What do these people think they gain?
Whats the point?
Do they really just want to ruin stuff for everyone?
Because they’re online? Not everyone is playing the same game. There’s the same cheating in offline games too, but that’s not as visible.
Most people being called out for cheaters are not cheaters.
Is it that prevalent? Seems like anti cheat works, at least I don’t see much of it in the games I play. Are y’all seeing cheaters frequently? What games?
CS2 is at least 1 blatant cheater every match that I play (spinbot, anti-aim, walls, aimhack). They react to things they cant see, shoot you through a smoke and a wall with no hesitation and generally dont hide it that well. You can even watch the demo back to see them lock onto someone they havent heard or seen through the wall and follow them perfectly, reacting to what the other player does without seeing or hearing it. Vac has been a joke for years and even now with “Vac 3.0” i havent seen a single person get banned
It’s to the point now where they are using DMA (direct memory access) cards to read memory directly from the PCI bus and bypass even the most invasive anticheats. Valorant has a ton of DMA cheaters.
That seems like a lot of time and effort … what is actually being gained by this?
In Oldschool Runescape it’s pretty common to see characters that are just blatantly bots. If they had plausible usernames and picked a random appearance it wouldn’t even be that obvious, because it’s a whole game about repetitive actions, but a lot of them have the default appearance and gibberish names.
Botting is sort of a different problem because it’s often related to real-money trading, so there’s a more obvious incentive to cheat: running bots generates gold that can be sold for cash.
In addition to that, many people run bots as a sort of side hustle, either to fund their main or just to fund more bots. And I suspect many people use scripts to automate tedious tasks on their main accounts as well, although that would be hard to notice unless you directly interacted with them while they were AFK.
At the end of the day, I see cheats as essentially just mods for games. A cheat enables you to do something with the software that you couldn’t before. If everyone has equal access to the mods and agrees at the outset, then who cares? But if you’re the only one in the lobby cheating then you’re probably a jerk who puts their enjoyment ahead of others’.
If you’re playing by yourself, hack away. Enjoy yourself. You should be allowed to have the maximum amount of fun with your toy.
If you’re playing with other people, especially against other people, it’s super unsporting. Everyone should have a level playing field.
Gamers with disabilities opens up sort of a morally gray area. Like, if you only have one hand you’ll have a hard time aiming and shooting at the same time. I could see why someone would be tempted to use an aimbot.
As far as why cheating seems so prevalent, I place the blame largely with the F2P model. Now, I’m not saying that people aren’t cheating in other games. But if the consequences of getting banned for cheating is that you just have to make a new free account, then you could argue that there aren’t really significant consequences to getting caught. There’s money to be made by cheat vendors on massively popular games, so the free ones make sense to target because the costs are low.
Worth mentioning: just because you think someone is cheating doesn’t necessarily mean they are. I’ve never cheated in a competitive game but I’ve been called a hacker by poor losers. If you’re looking for a cheater, you’ll likely confirm your biases and find one - whether or not someone was actually cheating.
Sportsmanship is dead, also some people who don’t have much else going on in their lives base what little self esteem they have on being good at video games and are desperate to maintain the idea they have of themselves as winners.
sportsmanship is dead
I’ve seen fighting game players who won’t throw a single punch until they know both players are ready. What kind of games do you play?
edit:formatting
As a former League player i felt kind of like that back then - a lot of people were just not nice people. I think some of that comes down to how certain PVP players are motivated insofar as personal agency - they want to be the high carry, they want to be why things won the way they did.
I saw that too in Overwatch 2 when that first came out with the rebalance to 5v5: suddenly everything was about personal agency and Blizzard decided that the game balance should favor that over strong teamwork (IMHO).
For me, that’s why I got out of those two games and only play when I have nearly a full team of preexisting friends. I was always more focused on trying to get the team to the finish as a whole (maybe that comes from ending up as a support main).
Ended up finding my vibe in FF14 PvE, where everyone tends to work together better. That’s not to say there aren’t bad apples and problem children in a game that has minimal anticheat, but on average I feel like I see it a lot less - and fewer people who swear you out for just learning something new, where the general populace will often take time out of their own schedule just to help people along or explain something tough.
Sportsmanship isn’t dead, it may just not be where you’re looking.
Which one? I’ve exclusively heard bad things about League for being a cesspool of toxicity. HOTS seems more chill though.
