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I have found over the last 5 years that it is impossible for me to take online multiplayer gaming serious in any capacity anymore. Cheating has become so rampan

I have found over the last 5 years that it is impossible for me to take online multiplayer gaming serious in any capacity anymore. Cheating has become so rampant and so ubiquitous that I have no confidence in any online gaming match to be cheater free. If people are cheating then what am I even playing for? It's only fun for me when I know there is some semblance of integrity between the players, but nobody else seems to care. I don't even particularly care about being good or winning. You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. I also have no trust in any sort of gaming related records of feats of ability. I've been deeply involved with gaming communities in the past where people would show off their world records. I would question such scores only to be flamed and then years later it is discovered they were cheating after all. Really my only point is that I despise cheaters and any game that isn't single player or only between friends may as well not exist for me anymore.

dumpsterlid 4y ago
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JohnClark1337 4y ago
I feel like I've "aged out" of online multiplayer gaming. I could pick up COD for maybe the hour or two of gaming time I have a day and immediately be dominated by those younger who have a vast amount of more time to hone their techniques. Or I could play something single player (or something that can easily be played single player like an MMO) that relaxes me after a stressful day at work. I choose the latter.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Except, ten years ago "older folk" COULD enjoy much less competitive online multiplayer experiences. I place the moment Call of Duty started spawning you randomly during team deathmatch as the marker. Instead of spawning in a safe zone with clearish "Fronts" to approach and attack and plan around. Instead, you spawn randomly, often with your back to an enemy, and half the time you spawn you instead have an enemy's back to you. I hypothesize that quick "yeah I got a kill" made the game more attractive to kids, and not allowing you to plan and implement any sort of individual strategy other than "click heads faster than the other guy" made online games more demanding in ability.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Online multiplayer doesn't have to be competitive, though, and co-op seems to be growing in popularity after PvP peaked a while ago.
- dumpsterlid 4y ago
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mchaver 4y ago
It sucks and I suppose things will only get worse as AI improves. The unfortunate thing with computers is once easy automation is available and there is a reward for winning, then these systems will attract cheaters, spammers, etc. Spam email, online game cheaters and the most recent example Clarkesworld Magazine that had to close submissions because so many people were using AI systems to generate low quality stories. The only positive thing is maybe gamers will push for more local multiplayer options.
- ShrimpHawk 4y ago
  AI has actually been working against cheaters. Using server side measurements fed into an AI like OSRS does has drastically cut down on the number of cheaters. Mass amounts of data can be collected of users mouse movements that when fed in can detect cheaters using aim botting in FPS. Valve actually does some of this already as well to reduce the number of blatent cheating overwatch candidates in CS:GO.
chongli 4y ago
You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. That’s the difference. The stakes are way higher in video games. People pour thousands and thousands of hours into these games. They dream of going pro and joining one of the big teams. They dream of winning the big tournament for real money. They dream of having a popular Twitch stream with many thousands of viewers throwing even more money at them. Most fall far short of those dreams. Instead they throw temper tantrums and rage at their teammates over voice chat. Some get so frustrated about their lack of progress that they search for alternative means. That’s where cheating begins. It’s really no different from sports.
- AmVess 4y ago
  There's the cheating, and then there's the fact that there are far too many man-children everywhere these days. They whine, complain, throw tantrums worse than toddlers do. It is absolutely painful to hear a grown man whining about something in a GAME. For instance, I played a free to play game. The servers just went live and it was the VERY FIRST MATCH of the game. It wasn't soon before one guy on our side was crying because we all sucked. I see this type of behavior everywhere.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    I've been that guy. It's hard to have fun in the modern "you will be FORCED to lose 50% of the time" matchmaking systems, compared to the small communities of the past. When I loved playing Halo 1 on the PC, you could actively chose how you were feeling that day, whether you wanted a very competitive match, or whether you just wanted infinite rockets with no shields so everyone's bodies are flying all over. You could have a relaxing game of chaotic fun, or you could load up a giant map sniper duel, or a very classic sidewinder CTF that requires teamwork and cunning and individual talent to make things happen. Instead, every single game now is optimized for streamers, content creators, and a small "Professional" scene. So now, when a single popular youtuber wants a meme gun, the devs add a powerful slug to the double barrel shotgun and a red dot sight, so that youtuber can make a highlight reel of headshotting people across the map with a damn shotgun while throwing the entire tactical part of the gameplay out the window. The community spends 6 years complaining about a tactic that is basically just spawn camping, and the publisher gives radio silence, but there's a weird, niche tactic using your favorite character in the pro scene that is SLIGHTLY better than random in effectiveness, and you better believe that character is getting a hard nerf. Now I boot up the game, and if I have a good match where I did better than expected, the system responds to that by putting me in a much harder game, where I'm expected to lose, because that 50% win rate must be ENFORCED. Even if you constantly improve at the game, you just get put in front of more and more talented people, wiping out any joy you might experience from your improvement. Meanwhile, you continually get destroyed by 12 year olds that don't have to cook dinner every night and have plenty of time to hone their skills. These systems are even implemented in """Casual""" game modes, which are then full of pro players on new accounts making youtube highlight reels. So yeah, excuse my old man anger, I just literally lived through a better time. Right now it is impossible to sit down with my friends and enjoy a PVP game together, because casual multiplayer has been thrown to the wolves, often in service to memes.
yamtaddle 4y ago
I remember joining games of Dark Forces: Jedi Knight in the '90s and finding someone playing as a TIE fighter. Like, a full size TIE Fighter, not a model scaled down to person-size. And insta-killing anyone who came near. Mind you, this is a (mostly) first-person shooter that doesn't normally have player-drivable vehicles of any kind. That and similar ridiculousness were fairly common. I actually didn't mind that stuff, it was funny enough to outweigh the irritation of not getting to play a real match. The ones cheating without making it overt were the ones who'd truly ruin a match. > You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. I don't get it, but people do cheat. They cheat in online games, they cheat at board games, they cheat at tabletop RPGs(?! and no, I don't just mean the DM fudging some roles in the name of fun—they have a screen for a reason) [EDIT] What I mean is, there must be some impulse to do it, even when the stakes are nonexistent and it might even ruin the fun for everyone. It's not even uncommon. I don't get it either, but it must be there.
