I used to “cheat” in Mass Effect 3 CooP, using cheat engine to buy those weapon/character crates en masse.
Screw that grind. It was such a sublime MP game EA bolted the absolute stupidest loot box system to. Everyone in the platinum tiers did it; it didn’t hurt anyone’s experience. That game was so good everyone played for the sake of the game anyway, not the trickle of unlocks.
As a side “cheat”, I used to host modded public lobbies with crazy mixes of enemies, like all banshees one wave or “ranger” swarms of scions+ravagers another and such. A few players left, but the most common reaction was “holy shit, this is mad” and players stayed for the fun.
…I guess what I’m saying is, screw malicious cheaters.
But I also don’t like the idea of locking out modding either, or enforcing particularly asinine P2P schemes. I suppose the kind of MP games even conducive to modding don’t really exist anymore though :(
Cackling. Cheaters can eat sand. l
LETSGOOOOOO CS2 VIABLE AGAAAIN
I was blissfully unaware, probably because I’m not cheating scum.
Couldn’t have happened to a better community of people.
Fuck cheaters.
IMO, cheating is just taking away all the fun of the game. The cheater didn’t have to get gud to be able to win, and the victim is denied any recourse or any fun in playing the game. Bluntly, I have absolutely no sympathy at all for these kinds of people. If you suck at the game and need to use cheats to win, maybe don’t fucking play it competitively?
There’s a reason I’ve kept my counterstrike antics to private games among friends and local matches against bots. I have no interest in larder boards. I just want to have fun. Dying over and over before you can even do any damage, isn’t fun.
If you’re a cheater, get wrecked.
Bravo valve. Bravo.
I never cheat in multiplayer. But if a single-player game has a “hacking” minigame, I’m absolutely loading up Ghidra & GDB and figuring out how to actually hack around it. Pretty much always harder than just playing the minigame, but more fun.
oh god. When I played System Shock 2 for the first time, I couldn’t figure out how the hacking puzzles worked. I look up guides and asked for advice. Got told to gitgud by someone who didn’t play the game, then got told they were pure rng guided by the hacking stat. I saved scummed that shit. Don’t present me with something that looks like a puzzle, but isn’t.
I’ve only ever run macros for mining in a game I loved that had a terribly dreary, but almost necessary mining mechanic. They banned for macros though, so I stayed alert for approaching mods.
Depending on who it is, and it’s obviously not even close to the vast majority of cheaters I’d imagine, there are people who cheat in tournaments and the like where they can win serious money, or people cheat so they can look good in front of viewers who pay them money. At that point there is both a practical reason for why they do it and also an excellent reason to get them to fuck all the way off because they’re not just cheating but are also theives.
I’ve worked in esports for a bit and there’s definitely cheats out there that pros use. When utilised well you won’t even notice when directly spectating or when the player is streaming. They’re designed to help extremely good players just that little bit extra needed to become a top-tier player.
Those “pro-grade” cheats don’t come cheap though. I’ve heard figures in the 400-600/month range multiple times. These would also work on the special tournament clients used by professional players.
Well, we have doping in physical sports…
oh look. Another reason to not respect esports.
Some of the top end tarkov cheats I know of are around 900-1000 a month.
About the only game where the cheating is so rampant that even just though osmosis you can end up learning a lot about the cheat economy.
I used to cheat in GunZ online, but to be fair, I was like 11, the game wasn’t competitive, and leveling up for cooler gear and to unlock new maps was HARD work.
Eventually I’d git semi gud and stopped bothering with the cheats. But it was fun as hell flying through the map with no clip, as a ball of fire that killed everything except other cheaters with godmode lmao
leveling up for cooler gear and to unlock new maps was HARD work.
There’s something to be said for skipping unreasonable grind. It’s not okay to mess with other players experience, but that other part I do get.
How is there fun.
Huh.
Woohoo to being responsible for others not having any fun playing a game!
