I met more hackers this month than 1 years ago combined

I've also noticed a few more hackers than usual. Though it's still bearable for me. Definitely not as back as it was in 2022.

I have been running into a few as well. It's getting ridiculous and on my survivor matches killers are getting paranoid and just DCing because they don't know if someone is using subtle cheats or not. Can't blame em either, my killer matches have been sketchy at times too.

Then there's the VERY obvious cheaters…

This is a sad record.

Thanks for making the game better. Keep going!

There's been a significant increase in the amount of cheaters, especially the subtle ones.

Since BHVR uses EAC, I've noticed that mass cheating tends to come and go in waves as patches and bypasses are made public. I suspect that this game's code is not well protected with internal validity checks unlike most other games that have their own internal back-up protections.

On a technical level, I think I've figured out how most of the common cheats works.

Movement speed, repair speed, etc. are all easy to change, because they are just stats in a sheet of numbers; with a cheat, someone can simply tell the game that their base speed is higher. I believe the game only checks once or twice at boot-up to see if all the numbers line up with what they are supposed to be, and then stops caring and they can be altered afterwards. They could also use the built-in status effects (Haste, Repair Boost, etc.) to increase their stats at those fixed values, but altering the base stats is less complicated than potentially overlapping status effects that some other status effects might counter.

Aura reads are likely tied to state reading; "Aura revealed to ALL/Player#X: yes/no" or something like that. A cheater can yell the game to alter the flag to always reveal the aura, ignoring other state flags like Undetectable.

The servers are notoriously limited in what they can handle, so a salty loser might opt to crash them simply by sending a bunch of false junk info in a single burst.

Teleportation is simply telling the game to put your character at a specific set of XYZ co-ordinates. Teleportation to specific things (Hatch, exit gate zone, etc.) only requires an automated look-up to where that entity's co-ordinates are and then entering them as your teleport destination.

Automatic wiggle outs is one I am not sure on. It might be a numerical alteration that sets the meter to max as soon as the Survivor is picked up, or it might re-use whatever code is attached to the process of Decisive Strike activating. Likewise for people unhooking themself from the second hook state; I think they would need to alter a flag that decides whether an unhook attempt is available or not.

A new cheat I've been seeing is Survivors respawning previously broken pallets or adding new pallets to valid spawn zones that were previously empty. I suspect that someone who makes cheats dug up the old anniversary event code that allowed Survivors to spawn temporary pallets on demand and altered it to make those pallets permanent without the confetti effects; knowing BHVR, it is very likely they left that code sitting in the files in case they ever wanted to re-use the mechanic for another event or for a future perk, so it was free for anyone to snatch up and work with.

With all that said, I have gotten more bans of cheaters in the last 2 months than I did in the first 6 years of playing; a pity that half of them were obvious burner accounts and most of those cheats were entirely avoidable with better protections.

(Don't edit my posts, mods, especially when doing so perfectly proves the off-hand point I was making.)

Content creators have their own matchmaking algorithm? Seriously?