I’ve been lucky and I’ve got 1 hacker in one month (in the Chinese servers, there was this widow with uncovered wallhack and aimbot), but I keep seeing videos of hackers in every ranks and it worries me. Also probably because youtube thinks I enjoy these and suggest me these, but the videos are way too fresh and often uploaded anyways.
I have been playing online shooting games since 2007, and I consider myself as a veteran in this field. WARNING, humble bragging: I was on the top page of EU top Crossfire players, I’ve participated in tournaments with prizes in this game back before twitch existed, I had global elite rank in CS go and 3800 Ana in 2017 (if I am not mistaken). Sorry for too much bragging, but I just want you to understand that I know every mouse movement you can imagine and I know what I am talking about. Just by looking 5 seconds of someone’s movement in a specific game, I can already tell if someone is experienced or not, and I am sure many experienced players can do the same. And as a person who spent countless hours in aimbooster and 3daim trainer, I can definitely differentiate when someone is hacking or not from their shooting. I am telling this to get some trust from you, because the topic I am going to discuss is controversial.
Smart cheating.
I don’t want to discuss idiot Cassidies who shoot the wall to decrease their accuracy cuz their aimbot is not even hidden properly, no. I want to discuss smart cheating. It is when someone has been cheating for so long, that they are able to properly hide the fact that they are cheating. This type of cheaters might even learn the games core aspects and showcase great understanding in ranked matches, and this way they can convince people that they are not hacking. Instead of having 100% aim assist, they will have like 10% aim assist, so sometimes they will miss shots. They will also purposely ignore a hidden enemy, as if they are not using a wallhack. These people purchase personal hacks, which means the code is unique and the anti-cheat will never discover it because it’s only one in the world.
How do I know this? Again, as a veteran in online shootings, I’ve seen many things. Look at this example. There was a website for Crossife that has been successfully delivering hacks for 3 months. After that, I noticed that on the most top level of our play, there were way too many new names. When you play on the highest ranks of an online competitive game, names are quite familiar to you because there are very few people on these ranks. After 3 months, that website launched a hack that had account stealing function as well, and according to the Crossfire Forum official post from that hacker himself (Name Med, Russian, controls one of the largest hacking teams in Post-Soviet countries), around 15% of the top 1 page players lost their accounts. This number doesn’t let me sleep some nights.
Another example is my best friend from Russia who was Med’s best friend, and he gave him tones of personal hacks, and I saw how these work in his own house. Med is an amazing gamer, and without hacks he can still play deadly. I am bringing you these examples so you understand what type of hackers I am talking about here.
What happens if we ignore this issue? If you allow hackers to live longer than a month, they start evolving and become better at hiding their stuff. They ruin more and more games, and it becomes harder to discover if someone is hacking. Eventually, they rank up to the highest possible ranks, and people don’t assume that they are hackers anymore. But this, of course, ruins the competitive fun and makes many people, such as me, paranoid about hackers.
The only solution is to have a dedicated anti-hack team with the best coders who will fight against this EVERY DAY. Ban waves are the worst thing ever because it happens every 2-3 months and it solves absolutely no problems. Another thing is to cooperate with the best hackers, and offer them more money than they make to assist with “white hat hacking,” but ofc asking blizzard to spend more money for game quality improvement is the same as to ask a pig to lay some eggs.
Again, right now it might not seem a huge issue for many, but free to play makes games way too vulnerable for hacking, and I hope people and blizzard understand this simple fact and are fighting for us, honest competitive players.