For those who are unaware, symbols similar to ▌are impossible to track on Steam. The reason behind this is that there are a crud-ton of symbols that all register as solid triangles in text. Now, the reason this is a problem is because around 90% of Dirty Bomb hackers (from my own experience) are using these symbols. To put it simply, there’s literally no way to report hackers who are using these symbols. For most Steam games, that isn’t an issue as you can easily click on their name in-game to open up their Steam profiles. Alternatively, games tend to use a ‘recently played with’ list so that you can see the last few people you played with on a Steam game. Sadly, neither of these options work for Dirty Bomb, so my advice to you is very simple… If you join a match and see a ▌▌▌in the player list, don’t even bother. Leave the match, avoid frustration and find a new match to join. Until we have a legitimate way to report players, most hackers will be unstoppable.
Word Of Warning: Avoid Matches With ▌▌▌Named Players
While generally true I have actually played games against legit players using those in their name. That or they sucked even with hacks.
I assume lots of Asian players’ names are translated in ▌, because of the characters?
I played a game with a hacker on the other team and his name was just ▌. But when the game ended you could see his actual name in the lobby. It was some chinese/japanese/korean/something like that character. But he really did ruin the whole game, we really need to be able to report players ingame.
Yes, some are legit. But some hackers are also not completely stupid. A top grade hacker isn’t going to have an aimbot, for example, that is constantly running. He will have a switch to enable/disable it as he sees fit to avoid detection. There are also aimbots that do not lock-on to enemy players until they aim near them, thus avoiding the whole ‘snapping all over’ you’ll see with script kiddies.
there are some legit players with those names, hence OP’s 90% estimate.[/quote]
I’m also going by my own experience, so there will certainly be players here who have never seen a rectangle name using hacks, or at least obvious hacks.
If Dirty Bomb can not display these characters, then yes. I’m not sure if the game does or not, but I do know that Steam fully supports Asian symbols. So either they are using text characters unsupported by Dirty Bomb or they are simply using ▌or similar names in Steam as Steam can’t properly track them.
Oh? I guess some text characters really are unsupported in-game. It’s a bit odd how they would properly display in the lobby but not in an actual match. That means they really are impossible to track if any hacker can just use one of many Asian symbols to hide their name in a match and just leave before the lobby screen hits.
Which means I shouldn’t play in about 80% of the ASIA servers? I’ll be darned.
On the topic, yes it’s caused by the fact that Dirty Bomb client can’t really display irregular characters properly (no unicode?) while Steam does, which a lot of Asian players would normally use (especially Japanese). Not sure how we can relate them to being a cheater since a lot of them actually streams their play. But yeah, full steam integration would be nice for hack reporting, or even better getting a real AC in place.
On the topic:It is normal for those things to happen. Many of games have it.
Just block special characters and use only normal letters with numbers and done.
And don’t give xp,credits,cases and many other things for players with that.
This entire issue would be solved by in-game reporting. I’ll take that over a new merc, thank you.
The names only show up like that because, for some reason, the scoreboard in game isn’t unicode compliant (including secondary chinese characters). However, the Lobby actually is. This is a fairly easy fix by SD but they haven’t done it yet.
Most of the time you see blocks instead of characters in player names because the in-game font is missing a lot of the non-standard glyphs (pretty much anything you can’t type on a typical English keyboard), and the ▌character is just used as a placeholder for a missing glyph. The in-lobby font supports more special characters, so sometimes you’ll be able to see the ▌▌▌ names clearly while waiting for a match to start.
You pretty much just repeated my post with different words. But you explained a bit more so 
[quote=“Amerika;32027”]
You pretty much just repeated my post with different words. But you explained a bit more so :)[/quote]
Yep, but you hadn’t posted yet when I started writing my response
Also a little tip from whatever experience I have: I indeed have seen a few hackers. In most cases you can make out a hacker from a player with different unicode name and I have seen this a lot. The people who hack don’t hang around in the lobby post game. So suppose you have a hacker playing and the game is about to end in 10 seconds. Most often than not he won’t stick around till the timer ends and the game switches to lobby. He will instantly disconnect with a few seconds to spare. My guess is they keep switching servers to avoid a trace perhaps.
Your name has nothing to do with steamID. So a hacker can’t hide by switching servers or names. If you find somebody is cheating and report them and can give the time you were playing, hopefully your server name (if you can remember it) and your own steam name the cheater can be easily tracked down. ECHO data plus their name at the time or at least the knowledge that the name wasn’t viewable would be enough for support to see the player in the logs. I’m sure their logs are UTF-8 but even if they aren’t the steamID would still be in latin based encoding…so not hard to spot.
Basically, just report them and give all the information you can and I’m sure support has the tools to track the person down easy enough.
There are some hackers I have seen who simply use numbers like ‘14’, ‘00000’, ‘90’, and so forth. But most of the time I see the blocks of white. Most of the time yes they are Asian users from what I’ve seen.
I was born in the Philippines and block characters are a huge thing to use BECAUSE they are untraceable.
If you have a friend playing dirty bomb or online you can simply click “view steam profile” when you click their name. This should be implemented for everyone to use for everyone, meaning being able to be In Game and click someone’s name and go to their steam profile.
This would
- Help against hacker reporting
- Make it easier to find friends to play with, instead of having to type in their name on the steam community home and search through 100’s of other accounts with the same name
Special characters show up in the lobby screen.
I have a ton of edgy friends who use special characters and it’s not like it’s uncommon. Not really a valid way of spotting hackers.
That explains why tf those people are so good…although I did still get like 10 kills on them but they still did get a lot of kills like those Dirty Bomb veterans (who aren’t hacking FYI).
Thank you for your info.