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Serious question for you gamers out there: Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? Is there a monetary incentive? Otherwise, it

Serious question for you gamers out there: Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? Is there a monetary incentive? Otherwise, it seems like a lot of effort just to increase one's standing on a leader board.

wmil 7y ago
Young men seem driven to compete for little reward. There's no need to try to intellectualize it.
- moftz 7y ago
  Any kind of competition can have real rewards at the highest levels. Many people like shooting their friends in paintball on the weekend with rented gear but there is also a professional level where there is real money and sponsorships available. Many male animals will engage in some sort of competition, sometimes with rewards and risks (mates, food, death) and sometimes just for play. It's ridiculous to act like competitive online gaming is any different from puppies rough housing or from lions fighting over leadership of the pride. No one is going to die but gaming could just be something fun to do after being at work all day or it could be what puts food on the table.
- krageon 7y ago
  > Young men Why make this a gender thing?
  - beaker52 7y ago
    Probably because it doesn't outwardly appear to affect young women so much? People should be able to make such observations.
gizmo686 7y ago
As someone who likes to cheat at single player video games, the cheating itself is a lot of fun (at least it was until I started doing reverse engineering professionally; now it just feels like work). My sense of the multiplayer cheating scene (which I never looked at closely) is that most of the cheaters use tools developed by others. So, it seems possible that the people doing the bulk of the work are motivated in part by the technical challenge (including the cat and mouse aspect of it), and the social proof that comes along with sharing their cheats. Once the cheats are out there, using them has a much lower barrier to entry.
- julianee 7y ago
  I would think money plays a big role too. Back when Apex Legends exploded into the scene with the initial user base, selling a hack for 10 a pop would make a lot of money.
  - TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
    Is this legal? It's obviously against TOS, but I don't think breaking a TOS is illegal..
    - kemonocode 7y ago
      You could make a case that making a cheat is copyright infringement as Blizzard did [0] so yes, it can be illegal. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker-for-copyright-infringement-160704/ https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker...
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - JamesBarney 7y ago
        It seems like blizzard is really stretching and the cases that already went to court they lost. Is making an overlay a derivative work?
  - im3w1l 7y ago
    I recently met someone who claimed he had a three person company making cheats. Maybe one of them was solely marketing? The memory blurs. They were selling cheats as a subscription service and with different tiers unlocking more cheats. Earned a decent salary doing it.
- moftz 7y ago
  There's a monetary incentive as well. If you can reliably produce new cheats that aren't detectable, people will buy them. There's usually an incentive not to share private cheats because once it's public, it will still probably work but will definitely get you banned. Amateurs and professionals both pay for private cheats so besides the technical challenge, there is some money to be made.
jeffshek 7y ago
Sense of social status, cheating artificially increases your rank. No one knows your cheating, so you get all the respect. Leaderboards are dopamine clickbait for trying to improve. Why do billionaires want to richer?
samwestdev 7y ago
Yes, especially in multiplayer focused games, if there's a way to cheat there will be cheaters. Also people who profit from the situations and sell cheating tools to other players.
rectang 7y ago
Playing by the rules favors those who the rules were set up to benefit. Are you poor, "ugly", unlucky, "stupid", uncoordinated? Cheating is your chance to win when our "just" society tells you you must lose. The transgression itself feels right and good.
- willis936 7y ago
  No one forces, or even pressures, anyone to play multiplayer video games.
  - furyofantares 7y ago
    Right but if you spend your day resenting the rules you're expected to obey, you might spend your leisure time disobeying rules that have lesser consequences.
  - ianleeclark 7y ago
    > No _one_ forces This assumes a subject is required for coercion. It might be that multiplayer games are the only way for someone to escape.
    - willis936 7y ago
      You’ll need to make a hell of an argument to make that sound reasonable.
      - ianleeclark 7y ago
        > You’ll need to make a hell of an argument to make that sound reasonable. I don't think this is really as difficult as you imagine. People in poverty have the decision to work or die. Poverty is a form of objective violence. Therefore, people are coerced by objective violence that doesn't depend on any sort of task master whipping them into action.
        willis936 7y ago
sunnydayddr 7y ago
Cheating for gamers is like hacking for programmers, except you get points and there's a leaderboard.
throwaway3942 7y ago
I used to develop multiplayer cheats and bots because I enjoyed overcoming the technical challenge. Reverse engineering software, creating and injecting your own shell code in a game and see it working is extremely satisfying. It seems very selfish in retrospective and I'm sorry for all the gamer experiences I ruined.
