I needed video footage of a spinbotter, so went onto Overwatch to find one.
It wouldn’t take too long, I thought to myself.
I was wrong.
It took me 4 hours…
but I did eventually get one.
But, on that journey, I had learned so much!
And I want to share it with you.
First, you’ll notice a shortage of videos about overwatch on this channel.
That’s because CS:GO is better.
But also because I don’t trust MY judgement of CS:GO’s overwatch cases.
I trust it enough to do them!
I think I’m probably very good at it.
But I don’t think I’m always right and, being in a position of power on YouTube, I
would hate to influence YOUR verdicts.
So although this video’s about overwatch cases, it’s not about HOW TO SPOT ONE.
Instead it’s…
I dunno, guess you’ll find out if you keep watching.
First bit of advice: if you want to binge on overwatch cases, you’ll need 2 accounts.
I found that by the time I had signed into the second, downloaded a case, watched it
and come to a conclusion about it, my first account would have a new case ready for me
to watch.
UNLESS I had a particularly blatant case, which would leave me waiting around for a
minute or so for the next one.
Secondly, Shift+F2 brings up the demo playback control panel.
Click to the end of the demo and it will end immediately!
You can speed it up, slow it down… but in Overwatch, you can’t go in reverse.
If you miss something you want to re-watch, click STOP and it will let you do the case
again.
Alternatively, click to the end, click ‘Postpone Judgement’ and you’ll see the same case
again.
In an ideal world, you wouldn’t use this.
You’d watch an Overwatch case all the way through, from start to finish.
And you should!
Normally.
But that would be hypocritical of me to tell you to do since I DO skip through some of
mine, simply because there are good reasons to do so!
Maybe The Suspect is AFK for a round.
Maybe he’s so blatantly cheating you don’t want (or have) to sit through another 5 rounds
of the screen spinning.
Or maybe you see on the map that the enemies have gone to the other bombsite and that you’ll
have nothing to gain by watching the Suspect guard an empty corridor for the next 60 seconds
or so.
Or how about this- you want to double-check on something, so re-watch the demo.
You won’t want to see the whole thing again!
And third, always try your best.
You gain experience, not just by catching cheaters, but in successfully determining
when a person’s innocent.
You have nothing to gain by skipping cases or by choosing the wrong verdict!
I admit, I’m in the unusual position where I do have another reason for doing these cases
(I was trying to find good video footage for a video).
But then, I like to have 2 reasons for doing anything just in case one turns out to be
a failure.
So yes, I did all of my cases to the best of my ability.
And remember- getting things wrong will only make your judgements mean less to Overwatch’s
decision making, and in less experience for you from doing them.
In the grand scale of things, once you’ve bothered to download and then to view a case,
you might as well do it properly.
That’s as much ‘advice’ as I’m giving.
Now for my observations.
Firstly, you can immediately tell if it’s going to be a competitive match or a 2v2 wingman
by how quickly it downloads the demo.
Wingman matches take much less time.
Just in case you wonder why some download so much faster than others- this is it.
Second, I got more ‘accurate verdicts’ as I went on- by the end I was getting the
notification before every new case.
It could just be that it takes time for Overwatch to come to a verdict about an earlier one:
remember, it has to be watched by somewhere between 7-100 people.
I’m guessing this is done in waves of multiple viewers, with more waves for the harder cases.
So it would make sense for it to take maybe half an hour or so to come to a conclusion.
Which is still pretty darn fast!
But I think I did get better.
With the first few I couldn’t help but feel the Suspect was there for a reason, and that
it was somehow a test for me to see if I could spot the cheat.
But after seeing so many in a row, I became desensitized and stopped doing that.
I was more forgiving of suspicious behaviour, indeed believing that they were innocent unless
proven to be guilty- which is exactly what we should all be doing all along!
It just got easier for me to do this with time.
I started getting more satisfaction from claiming someone was innocent than I did from saying
for certain they were guilty.
I would even say to myself that they might be cheating, but this isn’t the clip that
reveals it, so I won’t be the one to judge them for it.
This was certainly rewarding in its own way.
And it helped me to forget about a case that I’ve done, rather than to stew on it and
to question if I made a mistake.
At least if I had, it wouldn’t be an innocent getting convicted.
I ended up seeing 3 types of matches.
Those where they obviously cheated, those where they obviously didn’t, and then a
third group of suspects where I grew increasingly suspicious of them with every round I’d
watch.
You know what I mean.
They get a lucky shot that didn’t look as though it should have hit.
Which is fine, it happens to all of us.
But what if it’s the 5th round in a row where they’ve gotten 3 like that?
I always err’d on the side of caution, aware that it could be a smurf, or just a lucky
string of rounds.
But there were some cases I saw where I’d really dislike them by end of it, even if
I ultimately ruled they were innocent and hoped that VAC would deal with them at a later
date if I was wrong.
And there were a lot of cases where I liked them by the end, which restored my faith that
I wasn’t just trying to see the worst in everyone.
The next thing I’m going to talk about grinds my gears.
I guess I’ve always assumed that a cheater on your team is an advantage.
