An Interview with a Cheater

Dan writes to mention a post at the Aeropause site. Author Richard was recently given the rare opportunity to interview a cheater, shining a light into the dark recesses of a conflicted mind. The article explores why the cheater cheats, and the great excuses they use to be able to look themselves in the mirror. From the article: "Aeropause: What made you decide to mod your Xbox to gain an unfair advantage in games like Halo 2? Schmuck5000: Modding is not an unfair advantage. There is just as much chance that there will be a modder on the other team. I am there to even things out. Halo 2 is beginning to get old, us modders are just making it more funner."

athletes use same excuse

[192939495969798999]

Athletes often use the same excuse, that since there will be "other" players on drugs, they need to use the same drugs to stay competitive. However, this should only be the case if the drugs are allowed, because any given cheater could be exposed and stripped of their titles, video game or otherwise. That's the ultimate slap-down, because anyone after that will assume you're cheating even if you're not.

Rare Opportunity?

[KermodeBear]

The summary calls this a "rare opportunity to interview a cheater". Cheaters are hardly rare and it isn't difficult to talk to them. Granted, you're likely to get "OMGSTFUONTEHBBQ!!!11!1!one!eleven" than a real conversation, but...

Regardless, the amount of cheating that exists online now is the reason I only play online with people I know, on locked servers. The rest of the time it is single player stuff. When I play a game I play to have fun, and cheaters make games very UN-fun.

Catching them can be a problem. I'm happy the some companies are taking steps towards anti-cheating measures, but ultimately the cheaters are going to win. They control the software running on their hardware and they can modify it as they see fit.

PunkBuster was a good example of this. A server with PunkBuster running required all client connecting to be running a PunkBuster client, which reported to the server various bits of information such as video drivers, what processes are running, if something might be modifying the game's memory, etc. But, after a while, it was useless because the client software was hacked to make the cheater player seem legitimate.

Anti-cheat software is like a lock on a door: It only keeps the honest people out.

I used to cheat on Halo 2 too!

[Stormx2]

So you can get an interesting look into my mindset if you want. I expect heavy critisism but I'll continue anyway: Halo 2 is a fun game. I'm not gamer, and Halo 2 is one of the only games I actually play, besides the ones on my old Megadrive! I played online for quite some time until I experienced a cheater on a matchmade game. I became interested. I'd been using linux for 6 months and the idea of putting it on my xbox - to cheat - appealed to me. It took me a lot of getting to grips with the text talk used by all the "modders" as they prefer to be known on Halo 2. Eventually I managed it, and got banned in 6 hours on my subscription account! I guess that taught me a lesson. For a few months I cheated offline with friends. Some of the less destructive hacks (such as the new-ish 0 gravity hack) can make some interesting playing, and I agree with said cheater that it can bring a different edge on a game which can become repetitive! I decided to mod online one day. Not for glory, just to see if I could. It actually takes 2 people to mod online, and 4 hours of fussing around with that meant I totally screwed it up, and didn't have a single sucessful game! Heres my excuse: I'm a bit of a documenter/tutorial maker myself. Hacking Halo 2 isn't that simple. A lot of newbies get stuck, I was one. A lot of cheaters are fools and pre-teens (including mental age here), but not all of us! Much like the OSS community have their shared ideas, "modders" do too. I'm not demonising OSS here either. I actually wrote a rather lengthy and detailed tutorial, the only of its kind, on this topic (Halo 2 Softmodding, google it). Thats my excuse. I haven't played halo 2 in 6 months now, but cheaters don't always cheat to win. A lot do, but try and bare this point in mind! And please comment on this =) I just wrote a blog post on my second slashdot comment. Ah, such a newbie.

Re:Ladies and Gentlemen:

[bradkittenbrink]

While, he does claim to be 24, in general I agree with you, he definitely appears to think like a 12 year old. For example:

Aeropause: How many times have you been banned or suspended from gaming servers?
Schmuck5000: .... The people at Bungie are the worst. How can they complain about people like me. They should have built a anti-cheating engine in the game to prevent it. Its not my fault that modders cheat.

Aeropause: .... What advice would you give game designers to help discourage cheaters?
Schmuck5000: Give Up! There is no way to stop us. Everyone wants to cheat and we will always find a way to do it.