- awb 7y ago
  Or maybe you saved someone from gaming addiction by breaking these games and making it harder to win.
  - Operyl 7y ago
    Or the inverse: because someone had to work harder, the experience of finally winning only made the feeling so much better, and released a ton more endorphins. Or maybe .. neither really contributes or detracts from “gamer addiction”.
awb 7y ago
> Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? 1. Technical challenge 2. Trolling "try hards" 3. Dopamine from winning I'm sure there's a bunch of other reasons, but cheating is still like a game, just expanding the rules.
zZorgz 7y ago
As someone that's written a game "cheating" tool there's good technical / reverse engineering value from modding or cheating games. Plus it's fun to just be able to change a game (I fondly remember the days playing with Game Genie). It is indeed a bit immoral when one tries to cheat in a way that unfairly puts themselves ahead of other humans.
Mathnerd314 7y ago
A lot of games are just grinding, and cheating reduces the grinding. Usually it makes them more fun but sometimes it doesn't, in cases where the game is terrible to begin with. After a while cheating is more fun than the game. One could also look at Twitch streamers and ask why the people watching don't just play the game; the answer for a lot of games is that the games are incredibly difficult and the streamer can get through a level in a few hours while it might take the viewer months. I don't think money enters into it. People just do weird things, like painting miniatures or climbing Mt. Everest, and hacking is another of those hobbies.
kstenerud 7y ago
There are different kinds of cheaters. Some like the rush of doing something "naughty". Some want quick results. Some want prestige. Some want to explore and exploit the system itself rather than the game. Some want to gold farm. Some want to be like gods. Some want to automate the tedious parts. Some want to take down big mobs that can't be taken down any other way. I once wrote about 400k of Blech code for Macroquest to automate the most tedious parts of EQ grinding, and to automate support party members (running on separate accounts) when I couldn't find a group (before the mercenary system), powerlevel new accounts, or needed more precision to one-group multibox raid targets (for example, Overlord Mata Muram). In many ways it brought the game to a whole new level of challenges due to the difficulty of my targets, and the strategies I needed to employ. It was actually quite cool, consisting of modules for healing, buffing, offtanking, main tanking, positioning, dd, dots, aggro management, clickies, AA abilities, timers... the works. I had a configuration language that assembled the necessary modules to produce the behavior I needed for a particular task. All of the dev work involved, at my professional rate, would have come out to 5 or 6 figures, so there's that :P
- inetknght 7y ago
  Some want to role play but the game didn't provide the sandbox for it.
- withinboredom 7y ago
  Some just want to enjoy the story-telling and skip the bs.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    There should be a distinction between single player and multiplayer games. I've absolutely used cheat-engine in single player games. If it was up to me, entering the Konami code would unlock everything in every single player game. Everyone has the right to access content they've purchased in the way and order they see fit. But when you're playing with other people there's really no excuse.
    - 7y ago
fenwick67 7y ago
There are really 2 kinds of cheating in competitive games (counter-strike etc). The first are cheats like an overt aimbot, which are blatant and where basically everyone gets shot in the head from a mile away whenever the cheater has line-of-sight. These I imagine are only fun for trolling. The second are cheats that are more subtle, showing you the location of hidden enemies etc. Since these aren't just a "win button", the cheater still gets some satisfaction from winning. After all, they still had to shoot and kill the other players, and they're not guaranteed to win. In their mind they still won, they just had a little help. This kind of cheating is akin to cheating in sports by using steroids. You still have to do a lot of the same work, but it's easier to win.
krageon 7y ago
> Why would a person go to such great lengths Probably because adversarial coding is fun, and cheating at videogames is one of the best free ways to really get going doing that against a party that is really invested in stopping you. There's other options, but those are much more likely to lead to arrests.
- akerl_ 7y ago
  What percentage of people who use cheats in video games took part in development of the code involved, vs just downloading and executing code written by someone else?
  - krageon 7y ago
    Some percentage. I'm sure there's other motivations, but I have no idea what those would be.
xzel 7y ago
After beating Diablo 2 on a few characters I started to always used maphack. It took the guess work out of some of the repetitive actions. I feel like most hardcore, not the mode that is, players used it since it could take minutes off a Cow/Baal/Pindel etc. run. It didn't feel like cheating, although it certainly was, and at a certain point I felt like the game was unplayable without it. My point with all this is, I think there are certain quality of life hacks/addons that make games more playable in a way and then there are the other group of cheats, that remove skill gaps, such as click macros in games where combos are needed, aim/wallhack and others.
tsukurimashou 7y ago
