I've got well over 2k hours in game and it's like a complete shift in gameplay over the holidays, but it's been drifting this way over the last 3-6 months. I'm more than just a little familiar with how the game plays and what the average player is capable of. Either the cheats have become more popular, people bought XIM/Chronos boxes with Christmas money, or IDK what the issue is. More laser-beam guns with zero bloom and zero misses at longer range, more people running rounds of TDM and the like 40:1, 45:4 on the KDR, kills through smoke and incendiary flames like they don't exist while I can't see shit. Yeah we all have good rounds sometimes, but one thing about humans is that we are not good at consistency. The game also makes sure you can't be consistent with handicaps like bloom, yet there are players that headshot you every. single. time. Every time. With guns like the PBX, K30, the 880...one shot, or short burst they get the kill. Absolutely absurd. I have the Network performance bar and graphs, as well as the damage logs and events enabled. my latency is 18, the ALAT is usually ~40, my shots have an average hit of ~20% on a good day, but watching the "skilled" players damage on the event log? Damn near 100% hits on target. That literally should be impossible thanks to bloom. I've been through the attachments on gun kits via multiple iterations on several of the favored guns that already are "laser-beam" like to minimize recoil and bloom and simply cannot match that damage rate at all.
Sure, some of it is going to be netcode, EA/Origin has completely messed up how it treats low ping connections (seriously, Fuck EA/Dice for this. So tired of getting killed by a spurt of lagged bullets after I'm already behind cover) by sort of favoring laggers, but that's still not an explanation for the accuracy and lack of bullet deviation in some of these players.
Initially I thought the AC for this game was pretty good. There weren't too may players that were outliers. Now? Seems like that at least 1-3 players per round are running "assistance" of some sort. The scores are wildly and consistently out of par with the rest of the field. Guess the anti-cheat has been mostly neutralized, and certainly isn't capable of detecting external devices like the XIM or Chronos boxes, and absolutely doesn't look at players with what should be literally impossible hit %.
Unfortunately the TDM side is becoming unplayable. Big maps with lots of players make it so "cheats" can't really take advantage of their boost, too many other players to get in the way of a good run, ranges are too great to overcome with predictable accuracy. TDM? nice and close. Lots of kills. High accuracy.
2042 was fun while it lasted, but I think it's gone the way of V and 1...overrun with cheats.