Since we had extremely low ping when at the office (comparatively to dialup), we had a bit of fun jumping on servers to do a bit of “cleanup”. I’d play patsy under a generic handle, go to specific places in maps (around corners, etc.) I knew were impossible to track without wallhacks, and after getting fragged in impossible situations we’d all switch skins/handles and go to town on the cheater(s) like the ride of the Valkyries.
A few (ok, maybe twenty) years later, though, I got kicked out of a Quake Champions match because, well, I have a knack for railgun timings and am constantly switching weapons, so it wouldn’t be unusual for me to rail someone and then finish the job with a mid-air rocket. Which is tricky when you’re doing it with unfavorable ping (was using NVIDIA’s Mac client[2]).
Fun times. I still have ioquake on my Macs, and built a tweaked Q3A image for the RaspberryPi with OSP and our skin packs for the sheer nostalgia of it.
(Edit: Quake Champions, not Live. I only played Live a couple of times)
Also being a pro-gamer in RTS years ago, I can relate. There are many small steps between n00b level and mastery and a lot has to come together to be at expert level in gaming. Usually experts can play in variable settings, cheaters only in one particular. Experts can adapt, while cheaters usually not. Usually real talk about how you handled and interpreted a certain situation will show the difference. Cheaters usually are not the most talkative.
However sometimes there is a make or break in a certain game. While cheaters are usually spotted in the long run, it spoils almost every time the fun in the short run.
Missed opportunities to tourney advancement, frustration etc. can make or break players. Are we talking about the true winner, Carl Lewis, in the 100m finals in Seoul in 1988 or Ben Johnson?
I saw some guys with really good potential leaving out of frustration and that is really sad.
Absolutely. One thing that I may not have made clear enough to people who have never played competitive online games is that it takes so much practice to master these games that your progression can't possibly go unnoticed, even in a large community. If you're good enough to take games off well-known good players, people will know you.
Both Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis were on steroids, fwiw. "True winner" is a joke.
Sure, because they were also doping. Seriously though, I wouldn't say steroids make you _more skilled_, but they absolutely give a physical advantage over natural athletes. Which is why there aren't any top level natural athletes anymore except in very dedicated natural-only circles.
You're agreeing with me, I think, but in the form of an argument.
It's not really cheating anymore, since everyone does it now, but the point I'm trying to make is that it's not nothing either.
If you follow your logic and some how eliminate all outside advantage, then you may come to the conclusion that athletic competition is meaningless.
Following your logic of that’slife and genetics are part of natural life while steroids are so wrong, we should heavily focus on making sure advantages from consumption are curbed. No supplements, no high protein low calorie food. Limit medications and so on.
As genetics are a part of life, something I never disagreed with, and we all agree they are not equal in fairness, why are steroids of almost any kind frowned upon so strongly? But other life advantages or disadvantages are hand waved away?
My favorite "cheat" (I prefer hack) was to counter another pathetic cheat in Q1: players using an all-black skin. They would hide in the shadows and get you with a rocket when your back was turned. So I edited my local copy of the skin to be bright pink and made a point of chasing them down at every encounter (lingering in the shadows or not).
I bet this is the same in most games and many many "cheaters" just aren't.
Using a black skin that's part of the game is not cheating if you ask me. Editing a skin to have a bright pink that didn't exist in the game however is cheating.
Having played q3 back when myself it was standard though to make _all_ skins be the standard blue skin. The one that came with the game itself originally. That could be considered not cheating and being an anti-cheating technique. I'd say it's something that depends on the game though. Q3 wasn't really about shadows and using your surroundings in that sense because it wasn't set up for realism. You also played with gamma pretty high etc.
Something like Counterstrike or say Ghost Recon however I would very definitely find it cheating if you changed all skins to be the same because of the realism involved. Choosing the right outfit for a map would be part of the game.
This must’ve been early on in q3’s life, ‘keel/fb’ (bright green Keel) has been the preferred enemymodel for quite some time since it’s highly visible, has loud movement sounds, and fills out the hit box pretty well. I always assume my opponent forces fullbright Keel for my model too.
The entirely black skin was 3rd-party content, not an artifact from the official game. But yeah, no big deal either way.
AFAIK no players are actively cheating in that community, although some prefer to play using timenudge, which could be considered an "allowed cheat". Fortunately it's quite easy to spot those laggards, and it's up to yourself to decide whether you want to opt for fair play or not... (Also, it feels quote good to beat them even though they have an advantage over you.)
Also, it's rare to have skilled players that cheat, so most cheaters are easily detected.
And to add to unfair advantages: I have very good ping, and also noticed I moved up on ranking after switching from a slow monitor and Bluetooth mouse to a gaming monitor and - mouse. While this is not considered a cheat, it might give you an unfair advantage over the players who use less then average hardware.
I assume it's part of human nature to figure out ways to get an edge over others, and the difference between legal and illegal is mostly about subjective standards. A good example would be doping: as long as it's not on the doping list, it's considered fair play; I recall a trend of asthma along professional road cyclists a couple of years ago. Once the needed medication was on the doping list, the trend reversed immediately.
In my experience these additional "optimizations" are unavoidable.
Timenudge is not cheating by any stretch. It's been a long time since I looked into Quake Live's netcode. Someone here will probably know about this, so if you know more please correct me.
The server that you're playing on has a fixed framerate (server 'tick rate'), and periodically sends packets to connected clients containing the current gamestate (player locations, scores, etc). Your client deals with the latency involved by interpolating between the last two received packets. This means that what you're seeing is always (your_ping + server_tick_rate)ms behind 'reality'. Quake Live uses 'backwards reconciliation' on the server. When you fire a hitscan weapon the server looks at the server frame (your_ping)ms back in time to see if you hit something. These two reasons are why you might have experienced being railed around corners by high ping players. You were under their crosshair on their screen, but on yours you're in the clear.
What timenudge does is adjust the client's interpolation period. A server_tick_rate of 40fps makes for a delay between packets of 25ms. Since the client is interpolating between the last two received packets, your client is working with what is effectively an artificial 25ms delay. A timenudge of -20 tells your client to reduce that interpolation frame, at the cost of some accuracy. It's not cheating. It doesn't really give people any practical advantage at all unless you've got a totally obscene ping. If anything it'll exacerbate the effects of other players warping (caused by the server not receiving their client packets in the right order, or at all).
There's some good information on how this system works here: https://web.archive.org/web/20160302024647/https://www.ra.is...
These cheat tools could apparently be tuned to give extremely subtle advantages to players. Still, over a long enough time period the tool would eventually do something inexplicable enough by normal beahviour to give the player away. I haven't exactly kept up with competitive FPS in years now, however it doesn't seem hard to make aimbots that work well, it seems very difficult though to make ones that consistently appear natural to a trained eye.