Woo! Woooooo.
What?
I don’t know why you would admit this.
Because they were 11. Lol.
Yeah exactly, at that age knowing how to download cheats and stuff actually made you feel sorta cool, not everyone could figure it out (and I know most kids wanted to).
Then realising it’s more fun without the cheats, just getting good at the game, I’d even dare call it a story of personal development.
This is the modern internet tho. You used cheats once 20 years ago as a child. Thus your shit for the rest of your life have no right to parole and deserve to be thrown in a hole?!!1!!1!1! /S
That’s what I don’t get cheating is rampant in online games but why? What fun is it to cheat I would think it takes the fin out of the game.
and the victim is denied any recourse or any fun in playing the game
That is how they get enjoyment from the game, denying other players.
Those are the same type of people that cause damage in the economy by scamming others, leading to preventable deaths.
Being caught cheating in a game, should leave you unemployable, with no welfare, and businesses should refuse to serve you.
Just make a government black list.
I don’t generally have a problem with anti-cheat mechanisms except when they require things like secure-boot or allowing me to do what I want with my machine.
They’re all proprietary, wouldn’t want that crap on my system anyway. (I don’t game anymore)
til there’s a cheat economy. Had no idea
It’s a multi billion dollar global industry. Lol
And they did it without installing root kits on our computers.
Exactly
Finally, VAC is a good anticheat, and that works without running deep into the kernel.
Finally, VAC is a good anticheat, and that works without running deep into the kernel
So this will solve the linux client not working because of crappy kernel level anti-cheat software?
Not all games employ VAC, and it’s likely that a game that would employ it in the future would need to fine tune it for the game in question. (VACnet is reliant on curated data from game servers)
nah, am talking about Games with VAC being well known for not properly catching hackers, and i assume this made the anticheat in games better not the steam client itself.
Ha! Get fucked, losers. Cheaters ruin the fun for everyone, so I hope every last one gets permabanned.
You cannot permaban a cheater for the saame reason you shouldn’t have death penalty, people need to be able to challenge the decision which should trigger a process
As a piece of software, I highly doubt there isn’t a single bug in VAC that would cause a false-positive
Bro touch grass. Seriously likening a VAC ban with the death penalty?! You can just email someone if you got banned; if you wrongfully died from the death penalty you can’t just phone the judge and ask him to recheck lmao
Judges should be using ouija boards to communicate with people killed by death penalty. “So you were guilty, right?” To make sure everyone gets a chance to appeal the decision.
This is certainly one of the comparisons of all time
Consequence of sentencing the wrong person to death: You killed an innocent life in an irreversible action.
Consequence of permabanning a player from an online game: The player can no longer play the game. The action is also reversible since “permaban” just means to say “we’re never unbanning you unless something extraordinary were to happen”.
When you suspect someone of being highly dangerous you put them in jail even if they are not convicted yet. And when it turns out they are innocent they are released.
A ban is like jail not like a death sentence …
More like getting kicked out of a club, you can still go to other clubs.
And you can contest the ban and potentially get it lifted and return to the same game.
Not a bad analogy, but there is a major problem with pre-trial detention being abused in the US, leaving people in jail for years at a time without having a trial. So maybe not the best thing to compare it to.
No, absolutely the best comparison because the same thing happens with bans and bad moderators who ignore requests and refuse to explain a ban.
shadowbanning to cheater-only servers sounds like nice middle ground to me
Fall Guy did that. The consequence was a lot of videos with everyone cheating.
so…it’s a win/win?
League of Legends was evil for this. I got shadowbanned to rhe quitters server for having a bad internet connection, and parents who’d demand I go buy groceries instantly, and yell if I fon’t.
Sometimes it’s a nice perk if you want to play modded coop with your friends ie those from mods.
Found a cheater
Meh, no process is perfect and sensitivity and specificity are often enemies. Basically, in a lot of cases the more sensitive you make a test to detect something, the more likely it is to accidentally catch false positives.
