5 ms·

Yes, 100%. With the radar hacks I’ve built, I can see (with a high level of accuracy) which other players are aiming at me while not having a line of sight. Wh

Yes, 100%. With the radar hacks I’ve built, I can see (with a high level of accuracy) which other players are aiming at me while not having a line of sight. When I first started hacking in Escape From Tarkov in 2020, I ran into another cheater once. We stared each other down from opposite sides of a hill until we both turned around and left. I was banned last year and stopped playing EFT for a bit. When I picked back up over the summer I was absolutely floored by how bad the game had become with cheaters. A friend that builds paid cheats had given me access to his platform, so I indulged. My first 3 matches had at least one other cheater in them. There’s a secret handshake now - you wiggle from across the map at the other person so that you can go your separate ways. Some don’t respect the wiggle and try to shoot you from distance. The players not using hacks get decimated. Witnessing this changed my perspective on cheating. I don’t consider it a technical challenge anymore, now it’s a necessity to play and level up in the game. As far as bans, it truly is a cat and mouse game. The team I am involved with write hacks full time now. There are full time support people. Full time QA folks. Ban waves are actually great for business because players become addicted to the hacks, and as soon as they’re banned they want back in. In the case of Tarkov, I’ve noticed that the company that makes the game will wait until known cheaters elapse the chargeback window on their payments, then ban them. They know the cheaters will come back with a new account.

