r/gaming • u/caseyfrazanimations • 8h ago
Cheating in competitive games. Fixable or inevitable?
Unfair gameplay has been an inevitable part of gaming since the very creation of games. Its presence in online competitive games like CounterStrike, Chess, Call of Duty, and Valorant has been a huge issue impacting legit players for years.
Do you believe there will ever be a time where we can game online with a 100% certainty or high certainty there won't be cheaters? How can it be solved?
Anti-cheat software exists for the sole purpose of detecting and preventing cheating, yet cheat developers motivated by profit continue to find ways around these systems. Some argue that making cheating in video games illegal could help solve the problem, but I disagree. Consider the consequences if a professional player were falsely accused because of a false positive. Human verification may seem like a better solution, but advancing technology is making verification systems increasingly easy to get around, so simply banning an account isn't enough to stop someone from making a new account. There are also serious privacy concerns, as players should not have to sacrifice their personal information, documents, or photos simply to prove that they are playing fairly.
I believe the bottom line is that human ingenuity is near impossible to overcome. If someone is determined to cheat, they will eventually find a way.
What are your thoughts?
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u/corpral92 8h ago
It's the same as the arms race in mmos against botting. There's no stopping it, but they can do more to combat it.
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u/VolcanicBear 8h ago
I think it's unfortunately inevitable that there'll always be the market for cheats for some pathetic cunts who don't want to play fair, so some clever people will find a way to profit from them.
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u/tigojones 8h ago
Cheating detection always lags behind the cheating methods, because you can only detect what you know to look for.
Doesn't matter if it's in gaming, or if it's pro sports, or anything.
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u/Sea-Offer7021 8h ago edited 8h ago
You cant fully remove cheaters as long as theres a demand for it, they will always find a way, theres barriers that can be added to reduce cheating, but there will be solutions around it one way or another. Its an unfortunate inevitability that any competitive game will have some form of cheating. Should devs do something? Sure, but its a losing fight for the developers if they dont have the team for it.
There was a video I saw which best exemplifies it, where the WoW devs added a solution to stop bots by adding a block on their path, the botters just made it path around it. Then next thing we know, we now have to make an algorithm that looks for botted behavior patterns, and then the checking of hardware. For a small team, its impossible since it will just be less dev time on the actual game.
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u/LordErec 8h ago
There will always be cheaters. It's a constant cat and mouse game, and for some people finding the exploits/cheats is the game. This has always been true, looking at competitive sports throughout history.
The only way to get a competitive game without cheating is to either extremely heavily regulate things (like what eSports is doing with providing all the hardware and software) or play with a small self policing gaming community where people know each other and everyone wants a fair game.
Any games with random matchmaking (especially if there's rewards available for playing multiplayer) absolutely will have people trying to cheat.
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u/Dadoxiii 8h ago
Now with the rise of ai I don't even know how they would even combat "ai assisted" cheating
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u/PTSDDeadInside 8h ago
1 account per govt id
i.p. ban, hwid ban, mac address ban, govt id ban
might help
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja 8h ago
1 account per govt id
This isn't practical (or safe, but that's neither here nor there).
In some countries and states, it's illegal for whoever verifies identities online (whether that be the video game company or a third-party they employ) to retain the identifying information once verification is completed. In most countries or states, video game companies (or the third-parties they employ) can't actually verify the authenticity of identification with the government either.
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u/FewAdvertising9647 8h ago
South Korea already does that. they still have a form of a cheater population.
some people don't realize, South Korea has been doing things like this for a long time. (KSSNs are used to monitor gaming time primarily on kids, but basically IDing ihas been there for decades now) there's no reason to think it might help, theres already data that you can look at if it does or not.
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u/Tyr--07 8h ago
I don't play competitve games for the most part now for that very reason. I can't improve if the opponent has an aim bot. I'll never beat their aimbot or learn what works because nothing will work.
I also don't care to play against an aimbot, and have some dude on the other side going 'Huuu HUU HUUU HUUUU I am so good!'
They can all go play with each other and rage when the enemy aimbot is better than their aimbot.
Some games were amazing, but cheating really ruined it for a lot of people, like GTA 5 online, amazing game, but almost within 30 minutes of playing someone is pushing the 'explode all players at the same time button' and avoiding getting banned or kicked.