>is there monetary incentive? esports? not sure how common it is these days to have someone cheating in a competition but I can tell you it happened quite a lot of times in the past, especially with FPS games.
rambojazz 7y ago
I'm speaking from the point of view of an offline gamer (I never play online). Some games make you take repetitive actions in order to advance in the game (perhaps to lengthen the life of the game, otherwise you'd finish it too soon). An example of this is repeating the same races over and over in order to win more cash so you can advance. This gets boring pretty quickly, so I cheat by adding me more cash without having to race the same event infinitely many times. Online play could have more incentives (prizes) for people higher on the leaderboard.
csunbird 7y ago
On top the reasons mentioned in the sibling comments, there is also a huge market for in game currencies, which bots make is infinitely easier to farm those currencies.
anon9001 7y ago
I got into coding by writing hacks, cheats, and bots. It's one of the few ways to directly translate code into something that feels like a super power.
papreclip 7y ago
People make cheats for money, for online infamy, and for the challenge of it People use cheats because it makes the game more enjoyable. In FPS, someone can shoot you before you have time to react. In RTS, someone can step out of the darkness with an army that traps yours at just the right moment. Cheats replace those unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones where you ambush the enemy and fight them with an advantage Unfortunately cheating is a negative sum game. When both players cheat, it doesn't just even the odds once again, it makes the game you're playing significantly less enjoyable
- jerf 7y ago
  "People make cheats for money, for online infamy, and for the challenge of it" In all seriousness, I think there's a non-trivial aspect to it where human psychology is misfiring in the modern era. Certain people, mostly younger, have a drive to show off to potential mates, some more so than others, and superficially, spending lots of time creating cheats like this looks like it's leading to social approval and standing. You get lots of "thanks" and "kudos". But in reality, you're getting nothing. It doesn't work. People are willing to use the output, but whether rational on some level or not, I don't think you are really getting social credit for it, and even to the extent you are, it's far too widely dispersed to be any good. (That is, it may not exactly be useless to convince a million people to think slightly good of you, but harvesting that for any benefit is really tricky, whereas conclusively convincing someone you are a good person can be beneficial in all sorts of ways and is the basis of any number of relationships.) In grad school, I worked on an open source LCMS that spent a lot of time fighting people helping other students cheat on their homework. Instead of just solving their homework problem, the cheaters would solve the whole meta-problem (all the variants we might serve) and hand out the meta-solution. This requires a great deal more effort than just solving the individual problem alone. What was funny to me is... I don't think it actually got them anything. Nobody cares. They'll use your solution, but for all that work you get very little real social currency. The majority of your "customer base" is getting it from their friend, who got it from their friend, and the origin of the cheat isn't even known by probably the majority using it. Same sort of thing. Unfortunately, this is effectively unsolvable. By the time you hypothetically educate one group that this isn't useful, next year's group is already here. (Also, to be clear, I'm not saying this is all the reason, merely a less-explored one, and a sufficient one on its own to be a source of significant cheating.)
matheusmoreira 7y ago
Sometimes the game's just too boring and making a bot for it is actually much more fun. I had this experience with some mobile games and their little daily tasks. I realized they were trying to instill a daily login habit in me so I wrote a small client that'd log in and do the tasks. I turned their predatory design into a fun little project. Ironically, due to the way the game was designed the behavior of the bot is indistinguishable from that of a sufficiently addicted player.
- mnowicki 7y ago
  I feel like there's an important message somewhere in this post
  - matheusmoreira 7y ago
    Two. 1. Hacking the game can be more interesting than playing the game. 2. There's absolutely nothing wrong with hacking games with immoral game design.
yutuytuyt 7y ago
there's decent money on it. also skills, resume?
izzydata 7y ago
With the rise of esports there is a lot of money to be made with no real consequences. It isn't illegal to essentially steal prize money by cheating at a video game. Also game streaming is big now and being "good" attracts more viewers so there is also a lot of money to be made by cheating. I have completely stopped taking video games seriously in any capacity as I am pretty confident the entire culture of competitive gaming is completely infested with cheating.
- mstade 7y ago
  Are there online e-sports tournaments of any meaningful size? (E.g. $1000+ prizes) The only tournaments I've seen amount to essentially LAN parties where all the equipment and installations are provided by the tournament, such that players all compete on fair terms and unable to cheat (unless the opsec at the tournament is terrible, I guess.)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Buttons840 7y ago
  Any competitive game with big money on the line has the top players gather in the same room (on a stage most likely), and play using computers controlled by the event organizers. The players winning these big tournaments do not cheat.
