Why do people cheat in games?

So i'm a pretty "old" gamer, starting with the likes of Quake 3 and HL for online multiplayer. 1999?

The first time cheaters became more widely known for online games was when myg0t came on the scene, PCGamer eventually did a full article on them. Essentially a cheating clan, would go onto servers tagged up and purposefully try to ruin it.

Based on what i've seen there are a few reason;

- Morbid satisfaction of ruining other peoples game and their reactions when they do it. (They'll normally go all out, blatantly obvious theyre cheating).

- Not very good at a game, want gratification of being good and others thinking they are.

- Improve their enjoyment of the game by overcoming certain aspects, for example DayZ they'd use a teleporter to move around more quickly and get to the action (I had a friend who did this - just used teleport so he could have a more action packed game).

Or a combination of all three.

It's a shame when people do it, i personally never saw the appeal. It would just feel "wrong"..
 
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I tried some wall hacks back when I played CS 1.6 - mainly to see how they worked/out of interest. I found I played better without them though.

Being accused of cheating when you're not is the highest form of flattery. Used to get some people accuse me when I played BC:2, but not much these days as I mainly play rocket soldier guy on TF2, and that doesn't lend itself to aimbots :P

I was never amazing, always someone better!
 
harry5522 said:
:D trying to cover up there hacks by being so against them huh. It's a shame really too because some great games are just plagued into being terrible games because of these people.

GTA V Online/Diablo 3/Battlefield series/Cod series/Dayz&Dayz mod/Counter Strike series/World Of Warcraft/Elite dangerous/APB /ARK /Chivalry /Evolve /H1Z1 /WarZ /Insurgency/Killing floor 1&2/League of legends/Left 4 dead 2/Nether/Red Orchestra/Rust/Squad/Star wars battlefront/Team fortress/ War thunder/Payday 2
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Chivalry really? You dont mean rainbow/ballerina moves and excessive dragging do you? Thats part of the game mechanics. Speedhacks work as they are most common but are quite easy to see because their animations are out of synch and thus they get kicked or banned.
 
I like you sprite, the older gamer. What you have to remember is we weren't born in to life of you're online presence is your existence... more so the case with many gamers that allow their life to revolve around just games. What's right from wrong in the real world out there, might not exist in there's.

I totally gave up with online gaming when I saw examples of that with a mmo I used to play. Thousands were exploiting/cheating... And to a man they All complained that it was the developers fault for allowing the exploit/cheat to exist, thus no action should go against them.

Clearly what they were doing was cheating.... but not in their world.
 
Surfer said:
Chivalry really? You dont mean rainbow/ballerina moves and excessive dragging do you? Thats part of the game mechanics. Speedhacks work as they are most common but are quite easy to see because their animations are out of synch and thus they get kicked or banned.
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No i mean spawning the entire map onto your location and standing there killing them as they can't do anything.


will trust a video of this to you.

Again im just trying to make a point that almost every single game on the market is hacked to ****

EDIT : not going to send any more links out to people but all of the games i listed i can prove that they are hacked to hell. Even if the devs deny it. Their only reason for this is probably profit.
 
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I've watched the links, that warthunder hack is almost laughable.

Not only have I seen 10-20 members of this forum considerably better than the 'hacks' but I'm pretty sure thats identical to another one a while ago that was proved fake.

lets face it, you 'buy' this hack, realise it doesn't work, you think youre gonna be able to get your cash back? Doubt it.
 
harry5522 said:
No i mean spawning the entire map onto your location and standing there killing them as they can't do anything.


will trust a video of this to you.

Again im just trying to make a point that almost every single game on the market is hacked to ****

EDIT : not going to send any more links out to people but all of the games i listed i can prove that they are hacked to hell. Even if the devs deny it. Their only reason for this is probably profit.
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Harry, that link you sent me is from 2013. That kind of stuff doesnt happen nowadays. Ive played since 2013 on official servers and never had that happen. Sure ive seen other types of cheats but its not as rife as people think.

What i like about chivalry is that an aimbot doesnt help as much in this game as other fps (unless you play archer ofc:p). Its an unreal engine game so yes there are hacks for it but its not infecting all the servers.
 
I've never cheated and am pretty useless so had good reason to. However, I just play the games for fun, I don't care if I'm the best. I think people who cheat must be fundamentally insecure on some level and feel they always have to appear to be good or the best. I, however, always remember that at the end of the day it's just a game.
 
Haven't gone through the whole thread so not sure if this has already been posted.

Anyway, came across this on google.

Bad behaviour online such as cheating in MMO games is strongly influenced by how players identify with gaming communities.

That's the conclusion reached by Vivian Hsueh-Hua Chen (Nanyang Technological University) and Yuehua Wu (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) in a study of teenagers in Singapore published in the Behaviour and Information Technology journal. The research examined how anonymity and a sense of belonging to social groups within gaming affected in-game cheating -- something which has the capacity to affect both profitability of games and the experience of enjoyable gameplay.

Cheating can be pretty hard to define in relation to gaming -- you say "morally reprehensible actions", I say "totally legitimate exploit" -- but for the purposes of this study cheating was defined as "strategies that a player uses to gain an unfair advantage over his/her peer players or to achieve a target which is not supposed to be achieved according to the game rules or at the discretion of the game operator".

