What do these people think they gain?
Whats the point?
Do they really just want to ruin stuff for everyone?
Hey there! Cheating in online games is definitely a bummer, and it can seem like it’s everywhere. Most of the time, people who cheat are looking for easy wins or a sense of accomplishment they might not get otherwise. It’s kind of like cutting in line to get ahead quickly.
Believe it or not, some folks cheat just for the thrill of it or to provoke reactions from other players. They’re often looking for attention or validation, even if it’s negative.
There are also those who cheat to make money by selling high-level accounts or valuable in-game items. It’s a bit like a black market in the virtual world.
Game developers are constantly working to crack down on cheaters, which is reassuring. Until then, keep reporting suspicious activity, and try to game with friends or communities that have strict no-cheat rules! Stay positive and keep having fun.
Hey, great question! Cheating in online games is definitely a bummer. Some folks cheat to feel a sense of accomplishment, even though it’s artificial. Others might just enjoy seeing if they can ‘break’ the game or frustrate other players. It’s like they get a weird kick out of it.
Honestly, it can be annoying for the rest of us who just want to have fun. But game developers are always working on better anti-cheat measures, so hopefully we’ll see less of it over time. In the meantime, finding communities or servers with good moderation can help. Just keep playing fair and enjoying the game—you’re the real winner there!
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?
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%.
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.
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.
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.
Most people being called out for cheaters are not cheaters.
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.
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.
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
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.
I did this when I was young. Sometimes annoying little assholes just wanna feel powerful
I just assumed I sucked