- brokencode 4y ago
  Some people get joy out of making other people unhappy. It’s not about winning, it’s about making others lose. Cheating in games is a very low stakes and easy way to achieve this. I’m no psychologist, but this is the only explanation I’ve been able to convince myself of.
  - dspillett 4y ago
    Cheating has a rich set of reasons, and any one cheater may be doing it for a mix of them. For some it is to show power over other (like to make them unhappy in your example), for some it might be a sense of entitlement (I've paid for this game I should have the right to win it how I like), in some games there are people paying others (in game tokens or real world money) to level up for them and those doing the levelling up are using cheats to improve their profitability, and a number of other reasons.
- tobyjsullivan 4y ago
  Some people play for the socialization, some people play for the challenge, and some people play to win (ie, display their “dominance”). It’s just different personalities and values. The latter group will often cheat if necessary as winning is the need and the priority. The talented ones usually end up in profitable pursuits like business and poker rooms. The losers (pun intended) will gravitate toward friendly competitions where people have their guard down and cheating is easy. At least that’s what I’ve seen. The best strategy is to detect these people and ban them because appealing to values won’t work.
arecurrence 4y ago
Bots have been improving a lot in recent years. It may be that the future is not multiplayer but single player with excellent bots... maybe Sliders got the end times wrong :)
- aaomidi 4y ago
  I am so annoyed I can’t play league with those awesomely good boys. Seriously just let me stop interacting with angry man children and give me bots.
- jamesfinlayson 4y ago
  Agreed - I haven't played against real people for years. I've even developed bots for a few older games without much of a player base any more so I can continue playing them.
babypuncher 4y ago
I don't know what games you play, but in the games I play (Mostly Overwatch), cheaters are a pretty rare sight.
- deleted 4y ago
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AlexandrB 4y ago
IMHO, the only reliable solution is community-managed or "dedicated" servers where there are trusted admins that have the power to ban cheaters at their own discretion. I don't think this problem is solvable "at scale" in the general case. Unfortunately the gaming industry has spent the last decade taking power away from gaming communities and replacing it with proscribed matchmaking and map rotation - so the tools for community policing haven't advanced much beyond a "report" tool.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  Another solution is the console approach where the platform is secured so people can't cheap. This approach does scale. The PC platform is still playing catch up. Someday multiplayer PC games will be able to prevent cheats from reading / writing its memory or injecting come into the process. They will be able to use remote attestation to prove that they are using the actual game client on not cheater operating system.
  - Macha 4y ago
    I've certainly ran into cheating on both Xbox Live and PSN. My friends who play Mario Kart and Splatoon online on the Nintendo side tell me it's quite bad there too.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      The switch got hacked pretty badly so their platform is no longer secure. After doing some searching the xbox series and PS5 still look to be secure. While the PS5 has a jailbreak for early version I doubt it can play online games with such an old firmware. I'm surprised ran into cheating. Perhaps the game supported cross play with insecure platforms?
  - blibble 4y ago
    doesn't work against the newest generation of aimbots that taps your video output and sends inputs as a normal player would
nwallin 4y ago
> You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. It takes a minimal amount of study, training, effort to be a perfect tic tac toe player. If you put a small amount of effort into it, you can get skilled enough at tic tac toe to never make any mistakes, to never end up with a result less than a draw. No amount of improvement will ever give you a better result. Not so with nearly any online game, especially one with as high a skill ceiling as Dota2. You can always get better, there's always room for improvement, there's always someone better than you. If you could get just a little bit better, you will win more games, no matter how good you are.
abathur 4y ago
It is, at least, supremely satisfying to pwn a blatant cheater. One time there was a blatant hacker on the Markov server in the original PlanetSide (a TR player with a name like iIiIiIiiIiii) that was using some sort of time/speed hack to move and shoot at some large multiple of normal. They were having a lot of fun camping inside towers to kill people spawning there, so I managed to camp out in one before they arrived and held a good corner with my trusty bolt driver (sniper rifle). I managed to pop them once on their way up the tower, and I think they were moving so fast that they didn't realize it'd happened until they got to the top. Just enough time to reload and switch angles for them to come back down. I know the hacker was there to enjoy ruining fun for others, but they gifted me what was unambiguously the most exhilarating, triumphant, and memorable of the 25K+ bolt driver and 40K+ total kills I recorded.
armchairhacker 4y ago
I don’t like online multiplayer but instead of cheaters it’s because I just suck: most of the time almost everyone is just better than me, and it seems like I lose way more than 50% even with SBMM. I think it’s not just cheaters that are the problem, it’s skilled players who artificially lower their ranking so they can play against less skilled players and win more. A really smart SBMM would solve both problems. One that not only prevents players from artificially dropping rank, but also hiding their skill and maintaining a lower rank; and perhaps instead of an ELO, also matches players with similar play-styles. Because then cheaters will quickly end up in a rank with other cheaters, and won’t be able to leave unless they buy another copy of the game.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Another problem with multiplayer is that if you don't cheat but play well, people who lose to you can be so whiny and abusive. Not jut in game, but following up with nasty emails on the platform etc.
- pixl97 4y ago
  It's been 19 years since this was posted, and I don't expect the truth behind it will ever change. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
> it is impossible for me to take online multiplayer gaming serious in any capacity anymore I'm a gamer but I don't think that they're meant to be taken seriously.
- izzydata 4y ago
  That's not exactly what I mean by serious. I only play games for fun and don't consider anything that occurs in said games important to my life. But I am not going to spend the time playing something that has cheaters as it reduces the value of the experience to nothing for me.
dyingkneepad 4y ago
Play fighting games! You may complain about smurfs, the netcode, input latency or S++ tier characters, but you'll never complain about cheaters.
- unshavedyak 4y ago
  Why is that? There's plenty of computer opponents in fighting games (offline/campaign/etc), wouldn't bots be possible to cheat with?
  - serf 4y ago
    my take : you won't notice the cheaters because the modern fighting game genre is a DLC-laden garbage fire ; you're unlikely to complain about the cheaters .. ...but admittedly i've been turned sour by a few purchases recently in that genre .. so i'm probably just axe-grinding ;)
  - aseipp 4y ago