The study found that playing with strangers (which the researchers equate with anonymous gaming) significantly increased instances of cheating behaviour. But rather than anonymous cheating being the result of reduced self-awareness and reduced inhibition, the researchers say it's connected to identification with group norms. That means, rather than being a case of "I'm anonymous I can be as antisocial as I like", players are cheating because they feel it's a norm within that online gaming community.

A follow-up focus group study conducted after the main survey backed this up and "showed that all participants viewed game cheating as something 'everyone is doing' and 'If you don't do it, you will lose out'."

Obviously there are some limitations with the research -- most notably the survey was based around self-reporting which can be unreliable, and it couldn't assess more nuanced interpretations of cheating in relation to specific games, genres of game or contexts. The study also focused exclusively on teens, meaning that it may not be broadly applicable to other demographics and there may be other factors relating to community interaction which are the "true" mediators of cheating.

Those concerns aside, the researchers concluded:

"[The study] shows that deviant behaviours online such as game cheating are largely influenced by the online social groups people feel they belong to. An online group, despite its fluid, unstable and imaginary nature, is powerful in constructing and changing its members' attitudes and views on behaviours. Hence, a behaviour that is perceived as problematic and deviant can be reconstructed with a different interpretation."

The implication here being that if we can alter what is considered normal in online communities we might be better able to counter negative behaviour like cheating as well as flaming, trolling and other forms of abuse.

The full study, "Group identification as a mediator of the effect of players' anonymity on cheating in online games" is available online.
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Thekwango said:
why did you enjoy 'kicking everyone's ass' it wasn't you kicking their ass it was the hack? this is the bit I just don't understand. you weren't kicking anything - the cheat was doing all the hard work for you, I just don't get how you or anyone can enjoy that.
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I still had to aim my gun it was only a wallhack lol ! I had that extra 2 sec advantage on the trigger :)
 
I rarely do multiplayer and so far as SP games are concerned, if I have cheated it's always been when absolutely stuck or due to stupid game design/mechanics. The Dodo vs Learjet chase in GTA SA was a classic case in point. Just impossible to do unless you gave a slight boost to the Dodo performance in the config file. But if you're going to do a Tycoon style strategy game and just cheat money in or, as I did once, give myself nuclear weapons in 1600 something in Civilisation, what's the point?

The cheating that really annoys me though is in the tablet games such as Clash of Clans or Samurai Siege in particular, where people have done something so they get matched to attack players many levels below to get easy loot.
 
Mynight said:
Pure interest how would you spot someone using esp? Aimbots are pretty obvious most of the time.
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In FPS games generally you need to spectate someone for a considerable amount of time to pick up on it unless they are very sloppy. If you are reasonably good and experienced at a game you can develop good instincts for who is likely to be cheating but it would normally take considerable time spectating to be sure unless they are instantly snapping to target from a wide angle. Its also very easy to fall foul of confirmation bias if you suspect someone is cheating as any half decent player will sometimes do things that at first glance appear suspicious but often just coincidence, they know the game better than you or processed the information presented to them ingame in a different way to you and were aware of something you didn't pickup on.

There is also a common misconception that because someone isn't playing that well they aren't cheating - a fair few people use wallhacks, etc. while not aimbotting and fairly terrible at a game.

There is also a factor with aimbots in that many/most legit people use small strafe nudges to fine tune their aim which is absent when an aimbot is doing much of the work but its not foolproof as a way of detecting cheats as some people mentally have a different approach with some having highly separated their movement and looking around like with a tank where the tracks and turret are semi-autonomous and others aim more like selecting something in 2D on the desktop.

Someone using a "smooth" aimbot with low fov is far from obvious unless you know what to look for but again an experienced gamer can have fairly good instincts for how "legit" a shot was which can clue you in if you are more objective than "everyone better than me must be cheating".
 
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Not sure if its the case now but the classic way of spotting an aimbot using first person spectate mode was if their "aiming" was more a case of "pressing fire and the x-hair leaps to the target point" (so in effect they arent actually *aiming*) or if they are clearly moving the x-hairs first and then shooting. Can also tell if they are always shooting at the same spot on the model.

That was years ago tho...so they are probably a lot harder to spot these days.
 
Most common aimbot doesn't even help with aim. It just shoots when you have a hit. A triggerbot. For sniping mainly. Very difficult to spot when they are aiming manually.
 
I don't really see the point in cheating online, you're only cheating yourself. Way back when SWG was good I once found a bug that let you keep the mission terminal open while you were out doing a mission, it saved me having to pop back to town and get another meaning I could do more missions faster. Told the guild and some numpty started plastering it everywhere and it got fixed.

If I cheat on single player games I have always already completed the game and, I do it just to see if I can create them myself, never use cheats that are built in or others have posted.
 
you say "morally reprehensible actions", I say "totally legitimate exploit"
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That alone show you how deluded that person is, a exploit is a cheat, its just another cheaters way of excusing their actions! love the way they try make their excuses sound legitimate, there is no such thing as a legitimate exploit!!
 
Nemeses said:
That alone show you how deluded that person is, a exploit is a cheat, its just another cheaters way of excusing their actions! love the way they try make their excuses sound legitimate, there is no such thing as a legitimate exploit!!
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If it's a game bug though then until it is fixed it is part of the game mechanics whether or not it is meant to be. Unless the devs announce they are aware of the bug, consider it a cheat and will punish those that use it I wouldn't necessarily consider it a cheat. I know you have very strong feelings on the matter so you'll dismiss that idea, but I can see it from both sides.

I certainly wouldn't care too much if others were using it, I don't get that emotionally involved in games for it to bother me. :)
 
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