  - ronald_dregan 7y ago
    there used to be a way to embed cheats within your steam profile directly (abusing some other feature to do so) and it'd activate on login. some guy got caught in a tournament using one. they probably dont let people sign into their own accounts anymore lol
  - izzydata 7y ago
    You aren't thinking outside the box enough. If you could commission cheating software for $10,000+ then there is plenty you could do to circumvent the PCs being provided. It should also be noted that they allow self provided peripherals in most cases.
jtaft 7y ago
I did it to learn about computers and security. It's a form of sport too. Feels good to bend the rules and outsmart your opponent. (Opponent as in security controls, not in-game players). You get a rush when your hack works, and using it in a highly interactive environment makes it all the more fun. From a high level view, you learn: * Fundamentals of computer security * Fundamentals of computers, operating systems, and number systems. * Debugging skills!!! (Can't stress enough) * Perseverance * Note taking From a technical view, you learn: * Memory Forensics * Reverse Engineering * Patching executables (in memory and on disk) * Anti-Debugging and Anti-Anti debugging tricks * Packet sniffing and modifying * Crypto * 3D Modeling * Simple algorithms for writing bots * Memory corruption vulnerabilities * Programming That said, I'm HIGHLY against the use of cheats. If you want to show your friends and get a laugh out of it, that's fine! Just don't ruin the gaming experience for others. And don't do anything illegal of course.
- strbean 7y ago
  In the case of many games (mostly shallow MMOs), it is so much more fun to reverse engineer and break the game than it is to actually play the game.
jotm 7y ago
I've done it in some MMOs so they can shove their grindfest casinos up their asses. I don't know how it got so bad, MMOs used to be focused on group content, socialization, meaningful progression. Nowadays it's solo grinding bs with constant reminders to "buy this shit, it helps you/makes you look fab". Just sad money squeezing activities that waste your time.
lmilcin 7y ago
You are making mistake by trying to explain somebody elses motives for cheating by using your value system. First, these are not great lengths when all you need to do is download and install an application. Second, some people don't get as much kick from playing a game as from dominating other players. They want to win the game in any way possible, but don't consider winning fairly to be any more satisfying than winning with cheating. They might be in denial over their abilities and use cheating to feel better. They don't feel any need to be courteous or fair. These are people who, when they loose a game against you, will say "fuck you" instead of congratulating you. Don't try to find logic where there isn't any.
- mnowicki 7y ago
  I think that's only one subset of cheaters, many people use cheats in non-pvp games or use cheats in a specific server where everyone has the same cheats. It's often just a way to get more replayability out of a game someone really enjoys. In monster hunter, the speedrunning community is migrating to PC because the ability to use cheats to negate the huge amount of RNG present in the game. Cheating is usually looked down on by speedrunners for obvious reasons but because of the difficulty of speedrunning a game with so much RNG(not rng that effects your gameplay, but that effects your ability to play at all), modders are basically making a new game with the rng removed and people are speedrunning that, and it's widely accepted as necessary by the community. So cheating is often just a means of either getting something new out of a game or 'fixing' aspects of a game that the community takes issue with. I agree that players like you describe, who's main goal is griefing other players, also make up a large portion of cheaters, just wanted to further elaborate on your response that not all cheaters are doing it to 'move up the leaderboard'
  - lmilcin 7y ago
    I think the topic of the article is cheaters that compete with other players. Anti-cheats are not really necessary for games where the only person being cheated is the cheater. I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that offer valuable prizes have a real incentive to cheat.
SilasX 7y ago
I cheated on the original Halo (PC, online capture-the-flag) because I really sucked at it compared to everyone else, which made it unbalanced and therefore not fun to plan (not saying it was right, just filling in the understanding you were asking for). I didn't look into aiming bots, but I did figure out how to edit the resource files to make the walls transparent so I could camp the flag and see players coming for it long before I was supposed to.
egdod 7y ago
Griefers.
Can_Not 7y ago
Sometimes "cheating" is just fixing broken things the devs make really dumb decisions about. In RA2, online matchmaking required you to use the smallest resolution possible, which is dumb when you just beat the full game at a normal resolution. In DotA2, you can't zoom out. I just played LoL instead of "cheating" though (a.k.a. making the game playable). In Dawn of War I used a zoom out mod once but honestly the game already let you zoom out reasonably enough anyways. But these weren't for getting an unfair advantage, this was for solving claustrophobia and not-having-the-camera-right-in-the-dirt.
bashmelek 7y ago
There is also the market for selling digital goods. People wanting to make real money outside of the game will automate farming gold, items, sell an account with a great character or one that unlocked a lot of perks from wins