That's some ironclad logic there, if I've ever seen it.

Re:Really lame interview

[1010110010]

You're missing the point of the interview.

Yes, it would be very interesting to ask technical as well as moral questions to the people who enable cheaters to cheat, but this interview gave us insight into why a person would cheat in the first place.

I would also like to add that there is a strong difference between cheating at a single player game, and having fun figuring out the save system, and cheating at multiplayer. When you're cheating by yourself, whether it be because you enjoy reverse-engineering the save file or because you simply want to advance faster, it has no impact on anybody else.

Cheating at multiplayer is an annoyance for everybody. The interviewee clearly demonstrates that there is no technical challenge to what he is doing. He's not doing it because he wants to understand how the game works. He's doing it because he's not very good at the games he likes to play and he wants to win, to the frustration of everybody else.

Re:athletes use same excuse

[Red Flayer]

Athletes often use the same excuse, that since there will be "other" players on drugs, they need to use the same drugs to stay competitive.

I think there's a difference between recreational gaming and professional sports, however. Professional sports are ALL about winning (unfortunately, IMO -- it sets a bad example). Look at the famous quote by Vince Lombardi -- "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."

Recreational gaming is about competition, win or lose -- and the fact that some people are willing to cheat doesn't change the fact that if I cheat, I'm throwing away the concepts of fair play and good sportsmanship.

In life, as in gaming, there will always be people who cheat. The questions are:

1) Does your moral system acknowledge that when competing within a ruleset, it is immoral to reach outside that rule set? And,

2) Are you willing to suffer negative consequences for sticking to your morals, even when others are obviously acting outside the rules?

People who cheat usually justify their actions by their response to these two questions; a negative response to the first indicates a contextually amoral system, a negative response to the second indicates an immoral attitude.

The subject of TFA is of the second camp; his justification is that because others have broken the rules, and he doesn't want to suffer thereby, that the rules have changed to allow cheating.

However, this should only be the case if the drugs are allowed, because any given cheater could be exposed and stripped of their titles, video game or otherwise. That's the ultimate slap-down, because anyone after that will assume you're cheating even if you're not.

That works in professional sports; not so in on-line gaming, where anonymity cancels it out. I don't really see a solution -- I know that when I play, there are others playing with whom I'm not competing (the cheaters). It's frustrating, but I can always get my jollies from feeling that I've got the moral high ground. When there are too many cheaters, I play a different, less popular game -- where cheating is less rampant.

Re:Really lame interview

[ergo98]

I agree with parent, the interview is stupid, it is just one person whining because the 'cheater' beat him. I agree that what would be interesting is to interview the developers of the cheats.

It's impossible for a cheater to win. People who face cheaters get irritated because they completely ruin the game, not because they're such potent adversaries.

Even when you aren't getting shot by magic bullets from adversaries who can track you and shoot you through walls, once cheaters have permeated a domain you can no longer enjoy the game: Instead of ceding that your opponnet played better, once there's cheaters in the mix you can never savour a loss (to put it in a funny but truthful way). Suspicion and bitterness overtake the game (on both sides. I was pretty good at Urban Terror, and my abilities were endlessly chalked up to "cheats" by my victims. I could never enjoy my wins, and they couldn't enjoy their loss or learn from it, because the game was saturated by cheaters).

I agree that what would be interesting is to interview the developers of the cheats.

I think what motivates the creator of the cheats is clear to us all. Hell, I would never spam, but creating spam-track avoidance software has always intrigued me because it's a challenge. I'm sure the cheat developers are just playing their own game, and they are legitimately winning.

The people destroying online games, however, are just the scriptkiddy wankers, and really I doubt the actual developers behind the cheat (who do legitimate, real work for their achievements) ever really even bother using their cheats online.