Sounds like they’ve vastly improved it’s ability to detect, hopefully that didn’t come with false detections for people running unusual hardware or software combinations.
If, to you, not being able to play one game in the sea of many many many games is akin to death, maybe you need to see someone about addiction.
If you cheat in a game, you’ve burned your bridge. It’s like taking a piss in the cereal isle of Kmart, you probably won’t be welcome in that Kmart any more. Or hey, maybe you’ll end up like an acquaintance I knew who was banned from a Kmart, maybe you’ll be hired on as staff without them checking the binder of banned people. I think I’ve lost the plot of this analogy.
Yeah, I have a very thoroughly ingrained suspicion of people treating anticheat with too much confidence stemming back to when I got banned many years ago from an online game for supposedly running a script.
I had so much lag on my dialup connection, that a backlog of all my commands hit their server at the same time, so from their perspective it looked like I’d entered over a dozen commands in under a second. Insta ban, no appeal, essentially lost access to a significant percentage of my online friends that it hadn’t occurred to me to get email addresses for.
I said cheaters, not suspected cheaters. I know that’s unrealistic, because no anticheat software is perfect, but I still want it.
You surely can permaban a cheater, and should. It doesn’t mean the process can’t be challenged.
I agree, they should instead do a 10 gazillion year temp ban. I expect people would change by that point
/j
It does not matter if they change. They violated the community’s trust, and should never be allowed to interact with that community again, if it is worth anything.
Why not both?
In the worst case scenario offender can just create another Steam account, so permaban is fine.
They should use Reddit’s ban system
I did finally win a match in CS2 after a long loss streak… it was definitely because everyone else was always cheating… not because I’m shit…
Still in like 5k cause I’m shite
I really hope valve can get VAC into a good space so it can be an example of doing anti-cheat well without having to be a rootkit. Looks like we’re heading towards that point. Hopefully this change will last
John Macdonald is cooking the best fucking server-sided anticheat with all that compute power in Bellevue. Lets see him become a master chef!
I’ve been thinking for a while we need more server side stuff. No worries about infringing on the consumers computer then. Hopefully that ends up becoming something good!
and they need it for the steam deck too. win-win.
I wonder if that is actually their long-term goal. I feel like anti-cheats are like the last obstacle for Linux gaming where some highly popular games are straight-up unplayable on Linux; with how much stake Valve has in the success of Linux gaming (Steam Deck duh) maybe they want to make it so that eventually all games with anti-cheats can run on Linux
I mean, to me, this is amazingly obviously the goal.
Games run better ~5% fps better now on Linux (when using a distro configured for gaming) than they do on Windows.
As you say, last technical obstacle is kernel AC rootkits.
Solve that, anyone still gaming on Windows is a MSFT fanboy, afraid of change, whatever.
But they have very little actual solid reason to remain on Windows.
Start getting people outta Windows for home PCs, it becomes basically just a shitty corpo OS.
Rather, not OS… but ecosystem.
I’d actually imagine for non-Microsoft properties, they would have all the more reason to run away from Windows to linux as soon as the anticheat issue is resolved.
I’d imagine they would come to the same conclusion that Gaben had with Win8: Relying on Microsoft “never restricting” the installation of software outside of the windows/Xbox store in the future is a huge gamble. Better to avoid the risk entirely.
Right I used to think Android would be smart enough to maintain the illusion of an open platform alternative to Apple that doesn’t restrict users as heavily, but even Android is moving towards a locked down platform that doesn’t let users sideload apps or install alternative OS, if this succeeds then I’m quite sure Microsoft will follow suit the greedy fucks that they are. We need more alternative phone companies and easier ways to make cross platform apps that can run on non Apple and Android phones easily
I’ve often thought that the cheaters should be simply shadow banned, and only match with other cheaters. Let them play against the other cheaters and see how well they do.