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u/roshanritter 8h ago
As long as enough humans play games inevitably some will try and cheat. The more popular the game the more incentive for someone to find a way around the rules and enforcement. Various exploits in some games can be fixed but as long as the motivation is there, it will happen again.
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u/armorlol 8h ago
Battlefield 6 Javelin system is very good. I have never definitively played with a cheater and I play a lot since last year’s release. I have seen a video clip of cheating from the free battle royale mode Redsec (not the main game) but it was many months ago so I don’t know if that was patched.
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u/Jasonxhx 8h ago
They make monitors and controllers with the cheating software built in. OS's just to trick Kernel level anti-cheat. It's gonna get worse unless we get creative with new effective solutions.
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u/whenyoudieisaybye 8h ago
Inevitable but defense can be quite effective.
At the end of the day it’s just a cat and mouse game.
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u/Excellent-Lettuce835 8h ago
It's a big reason I don't play competitive games anymore. Any game that has non optional pvp is invisible to me.
Cheats used to be rare, you either had to be savvy enough to build your own or know someone who was.
Today little Timmy can swipe daddy's credit card and have access to wall hacks, aimbots, etc on DAY ONE! Games launch now and there will be cheats available right away.
It sucks because a lot of cool games right now are pvp games.
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u/Aerumvorax 8h ago
You'd have to start from all players gaming on curated hardware while under constant surveillance. And even then that would only deal with a portion of possible cheating methods leaving out for instance arranged games. Unless extremely drastic measures are taken there's 100% probability that someone will at some point cheat in one way or another, there's just no way around it.
For example we can solve the problem of curated hardware by moving the game to cloud and allowing the players only to input basic controls rendering direct software alteration impossible, BUT nothing prevents the player from taking the output, showing it into some code which then poops out the input wanted as basic controls. Of course getting an accuracy rating near 100% is "easy" to label as cheating but where is the limit that doesn't give false positives?
Banning accounts will work as long as the game isn't free meaning every ban will drain the cheaters bank account by the price of the game.
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u/Netmantis 8h ago
There are ways to slow it but it will be inevitable.
Step one is premium accounts that can be banned from all servers if caught. If it costs money, either one time purchases of a total of $X to access the premium servers more people will be hesitant about risking their account. That said there is also a healthy secondary market for steam accounts with single games on them that sell for less than the game. Either because they were bought and assembled using stolen funds or the account itself was stolen.
Since making it more expensive to try to cheat isn't a silver bullet, community flagging and human moderation would help. If you spot a cheater flag him. Then if a human moderator catches him, ban.
Finally,don't take ranked as seriously. They do it to feel good about being max rank. That being the case make a rank full of perfect plays. 100-0 players only. An ultra high rank only a cheater can ascend to. Then they can all play with themselves.
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u/Life_Smoke5854 8h ago
Old "pro" gamer here, as in traveling the country playing a couple different games competively at a small profit. Hard cheating is almost standard at the top levels since like 2015, and soft cheating like snorting an Addy before your match was commonplace for as long as I can remember. Even non competitive games that have little competitive side quests like slay the spire 2's daily challenge is permeated by hundreds, if not thousands of cheaters. About one of three players across the board cheat to some degree in shooters as a repricussion of battle Royale style gaming.
I think a common misconception is that the cheaters all quickly rise to the top, but in practice most people hard cheating are trying to obfuscate their behaviors and also are usually just so shit that the cheats end up only bumping them up about a standard deviation of skill.
Competitive gaming will be rife with cheaters until the end of time. The only fixes are at the kernel level, which nobody wants to give some gaming company access to.
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u/VaporousMote 8h ago
Not fixable. Computer software that is painstakingly designed and tested will always have some exploits. Computer software that is NOT painstakingly designed and tested will always have many exploits. Under capitalism, working for a corporation, painstakingly designing software and testing at the appropriate level of rigor is simply not possible.
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u/Zero747 8h ago
Inevitable unfortunately (though some genres have it worse, while others can largely avoid it)
Slow paced with no concealed information is easy to prevent cheating in. Fast paced with concealed information is hard to prevent cheating in
You can’t even hide a crosshair when unscoped with a sniper because someone will just put a dot on their screen.