    Several reasons but one is that, a lot of games where cheats are super effective are places where you can have "silent" advantages like ESP, equipment data, silent aim adjustment for better headshots/tracking, etc. These rely on the ability to not be detected and are extremely subtle when compared to normal gameplay. The more subtle, the harder to detect. Little of this applies in a fighting game. It's largely a mind game, not a game of inputs or technicalities. You're on the same level, can see everything. The only hidden information is what moves/combos you have, your opponent has, and how much information your opponent has on you. You have to be able to read your opponents moves, and respond appropriately. You have to trick your opponent and bait them into a scenario that is in your favor. Attacks have definitive strengths and weaknesses, and certain baits are better against certain people. If you attack me, and I intercept your attack with a "crushing blow" that simply overpowers your attack -- there's nothing the cheat can do to stop that, short of just like, breaking the game and undoing my damage. If I bait an attack, and you do it, and I dodge it by laying on the ground -- it can't retroactively change your input. If I set you up for a combo and begin wailing on you, the cheat cannot generally stop that. These games have mechanics where certain inputs just can't follow other inputs, where inputs are buffered certain ways, where there are vulnerability windows, etc. Exploiting these are key to success and cheats can't stop these mechanics. An example is Tekken where I play as Lei Wulong. He's extremely uncharacteristic and idiosyncratic, to the point that if you fight actual Lei players -- it's immediately obvious that bots don't play the same. One of my friends (a newer fighting game player) particularly hates my playstyle and tried to scrim against Lei bots to practice, but instantly realized they play nothing like me or any other Lei. Lei is a rare character to play. So he had to just keep scrimming, really. Many fighting games also have literal handicap mechanics that might be seen as equivalent to cheating in some capacity, but for the same reasons, it doesn't matter. They are often there to level the playing field, which is considered fair. Basic Combos in Tekken allow even the simplest of players to pull off powerful moves like Wind God Fist, but it doesn't matter how easy Wind God Fist is, I can and will still beat them even with that handicap, with no special moves of my own, because I can just read their attacks and respond and punish all of them and set them up and bait them endlessly. That said cheating does happen but often it's the last thing on my mind. Bullshit characters that are unbalanced is where all the complaints go. ;) TL;DR Humans have distinct fighting styles, and fighting games are largely mind games once you get into them. Cheats that are subtle enough to avoid detection can often easily be outplayed because of it.
tester756 4y ago
League of Legends is the game where cheating is rare as hell or hard to spot because it doesnt give as big advantage due to game mechanics/dynamics. Majority of cheaters that I've met were when I've been leveling new account Also: Today on HN we complain about cheaters Tomorrow we will complain about kernel rootkit from anti-cheat software and someone will argue that server-side should be enough :)
- hackerlight 4y ago
  All strategy games are like that. Cheating barely gives an advantage because the best cheats just reveal the fog of war but good players already know what's in the fog of war due to game sense, communication and scouting. So cheaters still lose.
CaliforniaKarl 4y ago
I suggest having a look at Deep Rock Galactic (http://deeprockgalactic.com http://deeprockgalactic.com). It's a coop-first game (that is, it's meant to be played with others, but can be played solo) that is PvE (that is, you & others are working together, against "the environment"). Missions are arranged into five difficulty levels ("Hazard 1", a.k.a "Haz1", the easiest, through "Haz5"). I've found that, when playing with random people, Haz2 or Haz3 gets you a good combination of players. Of course there are toxic players, but the proportion of them (that is, the number of toxic players as a percentage of the playerbase online at any given time) is low. I think Haz4—more difficult than Haz3 but not Haz5—has a higher chance of toxic players. I avoid Haz5 as it's _extremely_ difficult for my skill level, but I understand the players who regularly do Haz5 missions are good folk. If you play DRG on Steam, and you ever see me online (http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaliforniaKarl/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaliforniaKarl/), feel free to ping me for a mission!
- pants3000 4y ago
  Did you have that username before or after DRG?
- HideousKojima 4y ago
  Sadly co-op PVP is still no guarantee the game won't be ruined by cheaters. I love Monster Hunter: World, and you'll run into random players who have hacked gear that one shot the monster. Playing with friends, or running a dedicated server where you cultivate a community, are the only options.
  - Terretta 4y ago
    Same in Fallout 76 which is a cooperative PvE casual game, enjoyed by the fabled middle-American casual gamer Mom. (And Dads, and anyone else who isn't playing for competition.) For some reason, some players spend 3 figures at RMT sites for weapons that can few-shot the server-wide event bosses. There's no in-game benefit for this. The boss events are designed to entertain a half dozen to dozen players for 5 - 15 minutes. Insta death for the boss just means everyone has to wait longer for the next event. Other players use a glitch in the game that lets them blanket the event zone with white explosions, so no players (including themselves) can see the event. The only recourse is to switch servers or just leave the event. This phenomenon is interesting enough to have been researched: "Results support the relationship between self-determination theory need satisfaction and enjoyment, and indicate that griefers enjoy their gameplay style as much as community-based players, despite the antisocial nature of the gameplay style resulting in differing levels of need satisfaction." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282197704_The_enjoyment_of_griefing_in_online_games https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282197704_The_enjoy...
ssteeper 4y ago
I've played 3000+ games of competitive Halo Infinite over the last year while climbing to top 1% and only had 1-5 games with noticeable cheating. It's nowhere near "ubiquitous and rampant". In the singular game with blatant aimbotters, it was actually a really close and exciting game because while their aim was perfect, their strategy and game sense was atrocious. So with good communication and coordination on our side, we were able to outsmart them and win.
- owalt 4y ago
  Most people have no idea how to detect basic non-blatant cheats. Even simple low-FoV aimbots sneak past the vast majority of players. Good enough cheats are virtually undetectable by just human inspection. The few people you saw cheating were probably frustrated enough with the game they decided burn their accounts and ticked enough boxes in their cheat menus to let them go out with a bang. It may of course be that you are particularly good at spotting cheats and Halo Infinite is just blessed to be relatively cheater-free. (I've not played it.) But I'd expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more games to have cheaters than your estimate.
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    If I’m not able to determine that someone is cheating, do I care? That’s no different from my perspective as them just being really good. Whether they’re actually that good is immaterial. When they go beyond what a good player could do is where it gets problematic.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      If you accept that, then you may as well play against bots locally.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      Why do you even play online then? You could play against local bots. The human connection matters, even to cheaters. Cheating against the computer isn't very satisfying.
b4je7d7wb 4y ago
These cheats Valve banned for only give a small edge. Much less than the variance in skill between players. It's more like turning graphics low for better fps than an aimbot. If you don't care about being good or winning, you can just consider the cheaters to be better skilled players and be unaffected by them. I enjoy cs go, and I can't recognize a difference with good aim and aimbot. So there is no difference with a cheater or a smurf for me.