wmil 7y ago

Young men seem driven to compete for little reward. There's no need to try to intellectualize it.

moftz 7y ago
Any kind of competition can have real rewards at the highest levels. Many people like shooting their friends in paintball on the weekend with rented gear but there is also a professional level where there is real money and sponsorships available. Many male animals will engage in some sort of competition, sometimes with rewards and risks (mates, food, death) and sometimes just for play. It's ridiculous to act like competitive online gaming is any different from puppies rough housing or from lions fighting over leadership of the pride. No one is going to die but gaming could just be something fun to do after being at work all day or it could be what puts food on the table.
krageon 7y ago
> Young men Why make this a gender thing?
- beaker52 7y ago
  Probably because it doesn't outwardly appear to affect young women so much? People should be able to make such observations.

gizmo686 7y ago

As someone who likes to cheat at single player video games, the cheating itself is a lot of fun (at least it was until I started doing reverse engineering professionally; now it just feels like work). My sense of the multiplayer cheating scene (which I never looked at closely) is that most of the cheaters use tools developed by others. So, it seems possible that the people doing the bulk of the work are motivated in part by the technical challenge (including the cat and mouse aspect of it), and the social proof that comes along with sharing their cheats. Once the cheats are out there, using them has a much lower barrier to entry.

julianee 7y ago
I would think money plays a big role too. Back when Apex Legends exploded into the scene with the initial user base, selling a hack for 10 a pop would make a lot of money.
- TheAdamAndChe 7y ago
  Is this legal? It's obviously against TOS, but I don't think breaking a TOS is illegal..
  - kemonocode 7y ago
    You could make a case that making a cheat is copyright infringement as Blizzard did [0] so yes, it can be illegal. [0] https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker-for-copyright-infringement-160704/ https://torrentfreak.com/blizzard-sues-overwatch-cheat-maker...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - JamesBarney 7y ago
      It seems like blizzard is really stretching and the cases that already went to court they lost. Is making an overlay a derivative work?
- im3w1l 7y ago
  I recently met someone who claimed he had a three person company making cheats. Maybe one of them was solely marketing? The memory blurs. They were selling cheats as a subscription service and with different tiers unlocking more cheats. Earned a decent salary doing it.
moftz 7y ago
There's a monetary incentive as well. If you can reliably produce new cheats that aren't detectable, people will buy them. There's usually an incentive not to share private cheats because once it's public, it will still probably work but will definitely get you banned. Amateurs and professionals both pay for private cheats so besides the technical challenge, there is some money to be made.

jeffshek 7y ago

Sense of social status, cheating artificially increases your rank. No one knows your cheating, so you get all the respect. Leaderboards are dopamine clickbait for trying to improve. Why do billionaires want to richer?

samwestdev 7y ago

Yes, especially in multiplayer focused games, if there's a way to cheat there will be cheaters. Also people who profit from the situations and sell cheating tools to other players.

rectang 7y ago

Playing by the rules favors those who the rules were set up to benefit. Are you poor, "ugly", unlucky, "stupid", uncoordinated? Cheating is your chance to win when our "just" society tells you you must lose. The transgression itself feels right and good.

willis936 7y ago
No one forces, or even pressures, anyone to play multiplayer video games.
- furyofantares 7y ago
  Right but if you spend your day resenting the rules you're expected to obey, you might spend your leisure time disobeying rules that have lesser consequences.
- ianleeclark 7y ago
  > No _one_ forces This assumes a subject is required for coercion. It might be that multiplayer games are the only way for someone to escape.
  - willis936 7y ago
    You’ll need to make a hell of an argument to make that sound reasonable.
    - ianleeclark 7y ago
      > You’ll need to make a hell of an argument to make that sound reasonable. I don't think this is really as difficult as you imagine. People in poverty have the decision to work or die. Poverty is a form of objective violence. Therefore, people are coerced by objective violence that doesn't depend on any sort of task master whipping them into action.
      - willis936 7y ago

sunnydayddr 7y ago

Cheating for gamers is like hacking for programmers, except you get points and there's a leaderboard.

throwaway3942 7y ago

I used to develop multiplayer cheats and bots because I enjoyed overcoming the technical challenge. Reverse engineering software, creating and injecting your own shell code in a game and see it working is extremely satisfying. It seems very selfish in retrospective and I'm sorry for all the gamer experiences I ruined.

awb 7y ago
Or maybe you saved someone from gaming addiction by breaking these games and making it harder to win.
- Operyl 7y ago
  Or the inverse: because someone had to work harder, the experience of finally winning only made the feeling so much better, and released a ton more endorphins. Or maybe .. neither really contributes or detracts from “gamer addiction”.

awb 7y ago

> Why would a person go to such great lengths to cheat at a video game? 1. Technical challenge 2. Trolling "try hards" 3. Dopamine from winning I'm sure there's a bunch of other reasons, but cheating is still like a game, just expanding the rules.

zZorgz 7y ago

As someone that's written a game "cheating" tool there's good technical / reverse engineering value from modding or cheating games. Plus it's fun to just be able to change a game (I fondly remember the days playing with Game Genie). It is indeed a bit immoral when one tries to cheat in a way that unfairly puts themselves ahead of other humans.

