6 ms·

I played competitive level Quake 3/Quake Live for a number of years, during the height of its popularity. I also have friends who play more modern competitive F

by ajxs 5y ago

I played competitive level Quake 3/Quake Live for a number of years, during the height of its popularity. I also have friends who play more modern competitive FPS games, such as CS:GO. Even though QL was only a small online scene, the use aimbots, triggerbots, wallhacks, and similar tools was always very common at the competitive level. Quake Live had very limited anti-cheat functionality, so it was never relied upon for proving legitimacy. Despite this, cheaters generally didn't last long in competitive play before being banned. Even if the computer can't unequivocally identify the presence of these tools, skilled players could usually tell the difference. Even if skilled players couldn't tell by watching alone, other contextual factors usually gave hackers away. Such as lack of LAN experience, no history of natural skill progression, etc. I'm aware that this doesn't prove that we caught every hacker, just that we caught many of them. These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.

artificialLimbs 5y ago
Can confirm. I was playing Quake Live extremely well one day (for whatever reason??) and a couple of the guys specced me and announced that I, indeed, was not cheating. That led me to wonder how they knew and some searching turned up a few threads about various tools and tricks of the trade WRT that game specifically.
_the_inflator 5y ago
I side with you. Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative. However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run. Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson? I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
- void_mint 5y ago
  Cheating in video games is nothing like steroids. The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Steroids aren't magic and don't miraculously give the user abilities they didn't have prior. Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
  - jacobmischka 5y ago
    > The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Sure, because they were also doping. Seriously though, I wouldn't say steroids make you _more skilled_, but they absolutely give a physical advantage over natural athletes. Which is why there aren't any top level natural athletes anymore except in very dedicated natural-only circles.
    - void_mint 5y ago
      I'm not sure what point you're making. My point is that steroids don't turn average people into elite athletes, which is much closer to what auto aim or wall hacking tools in FPS games do. Average people appear elite because their tools make them perform that way. This is not what steroids do. You're agreeing with me, I think, but in the form of an argument.
      - allendoerfer 5y ago
        A better comparison to cheating wouuld be, if one of the runners would have taken a car instead of running.
        hnick 5y ago
        Or a motor hidden in a bike frame: https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a19219/professional-cyclist-caught-cheating-with-a-motor-in-her-bike/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a19219/pro...
      - jacobmischka 5y ago
ToJans 5y ago
I still play QuakeLive on a regular basis; the problem is mostly fixed by playing on servers with a stable community. AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.) Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected. And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware. I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately. In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.
- ajxs 5y ago
  > ...although some prefer to play using timenudge... Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me. The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear. What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all). There's some good information on how this system works here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is/unlagged/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lucb1e 5y ago
If you ever played OpenArena I would be curious what you think of the communities playing OA or QL. Coming from the small OA community when QL launched, I found QL players somewhere between hostile and mute, so I only played a few weeks before leaving that scene. There isn't always constantly friendly chatter in OA, but on occasion there is. In QL I often wouldn't even get answers to direct questions (I don't remember what, but I remember it was a thing I'd expect most players to know). The number of cheaters in OA was also, well, normal to me, but I suppose very low by other standards. The number of people that wouldn't stop and had to be banned from servers can be counted on one hand during the years that I had rcon on some servers.
rcarmo 5y ago
Many years ago I used to run a games service [1] (spanning q1 to q3, plus Unreal and various mods for all engines) and often had people message me occasionally about player X or Y cheating in various ways (these were the days before PunkBuster, but it happened more or less continuously). Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries. A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]). Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it. (Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times) [1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/games/quake_iii_arena https://taoofmac.com/space/games/quake_iii_arena [2]: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600
- Passthepeas 5y ago
  QC doesn't have /votekick though
  - rcarmo 5y ago
    Might have been Live after all. I'm getting that old :)
mrslave 5y ago
What you said about progression matches my personal experience. I jumped in the deep end of Q3 just before Quake Live came out with about 2-3 months of playing every evening for hours (vacation/between contracts -- I can't recall). I started saying, "Woah, this guy is so good he has to be a bot!" to the best player one evening early in my journey, after he fragged me for the 10th time in a row with nary a scratch from my pathetic efforts. By the end I was about as good as that, and other players routinely called me a cheat. My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  With you on progression. First time you see someone being super fast you call them a cheater. Then you learn about Strafe jumping and that it's just how q3 physics work (even if unintentional from the programmers perhaps) and you learn it suddenly you're called a cheater by n00bs. Same with jumping onto things of a certain height. If your graphics hardware could not do a certain framerate constantly it was impossible to do those jumps. Get a new graphics card that could render at the full frame rate cap constantly and you could literally just hold the forward key in front of that obstacle and jump and you were there. Someone with worse hardware would obviously call you a cheat because it was impossible. So at least back then it was also a hardware thing. Another one: I had a regular PS/2 ball mouse. I was just unable to do certain things. Until someone told me there was a setting in Windows to change the scan rate, which improved accuracy and also a USB infrared mouse. Huuuuge difference. In fact I still use that USB mouse today. I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't. Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc. Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
cdirkx 5y ago
One problem is that the uncertainty around hackers can lead to a toxic accusatory culture. I have seen multiple games where the high level (but below pro) gets bogged down in accusations of hacking; is someone genuinly more skilled or using aimbot (one is more comforting than the other). People giving up on a match because of some percieved inconsistency in the movement of someone on the other team etc. Or cases where someone is genuinly hacking but others not believing it "you're just mad" because of all the false positives.

by ajxs 5y ago

artificialLimbs 5y ago

Can confirm. I was playing Quake Live extremely well one day (for whatever reason??) and a couple of the guys specced me and announced that I, indeed, was not cheating. That led me to wonder how they knew and some searching turned up a few threads about various tools and tricks of the trade WRT that game specifically.