- largepeepee 4y ago
  >I can't recognize a difference with good aim and aimbot Probably why competitive fps games are at the top of the list for cheat makers. They are hard to detect by eye and can be easily made to look human-like.
1n 4y ago
I used to play competitive Search and Destroy on PC in Call of Duty. I clocked up a few thousand hours of online multiplayer play during a mis-spent 5 years as a student. I’d often get accused of cheating in casual online games - to the point where it became tedious to even acknowledge the accusations. My point is: often people think others are cheating when in reality they are just really good because they have spent thousands of hours playing.
- bilalq 4y ago
  It's also frustrating when you're not particularly skilled are just having an unusually good performance. My K/D ratio hovered somewhere just under 1, but I had outlier moments in CoD where I would rack up kill streaks and end games 16-0 or 27-1. Being accused of cheating and then follow-through harassed via PMs was just exhausting and ate up some of the joy of performing well.
  - cronix 4y ago
    I always turn off text and voice chat as part of setting any game up. I don't care what others in a game have to say about, well, anything. I'm there to play. I rarely if ever look at the social tab of any game. One of the worst things to happen to games in the last 15 or so years imho is in game communications (second to only being able to play with a net connection). We used to use external apps like teamspeak and xfire and the like if we cared enough to talk to people, like if you were in a clan and needed to play cooperatively.
  - enneff 4y ago
    I love it when people get salty at me when I do well. I take it as a huge compliment.
    - vintermann 4y ago
      Well if you cheat you get to enjoy that feeling even when you wouldn't do well. I honestly expect many of the people who go "nah I'm just that good" even in this thread are actually cheating. That smirk wouldn't feel any less good if you were cheating, in fact it'd be one more thing to smirk about.
dylan604 4y ago
I've known gamers that laughed at console gamers because of how much slower the systems were. Now, I have to wonder if they just weren't PC gamers for the sole reason of being able to run these hacks? Know the personalities of some of them, it would not shock me at all
jojobas 4y ago
>take ... gaming seriously There's your problem right there.
mattmanser 4y ago
Just to echo others, this is absolute nonsense. I've played many competitive games over the years, many to a decent level in the top 5-10%. Thousands of hours of play. Cheating is almost non-existent. I've been accused of cheating though, especially in CS:Go + Overwatch, when I wasn't even that good. I couldn't hold a torch to professional players. I've seen orders of magnitude a more complaints about cheaters in chat, than I've ever seen actual dodgy behaviour. Sometimes you're just on a streak, or lucky. You're just bad at losing.
- reportgunner 4y ago
  csgo and overwatch are games with very simple mechanics, try games like Rust or DayZ or EFT.
jrockway 4y ago
I think the future of gaming is to get rid of mechanics that computers are good at. Aimbots in an FPS are a common cheat, and they are pretty much undetectable with video analysis + a modded usb mouse providing the inputs. What I take away from that is that the next generation of first-person-kill-the-enemy games will simply rely less on aim and more on tactics and strategy; "press E to apply this debuff to this enemy" instead of "click the enemy's head to kill them". Overwatch is a good example of this style of game; you can be a top 10 player with garbage aim. (Aim is still a mechanic and people do cheat, of course.) Wall hacks are another common hack; getting information that the game client has but that you aren't supposed to know. I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls. All in all, I don't see cheating as ruining gaming as a whole. Game designers will design games that are more difficult to cheat at, and hopefully there will be less cheaters ruining your matches. I would definitely play the can-see-behind-walls-and-aim-doesn't-matter FPS!
- hackerlight 4y ago
  "I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls." Just don't send the data to the game client until the last moment. Currently the game server is literally telling your computer where the enemy is located behind the walls. Wallhacks can be made to be impossible with enough development effort.
- achempion 4y ago
  In CSGO, there are HvH servers dedicated to cheaters where everyone cheats with their favourite software making it impossible to cheat as everyone is in the same conditions.
jackmott42 4y ago
Based on what do you feel it has become rampant? There are many people who feel that way because they haven't reached a level of expertise where they can understand why they are losing. I see this all the time in recaps where streamers die to me in game. They could clearly be seen or heard or inferred but to them its a total mystery and they report cheating. I have run into cheaters but most games are fine, sometimes you even manage to kill a cheater, fun times. All sports are like this. Welcome to Earth. Sorry.
- deelowe 4y ago
  It’s obvious how rampant it is.
Zuiii 4y ago
To me personally, this is a solved problem: Bring back peer-to-peer servers that you can set up to play privately with your friends and online social group. No more rampant cheating and easy remediation. Game publishers won't allow this again because it they can't "control" it and it won't make them money. Fortunately, opensource games still exist :D
Razengan 4y ago
I like to believe consoles fare better, so I disable cross-platform multiplayer on the PS5 for games that have this option. In any case I think it's better to be matched with people with the exact same hardware anyhow.
Xelbair 4y ago
The better you get, the less 'cheaters' you spot. they are honestly rare, or very subtle. Mostly because actually spotting cheaters takes a lot of game knowledge and experience. In FPS games anyone can spot a spinbot, but how you can be sure that someone uses wallhack? or aimbot that just slightly corrects the aim? Without proper game knowledge you wouldn't be able to distinguish a wallhack from someone listening to footsteps, having info from teammates, and having a good map awareness. It is very easy to cry 'cheater', especially without any actual proof. Without knowledge that, for example in CS: spray patterns exist, even someone correcting them would look like a cheater to a newbie. I spent about 300 hours lately playing new COD, and there was only one case where i suspected someone of cheating. One. And i do play a lot of FPS, and played them for good 25+ years.
- bakoo 4y ago
  One would think that some of the 40000 dota cheaters weren't as careful and thus easier to spot.
  - Xelbair 4y ago
    they were reading memory directly, so i assume that they were given more information than usual - maybe maphack-esque cheat, + information about gold/items of enemies that wasn't yet revealed. It would seem like players had good map awareness, and would be really hard to spot.
- zelos 4y ago
  Try playing TF2. The cheaters aren't exactly subtle - instantly snapping from looking vertically upwards to headshot the instant you walk round a corner.
Pr0ject217 4y ago
It makes you wonder how large the 'cheater' population is in general (relationships, academic, professional, etc).
seanw444 4y ago
And then they push increasingly user-hostile things to try and solve the problem. No Windows passthrough VMs for those of us who don't want Windows touching our hardware, accidental bans because someone reports you for cheating when you weren't, and the team didn't analyze it well enough. Personally, I'm mostly referring to Tarkov. I don't play anymore. I used to love it and try to convince my friends to get it, but that was years ago. I only play the single player mod on top of it now. I've generally moved on to single-player and coop games now. Everything else is excruciating. And part of that is that I have less free time, so wasting it on being angrily competitive and anxious just isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't have time to be on-par with sweatlords.