Mathnerd314 7y ago

A lot of games are just grinding, and cheating reduces the grinding. Usually it makes them more fun but sometimes it doesn't, in cases where the game is terrible to begin with. After a while cheating is more fun than the game. One could also look at Twitch streamers and ask why the people watching don't just play the game; the answer for a lot of games is that the games are incredibly difficult and the streamer can get through a level in a few hours while it might take the viewer months. I don't think money enters into it. People just do weird things, like painting miniatures or climbing Mt. Everest, and hacking is another of those hobbies.

kstenerud 7y ago

There are different kinds of cheaters. Some like the rush of doing something "naughty". Some want quick results. Some want prestige. Some want to explore and exploit the system itself rather than the game. Some want to gold farm. Some want to be like gods. Some want to automate the tedious parts. Some want to take down big mobs that can't be taken down any other way. I once wrote about 400k of Blech code for Macroquest to automate the most tedious parts of EQ grinding, and to automate support party members (running on separate accounts) when I couldn't find a group (before the mercenary system), powerlevel new accounts, or needed more precision to one-group multibox raid targets (for example, Overlord Mata Muram). In many ways it brought the game to a whole new level of challenges due to the difficulty of my targets, and the strategies I needed to employ. It was actually quite cool, consisting of modules for healing, buffing, offtanking, main tanking, positioning, dd, dots, aggro management, clickies, AA abilities, timers... the works. I had a configuration language that assembled the necessary modules to produce the behavior I needed for a particular task. All of the dev work involved, at my professional rate, would have come out to 5 or 6 figures, so there's that :P

inetknght 7y ago
Some want to role play but the game didn't provide the sandbox for it.
withinboredom 7y ago
Some just want to enjoy the story-telling and skip the bs.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  There should be a distinction between single player and multiplayer games. I've absolutely used cheat-engine in single player games. If it was up to me, entering the Konami code would unlock everything in every single player game. Everyone has the right to access content they've purchased in the way and order they see fit. But when you're playing with other people there's really no excuse.
  - 7y ago

fenwick67 7y ago

There are really 2 kinds of cheating in competitive games (counter-strike etc). The first are cheats like an overt aimbot, which are blatant and where basically everyone gets shot in the head from a mile away whenever the cheater has line-of-sight. These I imagine are only fun for trolling. The second are cheats that are more subtle, showing you the location of hidden enemies etc. Since these aren't just a "win button", the cheater still gets some satisfaction from winning. After all, they still had to shoot and kill the other players, and they're not guaranteed to win. In their mind they still won, they just had a little help. This kind of cheating is akin to cheating in sports by using steroids. You still have to do a lot of the same work, but it's easier to win.

krageon 7y ago

> Why would a person go to such great lengths Probably because adversarial coding is fun, and cheating at videogames is one of the best free ways to really get going doing that against a party that is really invested in stopping you. There's other options, but those are much more likely to lead to arrests.

akerl_ 7y ago
What percentage of people who use cheats in video games took part in development of the code involved, vs just downloading and executing code written by someone else?
- krageon 7y ago
  Some percentage. I'm sure there's other motivations, but I have no idea what those would be.

xzel 7y ago

After beating Diablo 2 on a few characters I started to always used maphack. It took the guess work out of some of the repetitive actions. I feel like most hardcore, not the mode that is, players used it since it could take minutes off a Cow/Baal/Pindel etc. run. It didn't feel like cheating, although it certainly was, and at a certain point I felt like the game was unplayable without it. My point with all this is, I think there are certain quality of life hacks/addons that make games more playable in a way and then there are the other group of cheats, that remove skill gaps, such as click macros in games where combos are needed, aim/wallhack and others.

tsukurimashou 7y ago

>is there monetary incentive? esports? not sure how common it is these days to have someone cheating in a competition but I can tell you it happened quite a lot of times in the past, especially with FPS games.

