Originally posted by: skace
I think cheating might have been as high as 75% during the CS OGC days. It certainly reached critical mass. I'm not sure what the percentage would be at any other given time. I think players would be surprised how many people might casually cheat and probably wouldn't admit it here. In college, during the CS days, at one point I was using a ring model, which puts a big ring around players that can be seen through walls/floors/etc. The reason I started using it is because I had seen other people's screens on my floor and seen that they were using it first hand and I wanted to level the playing field. However it became a crutch. Even when I turned it off I couldn't tell if other people were using it.
Then came OGC and I only used it once, after it's use had gotten out of control. Using it once was enough for me to be incredibly disappointed in people in general. There was nothing that hack suite couldn't do, up until that point I didn't think stuff like that was true. Remove the walls? ok. White the walls out? ok. Autoaim at heads only? ok. Autoaim with invisible walls and headshot people through doors? ok. Speed up the player? ok. Lower recoil? ok. OGC might as well have been a case study for why hacking is wrong, left unchecked it can systematically destroy the game from every angle. There was nothing left to play at the peak of OGC, every game of CS had been thoroughly corrupted to a point where even a hacker wouldn't call it harmless.
But let's rewind back before CS, to the time of Quake 1, a period where I can honestly and proudly say I never cheated. Cheating in this game was well known too, from kl33n3x aimbots to every other assortment of speed hacks, lag hacks, wall hacks and respawn timers. Speed hacks in Quake1 were doubly notorious because you could actually break the framerate on weapons, allowing you to fire a lightning gun that could kill players in seconds. But 1 hack went above and beyond anything previous, it was exceptionally devious. This hack was placed out in the wild for about a year or 2, and then 1 day the author released a hidden feature of the hack, something nobody could see coming. The hack actually had a backdoor that wrote log files back to a server, logged the use of the hack by name and IP of every person who used it and when. When the logs were released a year later, the list was massive and devastating. People who had been considered major players in the community showed up on the list, and, even worse, it seemed to encompass far more people than had ever been anticipated. It was basically a whose who. The hack had answered the one question, how many people lie out their ass about whether they hack or not.
Now we are in the days of TF2 and the game is a lot less competitive so we haven't really seen cheaters in force. We had a nice run of dickheads who used the uber exploit to allow their medic to run around killing whoever they wanted while invulnerable. But this hack wasn't really devastating because it was so ungodly obvious that to do it was to beg to be kicked. However, I actually saw a person kicked from a server for possibly aimhacking. Now, I don't even know if an aimhack exists for TF2, but this person made it clearly obvious that they were going to sell a case for it that day. He stood on platform C on gravel pit and no-scope headshotted an entire team. Some of the kills took multiple headshots but that seemed trivial when you are headshotting continuously.
Being as I was part of the conversation that was starting to tangent and derail that other thread, this is somewhat what I was talking about.
From playing UT with tons of aimbots using the npc code that allows them to "cheat" it was hugely prevelant in that game from speed hacking, wall hacking, aim botting and insta-gibbing. Where do you think the isnta-gib phrase was coined?
Then to BF2 from simple hacks like removing the Fog of War, to having people's names always displayed (another minor wall hack) to the outrageous like flooding the whole entire map with commander abilities such as dropping millions of Humvee's or arty fire or supply crates an basically killing everyone on the screen, hacking is alive and well in today's open public games.
In fact at a last lan party I was at in which about 20 of us were playing COD4, I had this very conversation with people. One very vocal person took the OP's stance stating it's so rare that cheating goes on because it's so hard. I said name the game and he said AoC. It was a game that just came out. I said really? That's when I told him a buddy of mine was running a website distributing software called AoC buddy that allowed duping, speed hacking and tons of other stuff for the game and I just happened to have a copy of the executable and source code on my PC because, yes I'm a programmer and one point I used to find it fun to create hacks for games that I never intended to play anymore. So I keep a few contacts. I don't do it anymore, not enough time like I had over a decade ago in college and before, but I did at one time.
I'll admit, I'm good, but when I start seeing some things that don't seem right, or other people seem toooo good, then I get curious. I observe people for a bit, if the game allows that, and try to figure out what they are doing while I Google various hacks for the game. Many times, you can watch on YOUTUBE as people proudly document the hacks they use in a game from the mundane and almost benign to the seriously crazy. I then will download said hack, try it for a game or two in order to satiate my own curosity that the person I thought was just a little "too good" was doing exactly what I thought they were doing and then after that I'll stop playing that game online. For good. Why? Because if I catch one person very soon after a game comes out, it's only a matter of time before the flood gates open.
In my experience within 6 to 8 months after release of a major FPS game with online multiplayer mode, about 50% of the players cheat. As Skace has stated, with the quake 1 example many people that release cheats also keep statistics on this. Some just keep a number, others keep much more detailed info. At one point looking at a site that listed downloads for a hack for BF2 of unique IPs doing the downloads, something around 8 million. That's just one site and that's almost a fifth of the total sales of the game according to EA.
Anyone that doesn't believe how rampant cheating is for online games is deluding themselves. I also take it with a grain of salt when people on an internet forum state, "I don't cheat but been accused of it soo many time because of my skillz!" Why? The same adage that applies to inmates applies here. Every prisoner is innocent right?
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