Cheaters also are part of why I like coop games so much more. Join a random game with a cheater, doesn’t matter too much and you can leave. Play with a group of friends and that also goes a long way to eliminating them.
GTA Online does (did?) this, most cheating wouldn’t get you banned and instead just placed in cheater lobbies.
Rockstar botched that system, I can attest as I used numerous different mod menus on GTA V Online, most well developed menus will let you alter yours (and others) in-game reputation by spamming the commend/report functions.
Spawning in UFO’s an such was the highlight of GTA V Online for me, haven’t touched the game since I moved to Linux, I hear it’s broken due to the new anti-cheat.
They made it much easier to setup private lobbies for friends and crew. Haven’t played in public lobbies in years.
While private lobbies certainly help weed out the bullshit, if a modder was determined enough they could copy your Rockstar ID and use that to follow you from lobby to lobby regardless of its privacy restrictions.
Logging someones Rockstar ID might as well make them your friend, depending on the mod menu they could receive notifications on when you’re online/offline.
Here is a common mod menu that was popular prior to the anti-cheat update, I think they have shutdown now.
From what you’re saying, it sounds like you have to be in a public lobby first, then hop into private for them to get your id. Can they get your id without ever being in the lobby or any contact at all? Currently you can just go into single player and start a private lobby. Idk how the enhanced edition does, I’m assuming it’s the same. I haven’t played in a couple years, so getting into a private lobby might have changed.
it sounds like you have to be in a public lobby first, then hop into private for them to get your id. Can they get your id without ever being in the lobby or any contact at all?
This is not true, if you knew a persons social-club username you could search for the ID associated with it. I can’t find many tools online except for this one no idea of this works or not, I’m sure there are guides to obtain R*ID’s elsewhere.
That’s very concerning. It’s wild it even exist.
I’m glad I wouldn’t play GTA anyway, even older games, for different reasons.
What reasons wouldn’t you play older ones?
GTA is a disgusting franchise, and the content in the games is just awful. Maybe the stories are good, but do you really need to insert heavy esex and substance use into a game like that? That’s called desensitization, and I’m sensitive to quite a few things (not this fake sensitivity that’s floating around… legit sensitivity).
GTA is a disgusting franchise
Because of this nobody noticed how woke GTA:SA was. If you depicted the CIA smuggling cocaine and weapons into black communities while the justice system imprisons young black men with wildly disparate sentencing 2025, the game would be canceled, by the kind of chuds who just see “cool violence!”
San Andreas was the wokest of them all, but GTA V is pretty woke too. Your main enemies are three letter agencies, the in-universe equivalent of Blackwater/Academi/XE (legit their GTA name has been consistent for longer than their real names at this point, might as well call them real life Merriweather) and you pull a hit on an asshole tech CEO, a tobacco company CEO, etc. But then, GTA V has also been out for over a decade now.
I hope they keep the theme going with the next one. Show it all as a bunch of “cool violence” while beneath the surface it’s critique of consumerism, government overreach and society in general.
heavy s-x and substance use
Did you just self-censor the word “sex”?
Bruh.
I pulled an Am I The Genius? here, which explains it. I might have to modify that a bit, since I don’t remember how they did it.
It’s escapism. If it’s not for you, that’s fine.
So that’s why you don’t play GTA. I don’t agree, but you do you.
To get back on topic, why don’t you play older games as you said. That’s specifically what the other user asked.
Maybe I should’ve clarified something, as the older games were included due to the fact that GTA’s writing, content and mechanics were just disgusting. On top of that, I wouldn’t do any of that stuff in real life, let alone in something like GTA.
AFAIK why not add a mod that removes these things
That stuff is hard-coded into the game, and would potentially be impossible to remove.
I always thought there should be an “unlimited class” in the olympics where you can take anything you want. I want to see wildly drugged up athletes competing with each other.
Caaaaaarl, that kills people.
Don’t worry, you can still be buried with the medal if you win
That’s just the regular Olympics.