cinntaile 5y ago
> When I picked back up over the summer I was absolutely floored by how bad the game had become with cheaters. But... You're contributing to that since you're one of the cheaters? Is there some sort of cognitive dissonance at play here?
- neetrain 5y ago
  I guess it is like driving a car? Everybody knows cars are bad for society and the environment, but you have to drive anyway to go to office. He said specifically that cheating is "a necessity to play and level up in the game".
  - cinntaile 5y ago
    It would probably be more akin to cheating on a test. Like if you don't want to put in the hours but you want to perform above your actual level. These kind of games suffer from survivorship bias, the people that stick around sink thousands of hours into them. They have a very steep learning curve. People with experience and the gunplay to match it will absolutely destroy people that can't, won't or haven't put in the work. Without having to cheat.
  - ReactiveJelly 5y ago
    But cheating in a game is more like littering, I can easily choose not to litter. And my presence on the road doesn't change the rules to disadvantage other drivers. It makes the road more congested, yes, but for everyone including me.
  - Hikikomori 5y ago
    Its not required at all, I've managed it, but I'm also very good at fps games, but my friends that are not as good are still managing, at a slower pace. Its only 'required' if you do not want to spend time to learn the game, mechanics, where good loot is on the map, how ammo and armor work. Basically sidestepping what makes this game fun and challenging. Frankly a bit disgusted at his point of view, seems to have no remorse at all. A subset of people paying for hacks does not make it ok for him to hack, and since he can spot hackers now he seems to have justified it to himself.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lifeformed 5y ago
> now it’s a necessity to play and level up in the game. Wow. Have you considered just getting better, or quitting? This is a very selfish way of thinking. You are playing at everyone else's expense. It's such a huge waste of time when I play against cheaters in games. Sometimes I can still beat them because the players that resort to cheating are not very good. When cheaters aren't around, I have lots of fun. Are you even having fun when you cheat? Imagine playing soccer and you bribe the judge to let you pick up the ball with your hands whenever you want. All the players stare in disbelief and disdain you, and some leave the game. Everyone boos you. You slowly walk into the goal uncontested. Wow, is that fun? Why do you keep coming back every day to do it? Why are you spending this time getting this referee into other people's games? I know you probably don't care, but just remember that it's not "just a game". You are stealing the time of lots of people who are just trying to have an evening of fun with their friends after a hard days of work. It is antisocial behavior for your own monetary gain. How can you justify this to yourself?
- z3phyr 5y ago
  Not the parent, but the situation you described is not fun. But say, I can magically stretch my legs? Or make players not solid for a moment? That's magic from Harry Potter and that's fun. Fun is making a computer do stuff using your skills which it was not originally mandated to do. Then there is meta game of playing against other wizards of the world. However, I dispise pair exploits and unskilled players using paid exploits. That's not magic.
  - lifeformed 5y ago
    > But say, I can magically stretch my legs? Or make players not solid for a moment? That's magic from Harry Potter and that's fun. Sure, that's fun if you're playing by yourself or if it is a part of the game. But if you're playing against other people who don't have that advantage, then how is that fun? Is it fun to cut in line ahead of others? Sure, maybe there's a thrill for a moment, but it should quickly become apparent that you're just taking advantage of other people. If you want to play against the other wizards of the world but hurt innocent bystanders, then it's a very rude game to play.
grog454 5y ago
Do you ever stop to think about whether what you are doing is wrong? I understand and am not surprised that there are businesses built on cheating (see Blizz vs. Glider), but it's pretty striking to me that you never even mention ethics or morality in your post. I have been creating and hacking games for at least 20 years now. The hacking actually started when a friend who I shared one of my earliest games with (most likely a Breakout clone in Windows GDI / C++) hacked it with a memory editor to change his score. I was amazed at the time, both by his apparent ingenuity but also how easy it was to do myself in other games. 12+ years later you could still use a memory editor to desync RTS games (aoe2) or even over-write resources or XP (as in some SC2 custom games back in 2010). But I've also played games competitively. I was probably very close to good enough to compete in cash tournaments in Unreal Tournament 2004. I remember ending up in a game with a cheater who bragged about his aim-bot's ability to compensate for high latency (up to 300ms). I was genuinely impressed but at the same time found it off-putting. I imagine what I felt was tiny sliver of what someone must feel after working their whole life at a professional sport only to lose out on an Olympic gold medal to someone who was later found to be using PEDs. And then take it a step further and imagine if Lance Armstrong gloated about how long and effectively he was able to keep his PED usage undetected. It may sound paradoxical but I follow a code of ethics when it comes to hacking. I never give myself a competitive edge in multiplayer games that take their competitions seriously. Furthermore I would never distribute or share my hacks even if I did. I treat hacking as an exercise and mostly now just write bots that "play fair" because it is still an interesting technical challenge. By "play fair", I mean they read pixels from the screen and send keyboard and mouse inputs back to the game. Same interface as a human - no direct memory reading or writing of any kind. Even Alphastar (Deepmind's SC2 AI) doesn't go that far since it uses the game's provided API. This has the added advantage of being virtually impossible to detect via software (especially with human-simulated input delays and randomness). That's two of my perspectives: as a hacker and separately as a semi-competitive gamer. And I have a third perspective as a game developer. Because of my past experience, it was an incredibly easy decision to make everything I could server authority when I created my game Nebulous. Player's positions are lock-step synced with the server and the server even keeps track of the player's view so clients only receive data for objects nearby. This was actually a networking optimization with the added benefit of making things like your radar hack impossible. (There are certainly workarounds that I'm aware of in my game, but the idea is sound). Nebulous has a competitive 1v1 mode (with an Elo-like leaderboard). I used to do monthly ladders with in-game rewards at the end of month but had to do away with the rewards due to the all the "social" hacking it encouraged (win trading, smurfing, and multiple accounts. Some players have literally hundreds of accounts). Sucks for everyone. For a while, one of the things competitive players enjoyed about the game was the discovery of "lightning fingers" (coined by South Korean players) or extremely fast tapping to eject mass by using multiple fingers. Think finger-rolling in Tetris: https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE?t=80 https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE?t=80. Unfortunately you can imagine where that ended up going. Click macros became ubiquitous at the top of the ladder. There is nothing inherently wrong with a macro recording app (not sure if they still even require rooting). I wrote some hokey click-macro-detection algorithms but all you had to do was record your clicks while doing the technique successfully once for sufficiently long and replay that recording in segments. So I tried fighting fire with fire: I added an "auto click" feature with which you could hold the eject button down to eject mass at the server's tick rate (20hz), which is of course what the macros and very best legit clickers were able to accomplish. Unfortunately this really pissed off some legitimate players. It was a lose-lose situation. Nowadays the biggest issue I face is publicly distributed bots (even available on Github!). These are even harder to detect. I'm not sure if I really had a point with this post, but maybe I can provide unique perspective(s).
chii 5y ago
> I was absolutely floored by how bad the game had become with cheaters. i think there's actually value in a game server which allows _all_ cheats (that does not crash or disable the game from being playable). Like 2b2t (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t) minecraft server, the gameplay advances is amazing when cheaters are allowed full creativity. It changes the game in a whole new dimension. It also solves the problem of cheaters - in the sense, cheating is basically part of the game in 2b2t.
- unclebucknasty 5y ago
  >there's actually value in a game server which allows _all_ cheats There's no such thing as "all cheats" by definition. There's always "all cheats plus one".
hkopp 5y ago
Very interesting. Thanks. Do you know how much a cheat usually costs?