dumpsterlid 4y ago

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JohnClark1337 4y ago

I feel like I've "aged out" of online multiplayer gaming. I could pick up COD for maybe the hour or two of gaming time I have a day and immediately be dominated by those younger who have a vast amount of more time to hone their techniques. Or I could play something single player (or something that can easily be played single player like an MMO) that relaxes me after a stressful day at work. I choose the latter.

mrguyorama 4y ago
Except, ten years ago "older folk" COULD enjoy much less competitive online multiplayer experiences. I place the moment Call of Duty started spawning you randomly during team deathmatch as the marker. Instead of spawning in a safe zone with clearish "Fronts" to approach and attack and plan around. Instead, you spawn randomly, often with your back to an enemy, and half the time you spawn you instead have an enemy's back to you. I hypothesize that quick "yeah I got a kill" made the game more attractive to kids, and not allowing you to plan and implement any sort of individual strategy other than "click heads faster than the other guy" made online games more demanding in ability.
int_19h 4y ago
Online multiplayer doesn't have to be competitive, though, and co-op seems to be growing in popularity after PvP peaked a while ago.
dumpsterlid 4y ago
[dead]

mchaver 4y ago

It sucks and I suppose things will only get worse as AI improves. The unfortunate thing with computers is once easy automation is available and there is a reward for winning, then these systems will attract cheaters, spammers, etc. Spam email, online game cheaters and the most recent example Clarkesworld Magazine that had to close submissions because so many people were using AI systems to generate low quality stories. The only positive thing is maybe gamers will push for more local multiplayer options.

ShrimpHawk 4y ago
AI has actually been working against cheaters. Using server side measurements fed into an AI like OSRS does has drastically cut down on the number of cheaters. Mass amounts of data can be collected of users mouse movements that when fed in can detect cheaters using aim botting in FPS. Valve actually does some of this already as well to reduce the number of blatent cheating overwatch candidates in CS:GO.

chongli 4y ago

You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. That’s the difference. The stakes are way higher in video games. People pour thousands and thousands of hours into these games. They dream of going pro and joining one of the big teams. They dream of winning the big tournament for real money. They dream of having a popular Twitch stream with many thousands of viewers throwing even more money at them. Most fall far short of those dreams. Instead they throw temper tantrums and rage at their teammates over voice chat. Some get so frustrated about their lack of progress that they search for alternative means. That’s where cheating begins. It’s really no different from sports.

AmVess 4y ago
There's the cheating, and then there's the fact that there are far too many man-children everywhere these days. They whine, complain, throw tantrums worse than toddlers do. It is absolutely painful to hear a grown man whining about something in a GAME. For instance, I played a free to play game. The servers just went live and it was the VERY FIRST MATCH of the game. It wasn't soon before one guy on our side was crying because we all sucked. I see this type of behavior everywhere.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  I've been that guy. It's hard to have fun in the modern "you will be FORCED to lose 50% of the time" matchmaking systems, compared to the small communities of the past. When I loved playing Halo 1 on the PC, you could actively chose how you were feeling that day, whether you wanted a very competitive match, or whether you just wanted infinite rockets with no shields so everyone's bodies are flying all over. You could have a relaxing game of chaotic fun, or you could load up a giant map sniper duel, or a very classic sidewinder CTF that requires teamwork and cunning and individual talent to make things happen. Instead, every single game now is optimized for streamers, content creators, and a small "Professional" scene. So now, when a single popular youtuber wants a meme gun, the devs add a powerful slug to the double barrel shotgun and a red dot sight, so that youtuber can make a highlight reel of headshotting people across the map with a damn shotgun while throwing the entire tactical part of the gameplay out the window. The community spends 6 years complaining about a tactic that is basically just spawn camping, and the publisher gives radio silence, but there's a weird, niche tactic using your favorite character in the pro scene that is SLIGHTLY better than random in effectiveness, and you better believe that character is getting a hard nerf. Now I boot up the game, and if I have a good match where I did better than expected, the system responds to that by putting me in a much harder game, where I'm expected to lose, because that 50% win rate must be ENFORCED. Even if you constantly improve at the game, you just get put in front of more and more talented people, wiping out any joy you might experience from your improvement. Meanwhile, you continually get destroyed by 12 year olds that don't have to cook dinner every night and have plenty of time to hone their skills. These systems are even implemented in """Casual""" game modes, which are then full of pro players on new accounts making youtube highlight reels. So yeah, excuse my old man anger, I just literally lived through a better time. Right now it is impossible to sit down with my friends and enjoy a PVP game together, because casual multiplayer has been thrown to the wolves, often in service to memes.

yamtaddle 4y ago

I remember joining games of Dark Forces: Jedi Knight in the '90s and finding someone playing as a TIE fighter. Like, a full size TIE Fighter, not a model scaled down to person-size. And insta-killing anyone who came near. Mind you, this is a (mostly) first-person shooter that doesn't normally have player-drivable vehicles of any kind. That and similar ridiculousness were fairly common. I actually didn't mind that stuff, it was funny enough to outweigh the irritation of not getting to play a real match. The ones cheating without making it overt were the ones who'd truly ruin a match. > You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. I don't get it, but people do cheat. They cheat in online games, they cheat at board games, they cheat at tabletop RPGs(?! and no, I don't just mean the DM fudging some roles in the name of fun—they have a screen for a reason) [EDIT] What I mean is, there must be some impulse to do it, even when the stakes are nonexistent and it might even ruin the fun for everyone. It's not even uncommon. I don't get it either, but it must be there.

brokencode 4y ago
Some people get joy out of making other people unhappy. It’s not about winning, it’s about making others lose. Cheating in games is a very low stakes and easy way to achieve this. I’m no psychologist, but this is the only explanation I’ve been able to convince myself of.
- dspillett 4y ago
  Cheating has a rich set of reasons, and any one cheater may be doing it for a mix of them. For some it is to show power over other (like to make them unhappy in your example), for some it might be a sense of entitlement (I've paid for this game I should have the right to win it how I like), in some games there are people paying others (in game tokens or real world money) to level up for them and those doing the levelling up are using cheats to improve their profitability, and a number of other reasons.
tobyjsullivan 4y ago
Some people play for the socialization, some people play for the challenge, and some people play to win (ie, display their “dominance”). It’s just different personalities and values. The latter group will often cheat if necessary as winning is the need and the priority. The talented ones usually end up in profitable pursuits like business and poker rooms. The losers (pun intended) will gravitate toward friendly competitions where people have their guard down and cheating is easy. At least that’s what I’ve seen. The best strategy is to detect these people and ban them because appealing to values won’t work.