rambojazz 7y ago

I'm speaking from the point of view of an offline gamer (I never play online). Some games make you take repetitive actions in order to advance in the game (perhaps to lengthen the life of the game, otherwise you'd finish it too soon). An example of this is repeating the same races over and over in order to win more cash so you can advance. This gets boring pretty quickly, so I cheat by adding me more cash without having to race the same event infinitely many times. Online play could have more incentives (prizes) for people higher on the leaderboard.

csunbird 7y ago

On top the reasons mentioned in the sibling comments, there is also a huge market for in game currencies, which bots make is infinitely easier to farm those currencies.

anon9001 7y ago

I got into coding by writing hacks, cheats, and bots. It's one of the few ways to directly translate code into something that feels like a super power.

papreclip 7y ago

People make cheats for money, for online infamy, and for the challenge of it People use cheats because it makes the game more enjoyable. In FPS, someone can shoot you before you have time to react. In RTS, someone can step out of the darkness with an army that traps yours at just the right moment. Cheats replace those unpleasant experiences with pleasant ones where you ambush the enemy and fight them with an advantage Unfortunately cheating is a negative sum game. When both players cheat, it doesn't just even the odds once again, it makes the game you're playing significantly less enjoyable

jerf 7y ago
"People make cheats for money, for online infamy, and for the challenge of it" In all seriousness, I think there's a non-trivial aspect to it where human psychology is misfiring in the modern era. Certain people, mostly younger, have a drive to show off to potential mates, some more so than others, and superficially, spending lots of time creating cheats like this looks like it's leading to social approval and standing. You get lots of "thanks" and "kudos". But in reality, you're getting nothing. It doesn't work. People are willing to use the output, but whether rational on some level or not, I don't think you are really getting social credit for it, and even to the extent you are, it's far too widely dispersed to be any good. (That is, it may not exactly be useless to convince a million people to think slightly good of you, but harvesting that for any benefit is really tricky, whereas conclusively convincing someone you are a good person can be beneficial in all sorts of ways and is the basis of any number of relationships.) In grad school, I worked on an open source LCMS that spent a lot of time fighting people helping other students cheat on their homework. Instead of just solving their homework problem, the cheaters would solve the whole meta-problem (all the variants we might serve) and hand out the meta-solution. This requires a great deal more effort than just solving the individual problem alone. What was funny to me is... I don't think it actually got them anything. Nobody cares. They'll use your solution, but for all that work you get very little real social currency. The majority of your "customer base" is getting it from their friend, who got it from their friend, and the origin of the cheat isn't even known by probably the majority using it. Same sort of thing. Unfortunately, this is effectively unsolvable. By the time you hypothetically educate one group that this isn't useful, next year's group is already here. (Also, to be clear, I'm not saying this is all the reason, merely a less-explored one, and a sufficient one on its own to be a source of significant cheating.)

matheusmoreira 7y ago

Sometimes the game's just too boring and making a bot for it is actually much more fun. I had this experience with some mobile games and their little daily tasks. I realized they were trying to instill a daily login habit in me so I wrote a small client that'd log in and do the tasks. I turned their predatory design into a fun little project. Ironically, due to the way the game was designed the behavior of the bot is indistinguishable from that of a sufficiently addicted player.

mnowicki 7y ago
I feel like there's an important message somewhere in this post
- matheusmoreira 7y ago
  Two. 1. Hacking the game can be more interesting than playing the game. 2. There's absolutely nothing wrong with hacking games with immoral game design.

yutuytuyt 7y ago

there's decent money on it. also skills, resume?

izzydata 7y ago

With the rise of esports there is a lot of money to be made with no real consequences. It isn't illegal to essentially steal prize money by cheating at a video game. Also game streaming is big now and being "good" attracts more viewers so there is also a lot of money to be made by cheating. I have completely stopped taking video games seriously in any capacity as I am pretty confident the entire culture of competitive gaming is completely infested with cheating.

mstade 7y ago
Are there online e-sports tournaments of any meaningful size? (E.g. $1000+ prizes) The only tournaments I've seen amount to essentially LAN parties where all the equipment and installations are provided by the tournament, such that players all compete on fair terms and unable to cheat (unless the opsec at the tournament is terrible, I guess.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Buttons840 7y ago
Any competitive game with big money on the line has the top players gather in the same room (on a stage most likely), and play using computers controlled by the event organizers. The players winning these big tournaments do not cheat.
- ronald_dregan 7y ago
  there used to be a way to embed cheats within your steam profile directly (abusing some other feature to do so) and it'd activate on login. some guy got caught in a tournament using one. they probably dont let people sign into their own accounts anymore lol
- izzydata 7y ago
  You aren't thinking outside the box enough. If you could commission cheating software for $10,000+ then there is plenty you could do to circumvent the PCs being provided. It should also be noted that they allow self provided peripherals in most cases.