cinntaile 5y ago

> When I picked back up over the summer I was absolutely floored by how bad the game had become with cheaters. But... You're contributing to that since you're one of the cheaters? Is there some sort of cognitive dissonance at play here?

neetrain 5y ago
I guess it is like driving a car? Everybody knows cars are bad for society and the environment, but you have to drive anyway to go to office. He said specifically that cheating is "a necessity to play and level up in the game".
- cinntaile 5y ago
  It would probably be more akin to cheating on a test. Like if you don't want to put in the hours but you want to perform above your actual level. These kind of games suffer from survivorship bias, the people that stick around sink thousands of hours into them. They have a very steep learning curve. People with experience and the gunplay to match it will absolutely destroy people that can't, won't or haven't put in the work. Without having to cheat.
- ReactiveJelly 5y ago
  But cheating in a game is more like littering, I can easily choose not to litter. And my presence on the road doesn't change the rules to disadvantage other drivers. It makes the road more congested, yes, but for everyone including me.
- Hikikomori 5y ago
  Its not required at all, I've managed it, but I'm also very good at fps games, but my friends that are not as good are still managing, at a slower pace. Its only 'required' if you do not want to spend time to learn the game, mechanics, where good loot is on the map, how ammo and armor work. Basically sidestepping what makes this game fun and challenging. Frankly a bit disgusted at his point of view, seems to have no remorse at all. A subset of people paying for hacks does not make it ok for him to hack, and since he can spot hackers now he seems to have justified it to himself.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lifeformed 5y ago

> now it’s a necessity to play and level up in the game. Wow. Have you considered just getting better, or quitting? This is a very selfish way of thinking. You are playing at everyone else's expense. It's such a huge waste of time when I play against cheaters in games. Sometimes I can still beat them because the players that resort to cheating are not very good. When cheaters aren't around, I have lots of fun. Are you even having fun when you cheat? Imagine playing soccer and you bribe the judge to let you pick up the ball with your hands whenever you want. All the players stare in disbelief and disdain you, and some leave the game. Everyone boos you. You slowly walk into the goal uncontested. Wow, is that fun? Why do you keep coming back every day to do it? Why are you spending this time getting this referee into other people's games? I know you probably don't care, but just remember that it's not "just a game". You are stealing the time of lots of people who are just trying to have an evening of fun with their friends after a hard days of work. It is antisocial behavior for your own monetary gain. How can you justify this to yourself?

z3phyr 5y ago
Not the parent, but the situation you described is not fun. But say, I can magically stretch my legs? Or make players not solid for a moment? That's magic from Harry Potter and that's fun. Fun is making a computer do stuff using your skills which it was not originally mandated to do. Then there is meta game of playing against other wizards of the world. However, I dispise pair exploits and unskilled players using paid exploits. That's not magic.
- lifeformed 5y ago
  > But say, I can magically stretch my legs? Or make players not solid for a moment? That's magic from Harry Potter and that's fun. Sure, that's fun if you're playing by yourself or if it is a part of the game. But if you're playing against other people who don't have that advantage, then how is that fun? Is it fun to cut in line ahead of others? Sure, maybe there's a thrill for a moment, but it should quickly become apparent that you're just taking advantage of other people. If you want to play against the other wizards of the world but hurt innocent bystanders, then it's a very rude game to play.

