I play on occasion and the accusations seem to run rampant ... but, at the end of the day, do people really care? How is the frustration with cheating handled (aside from over the global chat line). Are there really people willing to quit in droves over it? I suppose some people even cheat themselves in retaliation to suffering at the the hands of suspected cheaters, but from what I've seen people just suck it up and keep playing.

Accusations can be rampant, but that's mostly just people who don't believe that some people are just that good.

When there's an actual cheater in a game, it completely ruins it.

In COD4 for example, hackers can one-shot-kill an entire team of players by themselves, from behind a wall... There's no way you can keep playing under those circumstances.
All you can do is screenshot their GUID and send it in to the server operators and anti-cheat people to get them blacklisted.

Unfortunately, lots of the people smart enough to make these hacks are also smart enough to steal peoples CD-Keys can get themselves an unlimited supply of new GUIDs...

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
All you can do is screenshot their GUID and send it in to the server operators and anti-cheat people to get them blacklisted.

Would you say people tend to just suck it up then, and wait on the offenders to get banned?




Is the awareness of cheating pretty low? I have to admit, I was somewhat naive about the extent of cheating until I saw YouTubes of Halo/COD/etc aimbots and chamming.

When I played Warrock that game was like 50% cheaters. You could still kill cheaters by basically one hitting them. The server's allowed a lot of client side events to slide and only did a few redundant checks. I had fun fighting the hackers. (Their health went up as if they were healing, so you had to be quick). It made the game an actual challenge.

I imagine for games like CS:S (only played it twice) it would be really annoying. Basically whenever another player has an unfair advantage due to cheating it ruins the game. Haven't played many games that allow cheaters.

Quote: Original post by HostileExpanse

Quote: Original post by Hodgman
All you can do is screenshot their GUID and send it in to the server operators and anti-cheat people to get them blacklisted.

Would you say people tend to just suck it up then, and wait on the offenders to get banned?

The average player does not know how to record GUIDs, so most people just seem to quit/go to another server.

Accusations are definitely higher than actual instances of cheating, but when it's happening, it's quite depressing for those trying to play legit.

I gave up on all flavours of BF because of the cheating. I loved the games, especially 2142, but being one shotted by people hiding inside walls gets boring after, oh, 30 seconds.

From my general experience, there are 2 kinds of cheating:

Smart cheating, where they bend the rules ever so slightly and don't overtly abuse it. Something like a toggled wall-hack. Something that makes them indistinguishable from some of the better players (and really, it takes skill to use cheats in such a covert manner).

And then there is Troll-cheating. The kind where they load up every-cheat-ever and hang around a server until everyone leaves, or they get banned (assuming there isn't a cheat/trick to get around bans). I find this is usually accompanied by mic-spamming of the worst kind.

The first kind can be really frustrating if you suck, but usually aren't that bad. And really, they are very uncommon, as there are always people that are just that good (especially on a game that's been around for a while). I used to play CS:S with a guy that could tell you how many people were running down a hall from the sound they were making.

The second kind, if rampant enough, can really suck the life out of a game. I personally stopped playing a few games because of it. edit: I should note, the smaller the community the game has, the more devastating the cheating is. FEAR is one of the games I stopped playing, because it had such a small community you couldn't help but run into a jerk every other hour.

Quote: Original post by HelplessFool
From my general experience, there are 2 kinds of cheating

I like that description.

The first kind -- difficult to discern between a cheater and a skilled player -- may be tolerated in some games. If that form of cheating is taking place on a ranked server the cheaters will be on par with the skilled players. The skilled players will notice the cheater's bad behavior but be able to deal with them anyway.


The second kind -- blatant cheating -- completely ruins the multiplayer experience for everybody.


Sadly, many cheaters in the second group believe they are part of the first.


The best solution to the problem: Do Not Cheat! It either ruins the fun for most players in the first case, or ruins the fun for everybody in the second case. A cheater's victory is a hollow victory.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that if you are caught cheating at a game you should first of all be banned from ALL servers for that game and then have someone come around and break your fingers.

If I've brought a game and I've played it for a while to become good at it I don't want some whiney person using cheats because if they don't they lose; losing is part of the game, deal with it or fuck off.

There is no 'skill' in using cheats, there are just cheaters and people who play the game how it should be played.

Fortunately I play on a set of servers which has a zero tolerance policy towards cheating so we have clean servers, which is nice.

But yeah, cheaters = fuckers.
There is no defending them.

When cheating is indistinguishable from playing well, it isn't really annoying for me. I don't mind if people are a lot better than me at a game, as long as they don't act like a child about it.

As for "troll" cheaters, they are very frustrating. But that is what they want, not to win, but to annoy. There are counter measures. In a game with a spectator mode, having every player join spectator until the cheater leaves is a simple solution that doesn't require an admin or votekick (which aren't always available). Other than that just leave the server. No point getting annoyed, that is what these cheaters want you to do.

I recall a recent game of TF2 where one guy picked up so many of the new droppable items. Everyone was really annoyed, and used the chat system to vent. If they had just ignored him, he would probably have moved on.

Calm is a surprisingly powerful weapon against annoying people, even in real life.