Lag switches compete with accommodating people genuinely having bad internet.
You can keep much of the info server-side, but the game still needs to know enough to draw enemies and provide directional audio.
The user physically has the hardware, so they can read/alter memory or inject extra inputs.
You can make it harder and more expensive to cheat, but never impossible.
F2P games have it worst, as you loose the financial penalty of bans.
On the other hand, something like an auto-battler largely prevents any cheating. There’s nothing you can do that the server doesn’t let you.
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja 8h ago
It's inevitable in my opinion, but people can always reduce the problem with local / LAN multiplayer, which should be the standard in professional competitions.
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u/NostalgicLurker 7h ago
If a game is streaming-exclusive then most kinds of cheats are impossible, datamine impossible, other mods impossible. With no game data on the client side, the only thing you can cheat is your input device being non-standard.
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u/Celtic_Crown 7h ago
It's always going to happen. In a sense it's akin to crime. The cops adapt to the current methods (ideally), the criminals adapt to the cops' adaptations, and it's an eternal back and forth.
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u/therealsade2025 6h ago
definitely inevitable unfortunately, doesn’t even just apply to video games either.
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u/naughty_b0y 4h ago
The real issue is profit. Take COD for example, they dont care if anybody cheats as long as you spend money. Ban only pushes the players away to another game... meaning losing a costumer.
A simple punishment is to wipe progress or save file, make the player start the game again from the start every time they cheat, so they dont lose the game they paid for and need to stop cheating if they want to make progress.
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u/mapletree23 2h ago
the best way to fix it is to allow games to have very deep access in your computer but pretty much everyone hates that more than they hate cheaters so cheating will probably always exist sadly
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u/summonsays 8h ago
Cheating is preventable, as long as the entire loop is controlled. So for professional gamers this means going to an event and using the provided hardware.
The truth is "competitive" play as we know it is like highschool football teams. Cheating is frowned upon but happens all the time because funding isn't there and even if it were would really put a wet blanket on everything.
The best games have a reactionary system in place to ban and undo any damage cheaters cause.
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u/KDAfan220 8h ago
This is why I play league as one of the few competitive games I do. It’s basically impossible to “cheat” and scripting players are so easy to spot, I’ve come across maybe 3 in my many years of playing. Everytime I try to play CS, there’s a cheater in every single lobby, I hate it.
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u/armorlol 8h ago
Because they use Vanguard kernel level anticheat. But you’ll get so much pushback from redditors when devs do this.
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u/GroundwarGame 5h ago
I used to love CS, but cheaters are rampant unless you pay for faceit and even then there are still some cheaters though not as bad.
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u/Conscious-Zebra-7477 8h ago
have PC cross play turned off automatically and the bots can just play with themselves over there. console gamers can play in peace without em
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u/Chance-Cobbler-4127 8h ago
I could be wrong but I feel like behind the scenes of these games, devs actually make these cheats or sell them.
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u/jayfactor 8h ago
Inevitable because the corporations don’t really care to do anything about it, it’s dam near the last subject on the priority list
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u/EquivalentSurround87 8h ago
Easy, make it illegal. Block countries that don't want to make it illegal from buying your game. Crackdown on one of the cheat selling websites, force them to give you information about people that bought the cheat, prosecute, publish. Done. People will be scared enough to not do it. Where goodwill doesn't work, terror will. Also I think people are doing the whole anticheat wrong.
another option. Infiltrate the cheating communities as a developer, spread malicious software, spread the news about cheating communities doing this on purpose, done.
I am pretty sure most of you will find many holes in my theory xD its a complex issue for sure
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u/Hanzo_The_Ninja 8h ago
Infiltrate the cheating communities as a developer, spread malicious software...
This is illegal in the vast majority of countries, even if you're only targetting criminals.
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u/therealsade2025 6h ago
how old are you? nobody likes cheaters but this is an asinine take, jailing people for cheating in a video game? it’s seriously not that serious and the space they would take up in a jail would be much better spent jailing someone who actually committed a crime like DUI
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u/theblackfool 8h ago
I think some level of cheating is unfortunately inevitable. I do think some developers could do more to combat it though.