grog454 5y ago

Do you ever stop to think about whether what you are doing is wrong? I understand and am not surprised that there are businesses built on cheating (see Blizz vs. Glider), but it's pretty striking to me that you never even mention ethics or morality in your post. I have been creating and hacking games for at least 20 years now. The hacking actually started when a friend who I shared one of my earliest games with (most likely a Breakout clone in Windows GDI / C++) hacked it with a memory editor to change his score. I was amazed at the time, both by his apparent ingenuity but also how easy it was to do myself in other games. 12+ years later you could still use a memory editor to desync RTS games (aoe2) or even over-write resources or XP (as in some SC2 custom games back in 2010). But I've also played games competitively. I was probably very close to good enough to compete in cash tournaments in Unreal Tournament 2004. I remember ending up in a game with a cheater who bragged about his aim-bot's ability to compensate for high latency (up to 300ms). I was genuinely impressed but at the same time found it off-putting. I imagine what I felt was tiny sliver of what someone must feel after working their whole life at a professional sport only to lose out on an Olympic gold medal to someone who was later found to be using PEDs. And then take it a step further and imagine if Lance Armstrong gloated about how long and effectively he was able to keep his PED usage undetected. It may sound paradoxical but I follow a code of ethics when it comes to hacking. I never give myself a competitive edge in multiplayer games that take their competitions seriously. Furthermore I would never distribute or share my hacks even if I did. I treat hacking as an exercise and mostly now just write bots that "play fair" because it is still an interesting technical challenge. By "play fair", I mean they read pixels from the screen and send keyboard and mouse inputs back to the game. Same interface as a human - no direct memory reading or writing of any kind. Even Alphastar (Deepmind's SC2 AI) doesn't go that far since it uses the game's provided API. This has the added advantage of being virtually impossible to detect via software (especially with human-simulated input delays and randomness). That's two of my perspectives: as a hacker and separately as a semi-competitive gamer. And I have a third perspective as a game developer. Because of my past experience, it was an incredibly easy decision to make everything I could server authority when I created my game Nebulous. Player's positions are lock-step synced with the server and the server even keeps track of the player's view so clients only receive data for objects nearby. This was actually a networking optimization with the added benefit of making things like your radar hack impossible. (There are certainly workarounds that I'm aware of in my game, but the idea is sound). Nebulous has a competitive 1v1 mode (with an Elo-like leaderboard). I used to do monthly ladders with in-game rewards at the end of month but had to do away with the rewards due to the all the "social" hacking it encouraged (win trading, smurfing, and multiple accounts. Some players have literally hundreds of accounts). Sucks for everyone. For a while, one of the things competitive players enjoyed about the game was the discovery of "lightning fingers" (coined by South Korean players) or extremely fast tapping to eject mass by using multiple fingers. Think finger-rolling in Tetris: https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE?t=80 https://youtu.be/n-BZ5-Q48lE?t=80. Unfortunately you can imagine where that ended up going. Click macros became ubiquitous at the top of the ladder. There is nothing inherently wrong with a macro recording app (not sure if they still even require rooting). I wrote some hokey click-macro-detection algorithms but all you had to do was record your clicks while doing the technique successfully once for sufficiently long and replay that recording in segments. So I tried fighting fire with fire: I added an "auto click" feature with which you could hold the eject button down to eject mass at the server's tick rate (20hz), which is of course what the macros and very best legit clickers were able to accomplish. Unfortunately this really pissed off some legitimate players. It was a lose-lose situation. Nowadays the biggest issue I face is publicly distributed bots (even available on Github!). These are even harder to detect. I'm not sure if I really had a point with this post, but maybe I can provide unique perspective(s).

chii 5y ago

> I was absolutely floored by how bad the game had become with cheaters. i think there's actually value in a game server which allows _all_ cheats (that does not crash or disable the game from being playable). Like 2b2t (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2b2t) minecraft server, the gameplay advances is amazing when cheaters are allowed full creativity. It changes the game in a whole new dimension. It also solves the problem of cheaters - in the sense, cheating is basically part of the game in 2b2t.

unclebucknasty 5y ago
>there's actually value in a game server which allows _all_ cheats There's no such thing as "all cheats" by definition. There's always "all cheats plus one".

hkopp 5y ago

Very interesting. Thanks. Do you know how much a cheat usually costs?