I cheated

[JeTmAn81]

I used to cheat a bit back in the days of CS, when it was still in one of the betas and there was an exploit that allowed you to switch teams in the middle of a round without any visible indicator of the change, so you would be playing along with your teammates, hit your custom-bound key, and instantly you'd be able to start blasting their brains out. This infuriated them to no end and usually it got to the point where your whole team would surround you and start shooting you at the beginning of the round...except at that point you'd be invulnerable because you were still on their team. This continued until the other team showed up and your team was forced to turn around to fight them...at which point you hit the button again and began shooting them in the back. This was an unbelievably hilarious process, made more so when you did it with a friend. I never cheated in a serious game, however. It was only for fun on pub servers in the interest of irritating total strangers. The various wallhacks available for CS back in the day were a ton of fun, too.

Re:Really lame interview

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I've always enjoyed it more when I'm having an "on" night, smoking everyone that stands in my way, and then being accused of botting. That's when I ham it up, say "Yes, I'm cheating like mad", and continue to smoke them on skill alone. More fun that way since I know they're pissed AND I know I'm skilled.

Re:Cheating is natural

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not a mystery. It is very simple. Our brains are the products of evolution in a competitive environment. In the good old days, the losers got eaten (or starved to death or what have you). So, those who used all their resources to give themselves every advantage they could tended to be the winners.

Your argument has so many flaws it isn't even funny. First, nobody ever cheated in the wild. You can't. There are no rules.

Games, and rules are an artificial, social contstruct, created by humans. Cheating is just as artificial. One major difference between a video game and real life is that a video game has rules posted.

In life, using all of the resources available to you is fair game. In video games, using all of the available resources to you is called "playing." It isn't the same thing as "cheating."

Your argument holds water for one type of person, the type who can not mentally differentiate between real life and video games.

Re:Of modders and cheaters

[Anonymous Coward]

That's all well and good, but where do you draw the line between tweaking/modding and cheating? Back when I was playing UT2004, I'd say that my client was tweaked to its limits. By changing some parameters in the configuration files and stringing together some uScript, I automated numerous tricks that would take a bit more time and a fair bit more skill for a player using a "standard" installation -- one-key weapon-boosted jumps, instant 180-degree turns, tricky weapon-swapping macros, fast key rebinding "exec" commands (quickly change a dozen settings to make flying a vehicle easier, for example), three levels of chat macros, a quick mouse sensitivity adjustment, and several other things that wouldn't make sense outside of UT circles. Additionally, I played with the graphics configuration, forcing most foliage to vanish, forcing only one easily-visible standard player model to load for all players, and "correcting" the game lighting to be more efficient and to look "brighter" (think "fullbright"). I also employed a couple tweaks to decrease my load times; on some servers, I could get to a weapon spawn while most people were still spawning -- and all of that on a crummy old 1.7 ghz box! Now, given that much, I tripped anti-cheat programs exactly twice in about a year and a half of playing, and both times, I was able to temporarily disable the relevant tweak through the game console within 15-30 seconds and get back to playing.

Now, I do NOT see myself as a cheater. Everything I did, I did through the game's own configuration system and scripting language. I didn't use tricky graphics card settings, I didn't modify game content, I didn't use outside software, and I still had to move, drive, and aim like any other player. Even so, I WAS better-armed than the average person playing the game, and more tweaked out than all but a few of the clan gamers I was playing with. I never made any bones about the fact that I had some unusual tricks up my sleeve, and I was always happy to explain how I did them if anyone cared. I would also contend that I was a very good, if not quite exceptional UT player -- not quite tourney quality, but not too far behind either. I was in the top 10 on a couple DM ladders at one time and I participated in squads that hit the top 5 in several team game ladders. Could I have done as well as I did without using tweaks? I honestly don't know. Obviously, I did derive pleasure from employing such modifications; it was gratifying to sense someone behind me, whack the 180 spin key, hit the slow mouse key to correct my aim, then double-tag the bloke almost simultaneously with two hitscan weapons. Go figure. My argument is this: client-side game configuration files are there for the benefit of the player, and as such, any changes to gameplay that can be enabled through the game's own initialization and configuration routines or console-available scripting calls are fair for use.

So tell me: was I a cheater or was I just an enthusiastic player? If that question seems pointless or OT, answer me this: would tweaking init/config files to a similar degree on a console game -- say, Halo 2 -- constitute cheating? Honestly, since my last console was an 8-bit Nintendo, I am a bit fuzzy on some of the finer points of console netiquette...