involved in this matter it was a mistake to shut this discussion down before it could happen so I am now opening this thread again to properly discuss the recent developments in this case. Also this wasn't in any case driven by an order on behalf of Relic, it was my own decision to try and give this one a (too early) conclusion.

Please be aware that this will be heavily moderated, so please abstain from participating in this discussion if you are just here to go after someone involved in this matter.

Thank you!

Guilty

There are different skill levels of cheaters, pro cheaters make it very hard to know that they are cheating. Seeking for example never made it obvious that he was cheating. However even he messes up every now and then, as shown by aerafield's sniper video.

Just so this can be productive in banning future cheaters: Seeking never looked deep into fog of war. What he did was move his camera a little bit more to the edge than normal, just a tincy bit. A little weird when you look at it, but anyone including myself can overlook it.

He was very smart about it. Even though he'd see an MG42 through maphacks, he would still send a combat engineer towards it making it look like he's not maphacking.

It's specifically his sniper play that really gave it away: everybody wants to keep their sniper alive and kill the enemy sniper. So I think catch a cheater by his sniper play.

Also I was very convinced by Seeking in his stream that he wasn't cheating, so that totally took me by surprise and good to know for future purposes that a stream to show he doesn't cheat isn't enough.



Rewatch this again. Great techniques to hide cheating, but still some big mistakes.

Just so this can be productive in banning future cheaters: Seeking never looked deep into fog of war. What he did was move his camera a little bit more to the edge than normal, just a tincy bit. A little weird when you look at it, but anyone including myself can overlook it.

That`s what i said to my friend when discussing map cheaters on RTS games , anyone who is smart won`t keep camera deep on FOW, just keep it on the edge of your real field of vision(which would be a real skill really,since you are actually seeing everything/don`t know where your field actually ends), and it would not look the least bit suspect since you are just looking at where the action is, send some units to the front of a mg or equivalent in other games now and then like you said and all appears normal.

It feels good that in the end, justice has been served... it would have been a horrible feeling if all of this prehistory happened against an innocent person. I think the least people expected an anti-cheat update like this.


And I know this probably has been said a dozen times already, but we had to publish this case, nobody (probably not even Relic) expected such an update after the initial report got rejected due to "not enough compelling evidence". MasterLeague events were ahead, and many players were aware of the suspicions against seeking and said "There is no way I will play MasterLeague against a (potential) cheater". So not sure what Relic means if that jab above is aimed towards us here.

If seeking would have been banned from ML without any arguments & transparency, there would have been a huge outcry as well.

It feels good that in the end, justice has been served...

But has it really been served? Relic has not disclosed why they banned Seeking. May have nothing to do with any of the previous evidence/videos. For all we know he was running some app that they flagged as hacking like CheatEngine or something that may not be a cheat/hack at all for Coh2.

I for one would like to see lists of people banned and what they were banned for.

It fosters more reports. Right now you play with some toxic ass hat. Spend 2 hours putting together evidence and emailing it away. Never to be heard from again. Did the person get banned??? Why would I go thru all this effort the next time if I dont even know Relic is reading it.

Well, if they banned someone from past, present and future games then obviously they fucked up. Over Dawn of War, Coh1 & 2 I've had thousands of matches in 17 years and nothing has happened to me - anecdotal obviously but I've never done anything to get banned. If a wave of bans was instituted he wasn't the only one. As far as I can tell he was the only one who got a chance to publicly redeem himself and in the end the people who run the show gave him a first row seat to get the fuck out.

But has it really been served? Relic has not disclosed why they banned Seeking. May have nothing to do with any of the previous evidence/videos. For all we know he was running some app that they flagged as hacking like CheatEngine or something that may not be a cheat/hack at all for Coh2.

I for one would like to see lists of people banned and what they were banned for.

It fosters more reports. Right now you play with some toxic ass hat. Spend 2 hours putting together evidence and emailing it away. Never to be heard from again. Did the person get banned??? Why would I go thru all this effort the next time if I dont even know Relic is reading it.

