Perhaps there aren't as many cheaters as you think.

dayrth

Volunteer Moderator
I have been taking part in a war this week. There were many other commanders participating. Unfortunately all of them on the opposite side :eek: Every encounter I had with an enemy commander was great fun. No one cheated, no one combat logged, no one complained, all was as it should be, but....

A strange thing happened. I was in a CZ and I attacked an Asp. I got behind it and was hammering away with my class 3 pulse laser and slicing across it with my class 3 beam laser for ages. Nothing was happening! The Asp's shields were staying at full 3 bars. This went on for about a minute. The suddenly it disappeared and reappeared behind me. I swung round and began attacking again. Still no effect. Must be cheating right? Actually no, and I'll tell you why. It was an AI.

Then the Asp suddenly jumped backward and it's shields were gone. Then all it's movements became jerky and sometimes it would take damage and other times not. Then it just exploded. This sort of thing happened again a couple of times over the week. It became clear that what was happening. There was always another commander in the instance, although we were not in direct contact. That commander's PC had taken control of the instance, and either was a bit underpowered or had a poor connection. My fight on the other side of the CZ wasn't getting processed smoothly.

I'm not saying there are no cheaters, I know that there are, but having experienced this I am now not so quick to accuse. Even if something clearly looks like a cheat there may be another explanation.
 
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Been playing a year, and I've only seen one instant myself of what looked like cheating - a commander in a clipper taking hit after hit from the police and his shields were regenerating near instantly after being knocked out.

I agree, its highly unlikely you will personally meet a cheater.
 
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If you're in an instance that is being hosted by a weak/spikey connection then all clients are going to have a sh_t experience. I've been 'shot whilst in cover' more times than I can count in ED and at this point it's just not worth the agro. Johnny On Target might call cheater but usually he's also benefitted from P2P in ways that have saved his life. P2P is cheap compared to dedicated servers but it's also often rubbish for the clients.
 
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But what otherwise might constitute genuine lag becomes a cheat when someone intentionally manipulates their connection to produce these effects.
 
I have been playing since beta last year, i have seen lots of cheaters, i have heard about lots of cheaters, and there has been plenty of talk on the forums about cheaters.
​But all those were in videos, or read on threads, i have never actually met one myself in over a year of play time.
 
I've seen similar things in PvP... I was fighting another commander, Python vs. Python... his shields dropped, the "target shields offline" message sounded, and I kept hammering away, but did no damage to his hull. First thing I thought was "Is he cheating?", but since I had a comfortable amount of shield cells left, I decided to continue the fight to see what happens. I wondered why he kept firing shield cells himself (seeing the blue effect), which is pointless with shields down, but this gave me the first hint that he wasn't actually cheating. A while later he suddenly started to take hull damage as normal and hyperjumped shortly after this.

So what happened wasn't a case of cheating but obviously our clients got out of sync. Although my client registered his shields failing, in fact they were still up, so he started to take hull damage only when they really failed much later.
 
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