I always thought professional sports games don’t have enough good ol’ gladiatorial bloodshed. If youre getting paid tens of millions per year for sports you damn well better be doing more than moving an object around.
Look, all im saying is any sports game can be made more watchable by giving players a side-armed melee wepon and allowed one swing per play iteration with no redcards. Put back in some selective pressure to turn those middle aged pudgy players and coaches into real athletes and tacticians.
“And now the athletes are at the starting line for the hundred meter ketamine stagger. . . They’re waiting for the starters’ gun. . . Some of them have got confused and wandered off. . .”
"Oh, it looks Swerving Dan had a heart attack when the starting pistol went off!
That’s going to hurt his chances, Jim."
According to D’Souza, he created the Games because he believes that athletes are entitled to do what they wish with their own bodies
If that’s been agreed upon as the ruleset for their competitions, I agree
and that the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is corrupt and not paying them enough.
Also agree, it’s the individual countries that usually pay their athletes to athlete and uh… Yeah, they get sponsors for a reason, don’t they. I know a few people who’ve competed at several olympic games and just being top 10 or something in the world in your sport doesn’t exactly get you swimming in money.
I think Valve should have only recorded which players were cheating for a few weeks, then ban them all at once. Would avoid them disabling cheats now they know and would also make it more difficult to figure out what exactly is VAC detecting.
I’d love to play matches with aimbots.
I’m not good at games. Don’t care enough to git gud. Certainly wouldn’t ruin anyone’s experience by cheating. But it’d be fun to see what the game is like with everyone having perfect aim.
Cheaters aren’t only aimbots. In fact, most of the time they’re not even using aimbot because that’s one of the easiest one to tell that someone is cheating. Most of the time they can just see everyone through walls. But if it’s cheater vs cheater and they don’t care about being caught then it’s not fun or interesting because you just use aim + speed + noclip (I assume that’s possible) and just kill everyone the second the round starts.
Yeah…that’s why I said “aimbots”.
Wonder if they are setting up a DeadLock reveal soon and wanted to make sure no one can cheat on it
I knew it that last cs2 game I was playing had a cheater… always losing every game I’ve played
Hypothesis: people who cheat in video games are scum bags in other aspects of life. I wonder if anyone’s done a study on that. I feel like the kind of person who has to cheat in video games is a broken sad sack.
Counter (simplier) hypothesis: people who don’t care about how they negatively impact other people’s experience are overall scumbags.
It depends if you’re only talking about multi-player or including solo too. I see no harm in customizing one’s experience with cheats in single player.
I don’t consider single player changes cheating. For something to be cheating, you need to break the rules agreed to by the players. If you’re the only player, you presumably can’t break the agreement you make with yourself.
Sometimes i turn off hardcore mode when i get overwhelmed. I def agree in principle though
Shit, I play in easy mode. And I sometimes look up hints online. But yeah, I only play single player stuff so I don’t feel like I’m cheating anyone.
I would further argue that it’s a bad behaviour only if one cheats in competitive multiplayer games.
Almost a decade ago, I was having fun playing Left 4 Dead 2. There is this survival mode where you and your human teammates play against neverending waves of zombies. In one stage, there was someone who invented a way to defend yourselves on a bridge by all four players strictly crouching and shooting straight to the front, at the far end of the bridge. If anyone runs out of ammo, they walk a few steps to pick up a new M4 and come right back. Cooperation is the key in surviving for more than 15 minutes, and everyone must strictly obey this play style.
Anyway, the way to communicate between players were limited. It was hard to tell everyone what to do by typing. I downloaded a mod which grants us infinite ammo, that way, nobody needed to get up to get a new gun. In late game, there were three Tanks spawning and charging at us, that even with perfect timing it was hard to defeat all three. The infinite ammo absolutely helped, and I think I just created an new way of playing this stage which depends more on one’s knowledge than skill.