arecurrence 4y ago

Bots have been improving a lot in recent years. It may be that the future is not multiplayer but single player with excellent bots... maybe Sliders got the end times wrong :)

aaomidi 4y ago
I am so annoyed I can’t play league with those awesomely good boys. Seriously just let me stop interacting with angry man children and give me bots.
jamesfinlayson 4y ago
Agreed - I haven't played against real people for years. I've even developed bots for a few older games without much of a player base any more so I can continue playing them.

babypuncher 4y ago

I don't know what games you play, but in the games I play (Mostly Overwatch), cheaters are a pretty rare sight.

deleted 4y ago
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AlexandrB 4y ago

IMHO, the only reliable solution is community-managed or "dedicated" servers where there are trusted admins that have the power to ban cheaters at their own discretion. I don't think this problem is solvable "at scale" in the general case. Unfortunately the gaming industry has spent the last decade taking power away from gaming communities and replacing it with proscribed matchmaking and map rotation - so the tools for community policing haven't advanced much beyond a "report" tool.

charcircuit 4y ago
Another solution is the console approach where the platform is secured so people can't cheap. This approach does scale. The PC platform is still playing catch up. Someday multiplayer PC games will be able to prevent cheats from reading / writing its memory or injecting come into the process. They will be able to use remote attestation to prove that they are using the actual game client on not cheater operating system.
- Macha 4y ago
  I've certainly ran into cheating on both Xbox Live and PSN. My friends who play Mario Kart and Splatoon online on the Nintendo side tell me it's quite bad there too.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    The switch got hacked pretty badly so their platform is no longer secure. After doing some searching the xbox series and PS5 still look to be secure. While the PS5 has a jailbreak for early version I doubt it can play online games with such an old firmware. I'm surprised ran into cheating. Perhaps the game supported cross play with insecure platforms?
- blibble 4y ago
  doesn't work against the newest generation of aimbots that taps your video output and sends inputs as a normal player would

nwallin 4y ago

> You wouldn't cheat at tic tac toe despite the inherently low stakes of the game so it doesn't seem any different in any other video game. It takes a minimal amount of study, training, effort to be a perfect tic tac toe player. If you put a small amount of effort into it, you can get skilled enough at tic tac toe to never make any mistakes, to never end up with a result less than a draw. No amount of improvement will ever give you a better result. Not so with nearly any online game, especially one with as high a skill ceiling as Dota2. You can always get better, there's always room for improvement, there's always someone better than you. If you could get just a little bit better, you will win more games, no matter how good you are.

abathur 4y ago

It is, at least, supremely satisfying to pwn a blatant cheater. One time there was a blatant hacker on the Markov server in the original PlanetSide (a TR player with a name like iIiIiIiiIiii) that was using some sort of time/speed hack to move and shoot at some large multiple of normal. They were having a lot of fun camping inside towers to kill people spawning there, so I managed to camp out in one before they arrived and held a good corner with my trusty bolt driver (sniper rifle). I managed to pop them once on their way up the tower, and I think they were moving so fast that they didn't realize it'd happened until they got to the top. Just enough time to reload and switch angles for them to come back down. I know the hacker was there to enjoy ruining fun for others, but they gifted me what was unambiguously the most exhilarating, triumphant, and memorable of the 25K+ bolt driver and 40K+ total kills I recorded.

armchairhacker 4y ago

I don’t like online multiplayer but instead of cheaters it’s because I just suck: most of the time almost everyone is just better than me, and it seems like I lose way more than 50% even with SBMM. I think it’s not just cheaters that are the problem, it’s skilled players who artificially lower their ranking so they can play against less skilled players and win more. A really smart SBMM would solve both problems. One that not only prevents players from artificially dropping rank, but also hiding their skill and maintaining a lower rank; and perhaps instead of an ELO, also matches players with similar play-styles. Because then cheaters will quickly end up in a rank with other cheaters, and won’t be able to leave unless they buy another copy of the game.

anigbrowl 4y ago

Another problem with multiplayer is that if you don't cheat but play well, people who lose to you can be so whiny and abusive. Not jut in game, but following up with nasty emails on the platform etc.

pixl97 4y ago
It's been 19 years since this was posted, and I don't expect the truth behind it will ever change. https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboards-and-other-anomalies https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

> it is impossible for me to take online multiplayer gaming serious in any capacity anymore I'm a gamer but I don't think that they're meant to be taken seriously.

izzydata 4y ago
That's not exactly what I mean by serious. I only play games for fun and don't consider anything that occurs in said games important to my life. But I am not going to spend the time playing something that has cheaters as it reduces the value of the experience to nothing for me.

dyingkneepad 4y ago

Play fighting games! You may complain about smurfs, the netcode, input latency or S++ tier characters, but you'll never complain about cheaters.