But with a closet wallhacker, this isn’t the case!
You know the sort.
The kind of person who blindly runs through an area when there’s nobody there, but if
there is then he’ll immediately home in on that one particular spot.
Or, worse still, awkwardly stop until a teammate goes in first and gets killed, which baits
the enemy out at which point the Suspect feels justified in claiming the kill.
It’s a horrible thing to see and it makes me wonder how many times I’ve died, not
because I’m against a cheater, but because there’s one on my team who’s using me
to help himself.
But on a positive note, these overwatch cases restored my faith in MOST of CS:GO’s playerbase.
Since I could see where players were through walls, I could see just how many mistakes
the average player makes every round.
How often their flank is left exposed, how often they’re looking the wrong way at the
wrong time and so on.
It made me realise just many chances you have every round to turn the tide in your favour.
But for the same reasons, I can also understand how cheaters can get an over-inflated opinion
of their own skill level.
If you know where players are every round then it doesn’t seem too difficult to reach
global, provided you pick your fights and bide your time.
I’m guessing there are cheaters out there who think that because they’re only wallhacking,
or have some kind of radar hack, that their performance is still largely determined by
their skill.
As though these things only tip the odds very slightly in their favour- but I suspect it
helps a lot more than that.
Especially when you get to the higher ranks in CS:GO, even the slightest advantage goes
a long way.
As a player, I’m very agitated.
Very paranoid that somebody’s creeping up on me, or that I should surprise them by rushing
out because the longer I give them, the longer they have to gain the advantage.
I imagine that in a 1v1, they know where I am and I don’t know where they are.
Maybe this is from experiences with cheaters in the past.
Maybe I am just paranoid.
But seeing how calm a lot of these players are (particularly those I suspect of cheating),
it makes me want to give ‘being calm’ a go.
Simply to believe that I know what’s going on, and that where I’m looking is where
the enemy will come out from.
Besides, if somebody is wallhacking, from what I’ve seen it’s often better to remain
hidden somewhere obscure.
This makes it difficult for them to kill you without looking suspicious themselves.
Oh and there is one situation I would like to cover.
One where an entire team is AFK, and the suspect is someone on the other team who’s rushing
to their spawn and killing them round after round.
I got 2 of these cases in a 4 hour period.
It’s tempting to say he’s rank boosting, or manipulating matchmaking in some way.
Possibly griefing?
But no, you can’t judge him for that.
This guy is innocent!
Imagine you found yourself in his position, against an AFK team- what is there to do other
than to rush to their spawn and to get some ez kills?
This kind of Suspect is innocent.
Even if he is guilty of rank boosting, this isn’t something you can tell from an overwatch
case.
The real question is: who on the server reported him?
I might be seeing a pattern that isn’t there, but my overwatch cases seem to show the interesting
bit of the match.
They’ll start on somebody 10 rounds in who only has 2 kills, before suddenly gaining
godly powers and pulling off 4 and 5-man kills every round.
I wonder if this is done intentionally to make Overwatch more effective, and also to
make it more appealing for players to do.
I certainly know I felt more inclined to do it when vacnet began submitting so many blatant
aimbotters!
Before then, most of my Overwatches had been spectating boring, innocent looking people.
And lastly, take a look at THIS case.
This guy was one of those annoying players.
You know, jumping about the place, fiddling with his weapons, trying to taze the other
team.
Just generally messing about thinking that he’s awesome.
He knows he’s great.
Maybe he’s smurfing.
Maybe the other team’s just having a bad day.
But there’s nothing you can do about someone like this.
It’s not like he’s griefing.
He’s not cheating!
He’s just one of those annoying, cocky players.
And then somebody on the other team enables his wallhacks, and headshots him through a
wall.
The very next round, he activates rage hacks, and destroys the other team again.
He wins his games… and he wants them to know it.
How dare they question his superiority by using cheats against him!
What nerve they have!
I can tell you, after 4 hours I was very happy to finally encounter a spinbot.
And up until that round, he very nearly got away as being innocent.
But I was more than happy to change my opinion following the rage hacks!
You know what got this cheater caught?
It wasn’t the cheats.
Well, yes it was.
But it was also pride.
And when somebody fought back, he couldn’t help but retaliate.
He could have lost to the cheater, reported him and then it would only have been the other
team’s cheater to have been overwatch banned.
But for whatever reason, he’d rather risk a ban than to lose to a cheater!
What a toxic place that server became.
Don’t get me wrong- I’m sure he’s justified this in his mind.
If someone else cheats, then ‘of course he should’ do so as well!
But hey.
I did my bit.
In those 4 hours of overwatch, I helped contribute to many overwatch bans.
If you have a few spare minutes, you should do the same- you may be surprised by how interesting
your own overwatch journey will be.
Well done for making it to the end of this… almost 10 minute long video.
Oh look at that, this will bring it over.
How convenient.
If you want to hear what a cheater thinks about cheating, check out my interview with
one here.
If you want to see the video that my brother made from all of these overwatch clips, click
here.
And for more information about VACNET, you can see my summary of the presentation here.