I ended up had a great time with those strangers who played with me, who unlocked the gold medal of that stage, and way beyond the survival time requirement.
I think that the (only) relevant factor is whether everyone else knows and wants it. Suppose your mod affected only yourself (so other players wouldn’t know about it) and you played in a way that was mostly reasonable, but providing a little bit more covering fire than should be possible. Your teammates might still have fun while they’re playing, though only if you don’t overdo it; but even then, they probably wouldn’t be too happy to discover your cheating once they’d already finished the map. If you give everyone infinite ammo, and tell them about it then that’s fine, but because they know about it, not because they benefit from it.
For that matter, cheating in a competitive server set up for that purpose can be fun (though it can also be wildly unbalanced, especially if the game is asymmetrical)
Yeah, if everyone is in on it then it’s not cheating, it’s “house rules” as they say for board games
HvH can be some of the most fun nonsense. Cheating in and of it self is not a problem. It’s breaking of the social contract everyone is assumed to be in place.
Nah, if someone on my PvE team is cheating/exploiting that still ruins the experience. I play games like that to get better, the skill improvement is a huge part of the experience for me.
Yeah, one of my friends had a random person join his game and give him like 1000 account levels, whatever they were called. Basically finished a huge chunk of the end game progression for him, and we never found a clean way to undo it, since it was account-bound progression.
I will accept this as truth without further examination. It’ such selfish, antisocial behavior that there MUST be something wrong with them.
I used Roblox cheats when I was younger because I was bored.
When I was a little kid and I ran into cheaters in Halo: Custom Edition I still hated them and would never do it. I don’t think being a bored little kid is an excuse.
That said if you don’t do it anymore that’s a little more excusable at least you stopped.
A big part of the boredom was the fact there was other cheaters ruining the same game.
But yeah, I wouldn’t use cheats now
It really depends on what you think about as cheating. I mod my Bethesda games and Stardew Valley heavily to the point that mod file sizes are way past the game file sizes themselves, but some people consider that as cheating, as I’m not playing the original games, I’m not experiencing the original spirits of them. Some people heavily against this. Is altering games only consider as cheating in online games or in all games?
Here’s my definition of cheating: The use of any 3rd party software, not allowed by the developer, that gives a material in-game advantage to the user against other players without their knowledge or consent.
So mods are not cheating. Purely single player hacks are not cheating. Optional 3rd party overlays or in-game aids like RuneLite for OSRS or the many external deck/stat trackers for games like Hearthstone or Genshin Impact also aren’t cheating.
Using Aimbots, wall hacks, infinite health/ammo/lives, and similar in online comp play is cheating.
Grey zone stuff would be things like unapproved in-game overlays.
I don’t care what people do in single player. Hack and mod as much as your heart desires, it doesn’t hurt any other players. The worst thing that can happen is you “cheat” yourself out of a personal challenge, but that’s your own call.
I’ve never heard anyone but you call modding a Bethesda game cheating.
Ehhh…
There are some ‘cheat’ mods. I remember a decade ago there was a slew of mods that added weapons and spells that did something like 9999 damage. I would personally call that cheating, but who really cares in a single-player game.
That being said, I did get annoyed by them because they kept crowding out other, better mods from Nexus’s front page. But thankfully you don’t really see that type of mod anymore. I assume the playerbase gradually grew up so that the average age was over 12.
Granted, my view is probably fairly skewed due to being harassed by a (presumed) kid for a week to do the same with a mod I made.
I hope everyone is talking about online only. Most single player games have difficulty modes so you can play casually or hard as desired. This thread sounds like anything but the hardest is cheating though.
I think people who get angry at cheating/modding single player games are not to be taken seriously. Probably children.
Modding an offline sandbox game just to improve in-game quality of life is not the same as using cheat mods to get even at another and farm all the achievements for everyone to see.
I believe actual cheating requires there to be harm done to another player be it due to unfair advantages, theft of time or other malicious activity.