unshavedyak 4y ago
Why is that? There's plenty of computer opponents in fighting games (offline/campaign/etc), wouldn't bots be possible to cheat with?
- serf 4y ago
  my take : you won't notice the cheaters because the modern fighting game genre is a DLC-laden garbage fire ; you're unlikely to complain about the cheaters .. ...but admittedly i've been turned sour by a few purchases recently in that genre .. so i'm probably just axe-grinding ;)
- aseipp 4y ago
  Several reasons but one is that, a lot of games where cheats are super effective are places where you can have "silent" advantages like ESP, equipment data, silent aim adjustment for better headshots/tracking, etc. These rely on the ability to not be detected and are extremely subtle when compared to normal gameplay. The more subtle, the harder to detect. Little of this applies in a fighting game. It's largely a mind game, not a game of inputs or technicalities. You're on the same level, can see everything. The only hidden information is what moves/combos you have, your opponent has, and how much information your opponent has on you. You have to be able to read your opponents moves, and respond appropriately. You have to trick your opponent and bait them into a scenario that is in your favor. Attacks have definitive strengths and weaknesses, and certain baits are better against certain people. If you attack me, and I intercept your attack with a "crushing blow" that simply overpowers your attack -- there's nothing the cheat can do to stop that, short of just like, breaking the game and undoing my damage. If I bait an attack, and you do it, and I dodge it by laying on the ground -- it can't retroactively change your input. If I set you up for a combo and begin wailing on you, the cheat cannot generally stop that. These games have mechanics where certain inputs just can't follow other inputs, where inputs are buffered certain ways, where there are vulnerability windows, etc. Exploiting these are key to success and cheats can't stop these mechanics. An example is Tekken where I play as Lei Wulong. He's extremely uncharacteristic and idiosyncratic, to the point that if you fight actual Lei players -- it's immediately obvious that bots don't play the same. One of my friends (a newer fighting game player) particularly hates my playstyle and tried to scrim against Lei bots to practice, but instantly realized they play nothing like me or any other Lei. Lei is a rare character to play. So he had to just keep scrimming, really. Many fighting games also have literal handicap mechanics that might be seen as equivalent to cheating in some capacity, but for the same reasons, it doesn't matter. They are often there to level the playing field, which is considered fair. Basic Combos in Tekken allow even the simplest of players to pull off powerful moves like Wind God Fist, but it doesn't matter how easy Wind God Fist is, I can and will still beat them even with that handicap, with no special moves of my own, because I can just read their attacks and respond and punish all of them and set them up and bait them endlessly. That said cheating does happen but often it's the last thing on my mind. Bullshit characters that are unbalanced is where all the complaints go. ;) TL;DR Humans have distinct fighting styles, and fighting games are largely mind games once you get into them. Cheats that are subtle enough to avoid detection can often easily be outplayed because of it.

tester756 4y ago

League of Legends is the game where cheating is rare as hell or hard to spot because it doesnt give as big advantage due to game mechanics/dynamics. Majority of cheaters that I've met were when I've been leveling new account Also: Today on HN we complain about cheaters Tomorrow we will complain about kernel rootkit from anti-cheat software and someone will argue that server-side should be enough :)

hackerlight 4y ago
All strategy games are like that. Cheating barely gives an advantage because the best cheats just reveal the fog of war but good players already know what's in the fog of war due to game sense, communication and scouting. So cheaters still lose.

CaliforniaKarl 4y ago

I suggest having a look at Deep Rock Galactic (http://deeprockgalactic.com http://deeprockgalactic.com). It's a coop-first game (that is, it's meant to be played with others, but can be played solo) that is PvE (that is, you & others are working together, against "the environment"). Missions are arranged into five difficulty levels ("Hazard 1", a.k.a "Haz1", the easiest, through "Haz5"). I've found that, when playing with random people, Haz2 or Haz3 gets you a good combination of players. Of course there are toxic players, but the proportion of them (that is, the number of toxic players as a percentage of the playerbase online at any given time) is low. I think Haz4—more difficult than Haz3 but not Haz5—has a higher chance of toxic players. I avoid Haz5 as it's _extremely_ difficult for my skill level, but I understand the players who regularly do Haz5 missions are good folk. If you play DRG on Steam, and you ever see me online (http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaliforniaKarl/ http://steamcommunity.com/id/CaliforniaKarl/), feel free to ping me for a mission!

pants3000 4y ago
Did you have that username before or after DRG?
HideousKojima 4y ago
Sadly co-op PVP is still no guarantee the game won't be ruined by cheaters. I love Monster Hunter: World, and you'll run into random players who have hacked gear that one shot the monster. Playing with friends, or running a dedicated server where you cultivate a community, are the only options.
- Terretta 4y ago
  Same in Fallout 76 which is a cooperative PvE casual game, enjoyed by the fabled middle-American casual gamer Mom. (And Dads, and anyone else who isn't playing for competition.) For some reason, some players spend 3 figures at RMT sites for weapons that can few-shot the server-wide event bosses. There's no in-game benefit for this. The boss events are designed to entertain a half dozen to dozen players for 5 - 15 minutes. Insta death for the boss just means everyone has to wait longer for the next event. Other players use a glitch in the game that lets them blanket the event zone with white explosions, so no players (including themselves) can see the event. The only recourse is to switch servers or just leave the event. This phenomenon is interesting enough to have been researched: "Results support the relationship between self-determination theory need satisfaction and enjoyment, and indicate that griefers enjoy their gameplay style as much as community-based players, despite the antisocial nature of the gameplay style resulting in differing levels of need satisfaction." https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282197704_The_enjoyment_of_griefing_in_online_games https://www.researchgate.net/publication/282197704_The_enjoy...

ssteeper 4y ago

I've played 3000+ games of competitive Halo Infinite over the last year while climbing to top 1% and only had 1-5 games with noticeable cheating. It's nowhere near "ubiquitous and rampant". In the singular game with blatant aimbotters, it was actually a really close and exciting game because while their aim was perfect, their strategy and game sense was atrocious. So with good communication and coordination on our side, we were able to outsmart them and win.

owalt 4y ago
Most people have no idea how to detect basic non-blatant cheats. Even simple low-FoV aimbots sneak past the vast majority of players. Good enough cheats are virtually undetectable by just human inspection. The few people you saw cheating were probably frustrated enough with the game they decided burn their accounts and ticked enough boxes in their cheat menus to let them go out with a bang. It may of course be that you are particularly good at spotting cheats and Halo Infinite is just blessed to be relatively cheater-free. (I've not played it.) But I'd expect 1-2 orders of magnitude more games to have cheaters than your estimate.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  If I’m not able to determine that someone is cheating, do I care? That’s no different from my perspective as them just being really good. Whether they’re actually that good is immaterial. When they go beyond what a good player could do is where it gets problematic.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    If you accept that, then you may as well play against bots locally.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Why do you even play online then? You could play against local bots. The human connection matters, even to cheaters. Cheating against the computer isn't very satisfying.

b4je7d7wb 4y ago

These cheats Valve banned for only give a small edge. Much less than the variance in skill between players. It's more like turning graphics low for better fps than an aimbot. If you don't care about being good or winning, you can just consider the cheaters to be better skilled players and be unaffected by them. I enjoy cs go, and I can't recognize a difference with good aim and aimbot. So there is no difference with a cheater or a smurf for me.

largepeepee 4y ago
>I can't recognize a difference with good aim and aimbot Probably why competitive fps games are at the top of the list for cheat makers. They are hard to detect by eye and can be easily made to look human-like.

