Played a good game, especially at first. Then got lost in the sauce and started playing sloppy. Enemy Soldier was also top 500, but was running Dual-Zone with aim smoothing so he got diffed. There were a couple XIMMERS in this lobby, but you wouldn't know it based on the scoreboard. They should really just quit the game or go back to controller. Whoever sold them their config should give their money back.
My tank: 100% XIM. You can see the mouse swipes clear as day. WASD Movement.
My Ana (Antidote): Terrible XIM config. WASD movement.
Enemy tank: Harcore XIM, WASDaf. Mouse swipes af.
Enemy soldier: Perfect example of not XIM. He’s a console player on Dual-Zone with Aim Smoothing on.
XIM
A XIM lets you use a mouse and keyboard on console, tricking it into thinking it's a controller. This gives cheaters mouse precision plus controller aim assist. You can spot them by looking for things that are physically impossible on a joystick:
Instantaneous Stops: They flick their crosshair and it stops on a dime with no "kickback." If you’ve watched good controller players you’ll know that when you’re really flicking like crazy there’s always some kickback on the screen (it looks like a high sens mouse player with bad mouse control) because on controller the fastest flicks require that you manually speed the joystick back to the center. That’s why you’ll always see the stick end up going a little to the opposite direction of the flick. XIM doesn’t have that kickback at the end
Perfect L-Shapes: Their aim can make a perfect 90-degree angle, which is impossible on a joystick's circular gate. Literally mathematically impossible when you think about it.
Things got really bad recently when a bug essentially turned off Blizzard's detection. It was open season for cheaters to test their configs. Now that it's "fixed," the community is flooded with effective and hard-to-detect cheat settings.
How Blizzard Can ACTUALLY Be More Effective
As an engineer, their response has been frustratingly slow. Here are some proactive ways they could improve this:
The Left Stick is easy to catch: Almost all XIM users use WASD for movement, creating a perfect 8-directional input pattern. This shouldn't be an automatic ban, because you don't want to falsely punish some doofus using the d-pad on a Gamesir G7 SE (that controller has a setting that lets you use the d-pad instead of your left stick). Instead, this pattern should be a computationally cheap, instant trigger. The second it's detected, the account is flagged and the full, resource-intensive XIM detection algorithm should be run on it.
Proactive Rank-Based Triggers: They claim to automatically run the check on Top 500 players. They should run the check automatically the moment any player's account reaches the rank threshold for Top 500 (e.g., Master 2).
Improving The Right Stick's Fingerprint: Blizzard already has methods for checking the right stick, but they can be improved. A mouse's linear movement creates a unique signature that a joystick can't replicate without feeling "wrong" to the user. By building a detector based on these inherent mathematical properties, they could identify XIM users with much higher confidence.
A lot of people feel like it’s a hopeless endeavor and there would be no way to detect this kind of cheating because XIM can always push an update that better emulates joystick behavior. That’s not true, mathematically and algorithmically it’s totally possible to make a world where anyone using XIM is at a disadvantage because the sluggishness they’d feel would make it less playable than just being on joysticks. Hopefully that makes sense from an intuitive standpoint, but I could write a book on it if any Blizzard devs reach out.
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