Companies don't normally let people know why they were banned. It always seemed odd that there was any info available on COH2 bans. If it was some type of hack they don't usually want to say anything because that gives information to the hackers that can help them develop their next hack.

I do understand the frustration. I'm pretty sure I get drop-hacked 1-2 times a week. I don't bother turning in reports because I doubt they have a good way to detect drop hacks.

Well, if they banned someone from past, present and future games then obviously they fucked up. Over Dawn of War, Coh1 & 2 I've had thousands of matches in 17 years and nothing has happened to me - anecdotal obviously but I've never done anything to get banned. If a wave of bans was instituted he wasn't the only one. As far as I can tell he was the only one who got a chance to publicly redeem himself and in the end the people who run the show gave him a first row seat to get the fuck out.

Different times. Nowadays you get banned from a platform, not just a title.

We should only be thanked!!!

We've recently brought in additional updates to our cheat detection system.

Come on AE. We all know, you guys were disapointed that Relic didnt issued him a ban instanly as community top figures reported him, therefor thats one of the the main reasons why it was brought public.

I highly doubt that they went updating their anti-cheat because of the shitshow dramma, you guys started, no offence.

Not to mention Seeking got into a banwave, not into personal decisional ban.

Probably they have seen all the evidence and so on + updated anti-cheat. But if Relic would have been presented with proper reasoning, evidence and so-on right in the beggining (not after few days past drama), who knows maybe Seeking would have been banned earlier.

And no official company or developer tolirated public personal discussions like this, so its justified that they are disapointed, like some other ppl (me included) that this all went in this direction.

But has it really been served? Relic has not disclosed why they banned Seeking. May have nothing to do with any of the previous evidence/videos. For all we know he was running some app that they flagged as hacking like CheatEngine or something that may not be a cheat/hack at all for Coh2.

I for one would like to see lists of people banned and what they were banned for.

It fosters more reports. Right now you play with some toxic ass hat. Spend 2 hours putting together evidence and emailing it away. Never to be heard from again. Did the person get banned??? Why would I go thru all this effort the next time if I dont even know Relic is reading it.

Considering whatever anti-cheat relic uses is entirely serverside that would be impressive considering it can only see the information that you're sending to the server as you're playing the game. Incredibly low odds of non-game related false positives given the circumstances.

The most likely scenario here is that Relic hadn't touched their anti-cheat in months/years so whatever anti-cheat exploits existed were abused by cheat makers for the longest time until someone over at Relic finally woke up and did some research resulting in a massive anti-cheat patchwork session that nailed all the existing cheats in one big swoop, including Seeking. This instance of him cheating may even have been the catalyst for Relic to step forward and update their anti-cheat. (Though given we'd gotten a new community manager it might have been on the docket for a while beforehand and this cheating scandal just happened to coincide with plans to upgrade the anti-cheat.)

I highly doubt that they went updating their anti-cheat because of the shitshow dramma, you guys started, no offence.

How did they start it lol? How is the guy who cheated in a tournament not the one who started it?

Considering whatever anti-cheat relic uses is entirely serverside that would be impressive considering it can only see the information that you're sending to the server as you're playing the game. Incredibly low odds of non-game related false positives given the circumstances.

The most likely scenario here is that Relic hadn't touched their anti-cheat in months/years so whatever anti-cheat exploits existed were abused by cheat makers for the longest time until someone over at Relic finally woke up and did some research resulting in a massive anti-cheat patchwork session that nailed all the existing cheats in one big swoop, including Seeking. This instance of him cheating may even have been the catalyst for Relic to step forward and update their anti-cheat. (Though given we'd gotten a new community manager it might have been on the docket for a while beforehand and this cheating scandal just happened to coincide with plans to upgrade the anti-cheat.)

well whatever anti-cheat measures relic has at their disposal, it's reassuring to know that these - apparently - extend well beyond the visual analysis of suspicious replays the community is limited to, which in itself will always yield circumstantial evidence at best. let's just hope they keep stepping up their game against any future exploits and have the banhammer ready to strike whenever it's due.