What do these people think they gain?
Whats the point?
Do they really just want to ruin stuff for everyone?
Oooh! I was just talking about this with my wife, who I met gaming online. We’ve had the conversation with each other, and other people a lot, including cheaters.
So, most of the cheaters I’ve known tend to look at it as entertainment rather than competing. It isn’t that they want to beat other people, and think cheats are an acceptable way to do that. It’s usually that, regardless of their skill, they get bored with the slower pace of play, but still want to play.
I’m not saying it makes sense, or is acceptable, but that’s the most common explanation I’ve heard.
The next most common is the jerks. They do it either to mess with people, or to “troll” people that the cheaters think are too serious, or too invested or too “tryhard”, or whatever the excuse is. That kind of cheater does indeed wnat to ruin things for other people.
The next one that I’ve run into enough is the nerds that are just looking for ways to cheat as a hobby. They’re the ones that end up developing cheat tools, whether or not they let others use them. It’s about figuring out the game, its code, and how to manipulate it. Those players tend to stop using cheats once they’ve done what they wanted.
The other significant grouping I’ve run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they’ll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they’re otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.
I’ve actually done that once, but on a private server where nobody could play without an invite. It was actually kinda fun running an over powered character by virtue of a ton of free “pots” that would buff you in both pvp and pve play. Everyone was juiced up and one-hitting each other. Wouldn’t be fun all the time, but the free pots were only on weekends, and outright unavailable any other time.
And, I will sometimes run cheats in single player games for the same reason; it gives a different play experience that’s fun as long as you can turn it on and off.
But you’d be surprised how many people in all of those groupings will cheat if they think there’s other cheaters, no matter if there’s proof or not.
I used to love in-game cheats as a kid. The ‘motherlode’ cheat on the Sims & the button combinations in GTA were great. Being able to summon a tank and roll over everything on-demand was awesome. I liked how those games embraced it and made things a whole lot more fun.
In a single player game no one should give a shit. Give yourself a million dollars. Mod in a gun that does 50,000 damage. A car that does 350mph.
It’s pvp where people notice/care you’re cheating
Yeah, I’m reminiscing because I was reminded of that particularly fun period in my life. Nothing to do with the main topic.
I’m also nostalgic for the era where cheats were easter eggs that enhanced the single-player experience.
Like, as a kid I was interested in Warcraft/Starcraft, but I’m horrible at RTS gameplay. Cheats gave me an out so that I could enjoy the story.
Historically, cheats were essentially debug tools that the developer could use to, say, thoroughly play through a level with unlimited lives. But around the 90s/00s you started to see this shift away from using a complicated code of buttons to activate (Konami Code, IDDQD) to a simple to remember phrase (“PowerOverwhelming,”“GiveUsATank,” “GunsGunsGuns”).
That shift makes me think that the cheats were for the players to enjoy. Otherwise they wouldn’t have fun names to activate them.
The other significant grouping I’ve run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they’ll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they’re otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.
I used to cheat in Need for Speed World. Almost everything worth getting was locked behind an extremely steep paywall ($15 for a car kinda paywall). I don’t know why I played that game, but I loved it. I didn’t cheat to win though. See, need for speed world was very poorly programmed. Badly enough that you couldn’t tell when people were cheating because they would lag-port around due to shitty netcode and/or shitty servers (knowing the devs, probably both). There was a lot of car customization in the game, which is where my cheating came in. A number of body kits for the cars were normally sold in packs with a fancy spoiler for premium currency. However, iirc the kits themselves (minus the spoiler) were hidden but available for purchase with in-game cash if you knew the right memory values to edit/freeze (tricking the game into letting you buy one of the hidden body kits). As such, you could get most of the premium body kits for free and the devs didn’t give a fuck.
Need For Speed World basically had whales, “cheaters” and cheaters.
Oh, I absolutely cheat in single-player games. If you add hunger to what I consider a nonsurvival game, I’m gonna cheat to get infinite food, or if you add a weight system inventory, I’m gonna give myself more carry weight. ~player.modav carryweight 1000 ~player.setav carryweight 1000
I’m a pack rat, and I refuse to pretend I’m not. If there is something I can pick up or steal I’m going to do it and yes it will sit in my inventory and make it harder for me to find the stuff I need and I still won’t get rid of it.
The first two reasons, to me, feel like excuses to hide the true reason(s) they cheat. I’d wager it varies per person but that many just want to be seen as cool or skilled by having everything or beating everyone. It seems equivalent to people who modify cars to be extremely loud; despite many saying the contrary, they’ve convinced themselves that people love to hear their loud cars go by.
It could also be the anonymous effect of online games. They don’t quite perceive themselves as cheating, really, because they don’t know the players and will never know them. It likely feels like NPCs in a video game, for the most part. If there were actually social pressure, like would be in a schoolyard game of football, then far fewer would be willing to risk the social ostracization. But because they are anonymous online, they feel safe and empowered to cheat.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned this: it’s a numbers game. It only takes a small number of cheaters to reach a critical mass where everyone is encountering them all the time. If only 1% of all players are cheaters and you play games against 10 people in one day, your chance of playing against at least one cheater is about 9.6% on that day. Play 10 players per day for a month (30 days) and your chance of meeting at least one cheater goes up to 95%.