1n 4y ago

I used to play competitive Search and Destroy on PC in Call of Duty. I clocked up a few thousand hours of online multiplayer play during a mis-spent 5 years as a student. I’d often get accused of cheating in casual online games - to the point where it became tedious to even acknowledge the accusations. My point is: often people think others are cheating when in reality they are just really good because they have spent thousands of hours playing.

bilalq 4y ago
It's also frustrating when you're not particularly skilled are just having an unusually good performance. My K/D ratio hovered somewhere just under 1, but I had outlier moments in CoD where I would rack up kill streaks and end games 16-0 or 27-1. Being accused of cheating and then follow-through harassed via PMs was just exhausting and ate up some of the joy of performing well.
- cronix 4y ago
  I always turn off text and voice chat as part of setting any game up. I don't care what others in a game have to say about, well, anything. I'm there to play. I rarely if ever look at the social tab of any game. One of the worst things to happen to games in the last 15 or so years imho is in game communications (second to only being able to play with a net connection). We used to use external apps like teamspeak and xfire and the like if we cared enough to talk to people, like if you were in a clan and needed to play cooperatively.
- enneff 4y ago
  I love it when people get salty at me when I do well. I take it as a huge compliment.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    Well if you cheat you get to enjoy that feeling even when you wouldn't do well. I honestly expect many of the people who go "nah I'm just that good" even in this thread are actually cheating. That smirk wouldn't feel any less good if you were cheating, in fact it'd be one more thing to smirk about.

dylan604 4y ago

I've known gamers that laughed at console gamers because of how much slower the systems were. Now, I have to wonder if they just weren't PC gamers for the sole reason of being able to run these hacks? Know the personalities of some of them, it would not shock me at all

jojobas 4y ago

>take ... gaming seriously There's your problem right there.

mattmanser 4y ago

Just to echo others, this is absolute nonsense. I've played many competitive games over the years, many to a decent level in the top 5-10%. Thousands of hours of play. Cheating is almost non-existent. I've been accused of cheating though, especially in CS:Go + Overwatch, when I wasn't even that good. I couldn't hold a torch to professional players. I've seen orders of magnitude a more complaints about cheaters in chat, than I've ever seen actual dodgy behaviour. Sometimes you're just on a streak, or lucky. You're just bad at losing.

reportgunner 4y ago
csgo and overwatch are games with very simple mechanics, try games like Rust or DayZ or EFT.

jrockway 4y ago

I think the future of gaming is to get rid of mechanics that computers are good at. Aimbots in an FPS are a common cheat, and they are pretty much undetectable with video analysis + a modded usb mouse providing the inputs. What I take away from that is that the next generation of first-person-kill-the-enemy games will simply rely less on aim and more on tactics and strategy; "press E to apply this debuff to this enemy" instead of "click the enemy's head to kill them". Overwatch is a good example of this style of game; you can be a top 10 player with garbage aim. (Aim is still a mechanic and people do cheat, of course.) Wall hacks are another common hack; getting information that the game client has but that you aren't supposed to know. I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls. All in all, I don't see cheating as ruining gaming as a whole. Game designers will design games that are more difficult to cheat at, and hopefully there will be less cheaters ruining your matches. I would definitely play the can-see-behind-walls-and-aim-doesn't-matter FPS!

hackerlight 4y ago
"I think games will have to evolve to being "perfect information", just let all players see behind walls." Just don't send the data to the game client until the last moment. Currently the game server is literally telling your computer where the enemy is located behind the walls. Wallhacks can be made to be impossible with enough development effort.
achempion 4y ago
In CSGO, there are HvH servers dedicated to cheaters where everyone cheats with their favourite software making it impossible to cheat as everyone is in the same conditions.

jackmott42 4y ago

Based on what do you feel it has become rampant? There are many people who feel that way because they haven't reached a level of expertise where they can understand why they are losing. I see this all the time in recaps where streamers die to me in game. They could clearly be seen or heard or inferred but to them its a total mystery and they report cheating. I have run into cheaters but most games are fine, sometimes you even manage to kill a cheater, fun times. All sports are like this. Welcome to Earth. Sorry.

deelowe 4y ago
It’s obvious how rampant it is.

Zuiii 4y ago

To me personally, this is a solved problem: Bring back peer-to-peer servers that you can set up to play privately with your friends and online social group. No more rampant cheating and easy remediation. Game publishers won't allow this again because it they can't "control" it and it won't make them money. Fortunately, opensource games still exist :D

Razengan 4y ago

I like to believe consoles fare better, so I disable cross-platform multiplayer on the PS5 for games that have this option. In any case I think it's better to be matched with people with the exact same hardware anyhow.

Xelbair 4y ago

The better you get, the less 'cheaters' you spot. they are honestly rare, or very subtle. Mostly because actually spotting cheaters takes a lot of game knowledge and experience. In FPS games anyone can spot a spinbot, but how you can be sure that someone uses wallhack? or aimbot that just slightly corrects the aim? Without proper game knowledge you wouldn't be able to distinguish a wallhack from someone listening to footsteps, having info from teammates, and having a good map awareness. It is very easy to cry 'cheater', especially without any actual proof. Without knowledge that, for example in CS: spray patterns exist, even someone correcting them would look like a cheater to a newbie. I spent about 300 hours lately playing new COD, and there was only one case where i suspected someone of cheating. One. And i do play a lot of FPS, and played them for good 25+ years.

bakoo 4y ago
One would think that some of the 40000 dota cheaters weren't as careful and thus easier to spot.
- Xelbair 4y ago
  they were reading memory directly, so i assume that they were given more information than usual - maybe maphack-esque cheat, + information about gold/items of enemies that wasn't yet revealed. It would seem like players had good map awareness, and would be really hard to spot.
zelos 4y ago
Try playing TF2. The cheaters aren't exactly subtle - instantly snapping from looking vertically upwards to headshot the instant you walk round a corner.

Pr0ject217 4y ago

It makes you wonder how large the 'cheater' population is in general (relationships, academic, professional, etc).

seanw444 4y ago

And then they push increasingly user-hostile things to try and solve the problem. No Windows passthrough VMs for those of us who don't want Windows touching our hardware, accidental bans because someone reports you for cheating when you weren't, and the team didn't analyze it well enough. Personally, I'm mostly referring to Tarkov. I don't play anymore. I used to love it and try to convince my friends to get it, but that was years ago. I only play the single player mod on top of it now. I've generally moved on to single-player and coop games now. Everything else is excruciating. And part of that is that I have less free time, so wasting it on being angrily competitive and anxious just isn't appealing to me anymore. I don't have time to be on-par with sweatlords.