The latest Overwatch update is quietly destroying aimbots

Since the launch of Overwatch, Blizzard has taken a hard stance against cheats and while some have managed to find holes in Blizzard's anti-cheat system, they don't tend to last for long. This week, some players discovered that the hard way, with an update this week making paid aimbots less effective.

Recently Blizzard launched the new Horizon Lunar Colony map for Overwatch. However, that update also made a small change to how the game uses colour. Some paid Overwatch aimbots lock on to targets by seeking out specific colours and by making this small imperceivable change, cheaters are going to have a much harder time than usual.

The news first broke on Korean Overwatch forums and eventually made its way to the Overwatch subreddit. In the post, it was explained exactly how these aimbots work:

“Image recognition based aimbots, prevalent in Korea, work by targeting specific RGB value used for enemy outlines. Basically starting from this patch, the outlines on enemies slightly change in color (unnoticeable to human eyes) so that the image recognition engine on aimbots would be either completely useless or have high failure rate.”.

The Gibraltar map in particular is causing problems for aimbot users due to the use of red backgrounds. Blizzard hasn't said anything itself about this year but PCGamer is waiting to hear back on that front.

KitGuru Says: I've had my share of issues with cheaters on shooters but I don't think I've ever come across one in Overwatch. Smart updates like this are probably a huge reason why that's the case. Have any of you ever seen a cheater in Overwatch?

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