What do these people think they gain?
Whats the point?
Do they really just want to ruin stuff for everyone?
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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.
Have you tried gtao with mods/cheats? Its the only game that I happily “cheat in” because when I play, I just want to have fun with the new things. Also keeps you safe from other modders, and I’ve made quite a few friends just being able to enjoy the game and not grind.
I haven’t played GTAO, but maybe I’ll check it out. Thanks for the tip.
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.
This answer deserve more than an upvote. Have a beer 🍻
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.
Don’t forget the streamers that make bank being “good” at a game.
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.
Is some cultures just a PC way of saying China?
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.
Can you elaborate?
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?
That’s “the Achiever” with different wording.
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
MOBAs
Which one? I’ve exclusively heard bad things about League for being a cesspool of toxicity. HOTS seems more chill though.
As someone who played exclusively ARAM because I just don’t like the main game, even in LoL, that mode is pretty chill.
Either even salty people can calm down when the stakes are lower, either that mode mostly attracts the non-salty people, but yeah, I would rarely encounter toxic people.
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.
Something isn’t dead just because it isn’t universal.
I’d imagine it’s mostly because of how many players there are. If only 1% of players cheat, and you run into 100 players in a typical session, you’ll likely see a cheater, and if 1,000,000 players are playing, then 10,000 cheaters are playing.
They get to feel like they’re the best at something. They know they’re cheating, but they lack enough self-awareness for that to be an issue for them. Alternatively, some people just want the technical challenge of figuring out how to cheat, and getting away with it.
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.
Manipulating the game can be a lot of fun, more than the game itself. In a way, it kind of becomes like a higher level kind of game. When done appropriately and not ruining other people’s fun, that is. I’ve had good fun on friend’s private servers and giving their shit code a good stress test.
I have zero respect for those that just download cheats and use them to pass off as skilled and ruin the fun for others. It’s like ethical hacking: do it with permission or at least be transparent about it.
There’s game servers out there to play against other cheaters, and it can truly be hilariously broken and entertaining. I’ve also been quite fascinated by Minecraft servers like 2b2t where cheating is basically necessary to survive at all. The exploit content and drama that have come out of this server is bonkers. But everyone knows they’re playing against cheaters, the fun is seeing how you can outcheat your opponents.
There’s also the whole speedrunning community, the ways people have broken games wide open. Fascinating and very entertaining stuff. The skills you need to perform a lot of those glitches are insane and extremely challenging. Hours of grinding to get frame perfect glitches work, several times during a run. It’s a whole new puzzle, with so many more variables.
Why would someone cheat on games like CS2, Apex, Valorant and the likes, that I don’t know. Some people are really just kind of losers I guess. I personally don’t see the appeal, I’d want to be famous for the cheats and not even compete with non-cheaters because that’s just plain unethical and unfun. There’s also a big difference between finding dupes in Minecraft vs an aimbot in a competitive shooter.
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?
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?
For the cheaters? A feeling of superiority. For the people that make those cheats? Money from those losers, apparently enough to be worth the trouble sadly.
Ok that’s impressive! I had no idea.
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
GTA Online has so many cheaters/hackers/modders that it can be unfun to do anything in it since they are either the type to give away free money or the type to grief you and crash you.
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.
I suppose nobody wants to be a loser but some people are pathological with it. I would imagine a typical scenario is some young guy has reached the limit of what he can achieve in a game and is still losing. They implement cheats for a while and then quit the game entirely because it still doesn’t scratch the itch and now it’s also become boring. Everyone loses.
Yeah I don’t get. I mean even single player games. As a kid I learned my lesson with wizmaker. Ruins the game. Ive used some since but it was like after a doom level before I hit the switch I would use the thing to show the whole map to get 100% complete. That was worth it but like infinite ammo or invulnerability would just make the game pointless.
Its a plague in online games. If its anything like real life I assume that people just get a kick out of doing it and getting away with it. Stomping people and being elitist about it. I guess that’s the reason why people smurf too.
Like a rich kid feeling better than the rest because dad=rich and your dad is not.
People can do whatever they want in single player games. Run with infinite ammo, god mode, flying, unlock all skills at lvl 1, increase stats/or resources on demand. I dont care. Maybe it takes the edge off or maybe they want to go through the campaign story without all the grinding after a long day at work or school.
I’m not complaining. I won’t lose any sleep over it. If it fulfills your power fantasy or whatever. Go for it. You’re not hurting anyone.
But the people who cheat in online games can piss right off. They’re ruining of for everyone on multiple levels ( kernel AC, online enjoyment, … ).
I recently saw a documentary clip on how people cheat nowadays with arduinos and PIs to circumvent kernel anti cheat and stuff. It was fucking depressing.
If you get joy from ruining other people their day you need to go outside, touch some grass and contemplate your life’s choices.
The same goes for smurfs. If you want to stomp on something then go stomp on very easy bots while they aren’t sentient yet.
Yeah, on the rpi thing. I know someone who uses something like that for EverQuest. The gist is it looks for monster spawns and can display them on a map instead of camping a spot for over an hour, sometimes more, to get an item you need. The amount of people who use it on some of these servers is supposedly pretty high and it is just looking at network packets I believe. This is a case where I can find it acceptable, especially for an old game that is mostly played by people who have jobs.
I can’t fathom cheating though in online games and as a woman I have zero desire to play FPS games with a bunch of immature assholes that will torture me if they find out my gender. The only online FPS I played as a kid that was a positive experience was Serious Sam 1 & 2. A lot of German players I remember. Only other online PVP I liked was in Guild Wars 1.
This is the reason why I only play cs2 with 5 or 4 people in the team. I suck, usually, but CBA dealing with salty tryhard teammates. At least the people I play with are just there for a good time.
I swear one of them should be in the 20k rating region if he wasn’t constantly dragged down by us losers. :D
I can’t imagine putting that much effort doing passthroughs. Its like I can get paid to do stuff like that for sensible reasons. Why would I want to do it in my free time to play a game.
I did this when I was young. Sometimes annoying little assholes just wanna feel powerful
Yeah, like the other person also mentioned Counter Strike has had a major cheating problem for two decades and it’s still pretty bad today. Valorant is a very similar type of game: twitch shooter that needs fine motor skills and reaction time where one player can dominate an entire match. Valorant has a more intrusive anti-cheat and a lower ratio of cheaters but both game still have cheaters and cheats. People will pay large monthly fees for access to premium, not-yet-detected cheats to compete in competitive circuits.
What’s distinct about twitch shooters is that the core gameplay is very simple (just click on everyone’s head) but it can take thousands of hours to become really competitive at them. People who are not at the same level as their opponent may think they are cheating if they outskill them enough which leads to a feedback loop where new players feel like they need to cheat to be on equal footing because the other person HAS to be doing it too.
Players with a lot of hours can usually tell if someone is cheating with relatively high accuracy (except at very high skill levels where the cheaters are also incredibly good at the game) but newer players tend to consistently call cheats on players that are just better at the game. Competitive drive, lack of trust in other players playing fair and high skill ceilings all create the demand for cheats which in turn creates lucrative opportunities for cheat developers.
Ruining other people’s fun is also another popular reason like you said but I would say most cheaters justify it to themselves in some way.