jtaft 7y ago

I did it to learn about computers and security. It's a form of sport too. Feels good to bend the rules and outsmart your opponent. (Opponent as in security controls, not in-game players). You get a rush when your hack works, and using it in a highly interactive environment makes it all the more fun. From a high level view, you learn: * Fundamentals of computer security * Fundamentals of computers, operating systems, and number systems. * Debugging skills!!! (Can't stress enough) * Perseverance * Note taking From a technical view, you learn: * Memory Forensics * Reverse Engineering * Patching executables (in memory and on disk) * Anti-Debugging and Anti-Anti debugging tricks * Packet sniffing and modifying * Crypto * 3D Modeling * Simple algorithms for writing bots * Memory corruption vulnerabilities * Programming That said, I'm HIGHLY against the use of cheats. If you want to show your friends and get a laugh out of it, that's fine! Just don't ruin the gaming experience for others. And don't do anything illegal of course.

strbean 7y ago
In the case of many games (mostly shallow MMOs), it is so much more fun to reverse engineer and break the game than it is to actually play the game.

jotm 7y ago

I've done it in some MMOs so they can shove their grindfest casinos up their asses. I don't know how it got so bad, MMOs used to be focused on group content, socialization, meaningful progression. Nowadays it's solo grinding bs with constant reminders to "buy this shit, it helps you/makes you look fab". Just sad money squeezing activities that waste your time.

lmilcin 7y ago

You are making mistake by trying to explain somebody elses motives for cheating by using your value system. First, these are not great lengths when all you need to do is download and install an application. Second, some people don't get as much kick from playing a game as from dominating other players. They want to win the game in any way possible, but don't consider winning fairly to be any more satisfying than winning with cheating. They might be in denial over their abilities and use cheating to feel better. They don't feel any need to be courteous or fair. These are people who, when they loose a game against you, will say "fuck you" instead of congratulating you. Don't try to find logic where there isn't any.

mnowicki 7y ago
I think that's only one subset of cheaters, many people use cheats in non-pvp games or use cheats in a specific server where everyone has the same cheats. It's often just a way to get more replayability out of a game someone really enjoys. In monster hunter, the speedrunning community is migrating to PC because the ability to use cheats to negate the huge amount of RNG present in the game. Cheating is usually looked down on by speedrunners for obvious reasons but because of the difficulty of speedrunning a game with so much RNG(not rng that effects your gameplay, but that effects your ability to play at all), modders are basically making a new game with the rng removed and people are speedrunning that, and it's widely accepted as necessary by the community. So cheating is often just a means of either getting something new out of a game or 'fixing' aspects of a game that the community takes issue with. I agree that players like you describe, who's main goal is griefing other players, also make up a large portion of cheaters, just wanted to further elaborate on your response that not all cheaters are doing it to 'move up the leaderboard'
- lmilcin 7y ago
  I think the topic of the article is cheaters that compete with other players. Anti-cheats are not really necessary for games where the only person being cheated is the cheater. I also excluded professional players because the original poster was basically trying to get an answer regarding what kind of person would cheat when there was no extra incentive. Obviously, professional players or players in any games that offer valuable prizes have a real incentive to cheat.

SilasX 7y ago

I cheated on the original Halo (PC, online capture-the-flag) because I really sucked at it compared to everyone else, which made it unbalanced and therefore not fun to plan (not saying it was right, just filling in the understanding you were asking for). I didn't look into aiming bots, but I did figure out how to edit the resource files to make the walls transparent so I could camp the flag and see players coming for it long before I was supposed to.

egdod 7y ago

Griefers.

Can_Not 7y ago

Sometimes "cheating" is just fixing broken things the devs make really dumb decisions about. In RA2, online matchmaking required you to use the smallest resolution possible, which is dumb when you just beat the full game at a normal resolution. In DotA2, you can't zoom out. I just played LoL instead of "cheating" though (a.k.a. making the game playable). In Dawn of War I used a zoom out mod once but honestly the game already let you zoom out reasonably enough anyways. But these weren't for getting an unfair advantage, this was for solving claustrophobia and not-having-the-camera-right-in-the-dirt.

bashmelek 7y ago

There is also the market for selling digital goods. People wanting to make real money outside of the game will automate farming gold, items, sell an account with a great character or one that unlocked a lot of perks from wins