Now consider the effects that cheaters have on the rest of the population: if people get frustrated by cheaters often enough they’re more likely to quit the game. Over time, this can cause the number of non-cheaters to go down, increasing the chances of everyone playing against cheaters. If cheaters are now up to 2% of the population then your chances of meeting at least one in a day (assuming 10 opponents again) rise to 18%.
Conclusion: Over a long enough time span the population of cheaters rises to 100%.
People don’t have the skill or don’t want to put in the effort to do or get something so they cheat instead
Sometimes other people are cheating so they rage hack in response
And some people just like to make other people mad to laugh at them
Well, in some cultures, if you’re not cheating to get ahead you’re considered a sucker.
I myself don’t cheat, but aside from hacking the actual code, I don’t think it’s cheating to do anything the game’s mechanics call for.
Most notably, I hate when people complain about spawn camping and snipers dominating.
My philosophy is: figure out a strategy to oppose that strategy. And avoid letting your spawn get overrun.
There are assholes I really hate though. Two experiences that really ground my gears were:
- Getting my bed surrounded by lava, in Minecraft multiplayer
- Getting boarded by a galleon crew who spawn killed us repeatedly on our sloop, without ever sinking our ship, in Sea of Thieves
I don’t mind being beaten, but being tortured is a whole new thing IMO.
Most notably, I hate when people complain about spawn camping and snipers dominating.
There are assholes I really hate though. Getting boarded by a galleon crew who spawn killed us repeatedly on our sloop, without ever sinking our ship, in Sea of Thieves
Is this not contradictory?
Disclaimer: I’ve never played Sea of Thieves.
All of those issues sound like things the game developers should figure out solutions to. If there’s a boring behaviour that results in boring gameplay and people can’t do much against that unless they have overwhelming skill… Yeah sounds like a problem that they need to solve somehow.
Because games should be fun.
Well, that minecraft thing happened once in maybe a thousand hours of gameplay.
Same with the sea of thieves thing.
I think it’s acceptable to technologically tolerate small amounts of abuse, so long as the abuse isn’t literally killing people (dying in a video game doesn’t count).
If one asshole uses game mechanics to make the game not fun, during one session out of hundreds of sessions, it’s not that big a deal to me, and I don’t think it warrants changing the game mechanics.
Just my own opinion on it. Fine with people differing.
That being said, fixes for these two problems could be as simple as:
- Dying in lava has a 5% chance to catch an adjacent bed on fire (allows you to then spawn at the world’s origin again)
- Being killed N times on your own ship opens up an alternate portal in the underworld (maybe it’s a plank you walk) that lets you spawn in the water outside the ship instead of on your ship
But I enjoy seeing people’s creativity in devising these evil stratagems, and also I seriously don’t think games should always be fun. I think games should enable players to practice making it fun. I think it should be possible for games to be not fun, so that players can practice the type of political organizing that helps groups of people kept reality fun.
But I’m weird in that I see video games as deeper than mere diversion; I see them as a way to practice for the Meta Game, which is the set of all games, including all the social arrangements we have in reality. I think permitting antisocial behavior in low-stakes scenarios gives people an opportunity to practice strategies for dealing with antisocial peers.
One time in minecraft this kid got himself a high level enchanted bow and about a million arrows, then proceeded to build a mountain out of lava and water buckets that constantly grew, and killed us all from the top of it with his bow.
The entire server was trying to take him down and he was just owning everyone. It became like 10 vs 1 as we tried to scale his lava mountain and take him out.
Moments like that are, to me, cool gaming moments. I was pissed but not really deeply. It was also amusing and impressive.
I’ve done koan training, so I love extremely “impossible” tasks that take countless tries to get past.
I do remember that before the koan training it was extremely frustrating and miserable to try try try 10,000 times and still fail at a thing, so I know I’m in the minority here.
Chinese gamers are probably the most prolific, yes. But, it’s not a Chinese-cultural characteristic.
I think it’s a characteristic you can find in any culture that where outcomes don’t seem to be distributed in a fair manner.
It’s like a society-wide version of oppositional-defiance disorder.
Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!
I read something about this in the Book “Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#” by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.
Basically, every Player has some Intention or the “Player Intent” which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:
- The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
- The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
- The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
- The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them
And then you have two others that you will be encountering:
- The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
- The Spoilsport who doesn’t care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player’s experience
So, the motivation to “cheat” could either be that this player doesn’t really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to “win legitimately”.
As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn’t about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of “don’t feed the trolls”.
With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be “What is their motivation” and the answer to that is “to win the game, at all costs”. And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.
What about the Grower who wants to pit himself against others in ranked matches to optimally develop his own skill?