_the_inflator 5y ago

I side with you. Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative. However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run. Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson? I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.

void_mint 5y ago
Cheating in video games is nothing like steroids. The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Steroids aren't magic and don't miraculously give the user abilities they didn't have prior. Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
- jacobmischka 5y ago
  > The people using steroids are equally as skilled as their opponents. Sure, because they were also doping. Seriously though, I wouldn't say steroids make you _more skilled_, but they absolutely give a physical advantage over natural athletes. Which is why there aren't any top level natural athletes anymore except in very dedicated natural-only circles.
  - void_mint 5y ago
    I'm not sure what point you're making. My point is that steroids don't turn average people into elite athletes, which is much closer to what auto aim or wall hacking tools in FPS games do. Average people appear elite because their tools make them perform that way. This is not what steroids do. You're agreeing with me, I think, but in the form of an argument.
    - allendoerfer 5y ago
      A better comparison to cheating wouuld be, if one of the runners would have taken a car instead of running.
      - hnick 5y ago
        Or a motor hidden in a bike frame: https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a19219/professional-cyclist-caught-cheating-with-a-motor-in-her-bike/ https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a19219/pro...
    - jacobmischka 5y ago

ToJans 5y ago

I still play QuakeLive on a regular basis; the problem is mostly fixed by playing on servers with a stable community. AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.) Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected. And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware. I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately. In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.

ajxs 5y ago
> ...although some prefer to play using timenudge... Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me. The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear. What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all). There's some good information on how this system works here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is/unlagged/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lucb1e 5y ago

If you ever played OpenArena I would be curious what you think of the communities playing OA or QL. Coming from the small OA community when QL launched, I found QL players somewhere between hostile and mute, so I only played a few weeks before leaving that scene. There isn't always constantly friendly chatter in OA, but on occasion there is. In QL I often wouldn't even get answers to direct questions (I don't remember what, but I remember it was a thing I'd expect most players to know). The number of cheaters in OA was also, well, normal to me, but I suppose very low by other standards. The number of people that wouldn't stop and had to be banned from servers can be counted on one hand during the years that I had rcon on some servers.

rcarmo 5y ago

Many years ago I used to run a games service [1] (spanning q1 to q3, plus Unreal and various mods for all engines) and often had people message me occasionally about player X or Y cheating in various ways (these were the days before PunkBuster, but it happened more or less continuously). Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries. A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]). Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it. (Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times) [1]: https://taoofmac.com/space/games/quake_iii_arena https://taoofmac.com/space/games/quake_iii_arena [2]: https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600 https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2018/09/30/1600

Passthepeas 5y ago
QC doesn't have /votekick though
- rcarmo 5y ago
  Might have been Live after all. I'm getting that old :)

mrslave 5y ago

What you said about progression matches my personal experience. I jumped in the deep end of Q3 just before Quake Live came out with about 2-3 months of playing every evening for hours (vacation/between contracts -- I can't recall). I started saying, "Woah, this guy is so good he has to be a bot!" to the best player one evening early in my journey, after he fragged me for the 10th time in a row with nary a scratch from my pathetic efforts. By the end I was about as good as that, and other players routinely called me a cheat. My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).

tharkun__ 5y ago
With you on progression. First time you see someone being super fast you call them a cheater. Then you learn about Strafe jumping and that it's just how q3 physics work (even if unintentional from the programmers perhaps) and you learn it suddenly you're called a cheater by n00bs. Same with jumping onto things of a certain height. If your graphics hardware could not do a certain framerate constantly it was impossible to do those jumps. Get a new graphics card that could render at the full frame rate cap constantly and you could literally just hold the forward key in front of that obstacle and jump and you were there. Someone with worse hardware would obviously call you a cheat because it was impossible. So at least back then it was also a hardware thing. Another one: I had a regular PS/2 ball mouse. I was just unable to do certain things. Until someone told me there was a setting in Windows to change the scan rate, which improved accuracy and also a USB infrared mouse. Huuuuge difference. In fact I still use that USB mouse today. I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't. Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating. Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc. Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.

cdirkx 5y ago

One problem is that the uncertainty around hackers can lead to a toxic accusatory culture. I have seen multiple games where the high level (but below pro) gets bogged down in accusations of hacking; is someone genuinly more skilled or using aimbot (one is more comforting than the other). People giving up on a match because of some percieved inconsistency in the movement of someone on the other team etc. Or cases where someone is genuinly hacking but others not believing it "you're just mad" because of all the false positives.