It's also frustrating when you're not particularly skilled are just having an unusually good performance. My K/D ratio hovered somewhere just under 1, but I had outlier moments in CoD where I would rack up kill streaks and end games 16-0 or 27-1. Being accused of cheating and then follow-through harassed via PMs was just exhausting and ate up some of the joy of performing well.

I always turn off text and voice chat as part of setting any game up. I don't care what others in a game have to say about, well, anything. I'm there to play. I rarely if ever look at the social tab of any game. One of the worst things to happen to games in the last 15 or so years imho is in game communications (second to only being able to play with a net connection). We used to use external apps like teamspeak and xfire and the like if we cared enough to talk to people, like if you were in a clan and needed to play cooperatively.

I love it when people get salty at me when I do well. I take it as a huge compliment.

Well if you cheat you get to enjoy that feeling even when you wouldn't do well.

I honestly expect many of the people who go "nah I'm just that good" even in this thread are actually cheating. That smirk wouldn't feel any less good if you were cheating, in fact it'd be one more thing to smirk about.

> I honestly expect many of the people who go "nah I'm just that good" even in this thread are actually cheating.

This, players that are actually good don't feel the need to brag about it on hacker news.

I don't know why you think being good at video games makes you a better grounded person. Lots of people good at games also have big egos.

On the contrary, I would get no pleasure from the salt if I were cheating. The pleasure entirely comes from feeling good at the game, so good that people feel the need to complain about it.

take it as a confirmation of your skill - you did so well that others thing you must've been cheating.

It is a badge of honor, not a hassle.

The absolute best I've ever felt in online gaming was when someone accused me of cheating after a particularly good round of TDM. Rode that high for at least a week.

I got that once in Unreal Tournament, but only because someone on the server didn't understand what relics were (items that gave you buffs of some kind). Still felt good, though.

I totally killed it on a particular server for Counterstrike (the oooold versions). It was the only server that had a map I really liked but my ping sorta sucked. But the netcode made it so that I could circle around people with an MP5 meaning I was very accurate and they had almost no chance to hit me.

Guess what happened.

I mean, in some sense you did have an unfair advantage over the other players and maybe they were justified in banning you?

If having a high ping is an issue that should simply be a kick. Most modern games generally have a way to prevent people with a high ping from playing. Lag compensation techniques also reduce the problem to some extent. I imagine OP is talking about CS in goldsrc which absolutely had bad netcode for high ping, still fun as hell though.

High ping / jitter could be used as an intentional cheating mechanism in the days of the lag switch through.

See my reply to your parent. You are spot on. This was CS way before the "I hate CS 1.6 and will forever stay on 1.5" days.

The kids these days don't know what normal pings looked like back in the day.

Wrong guess :)

Nobody banned me. But yes players accused me of cheating of course. Back then I also didn't know what "netcode" is. Now in hindsight I know that the game gave an unfair advantage to players with high ping. Probably in order to make the game playable with internet connections common at the time. Blame Valve ;)

No cheating involved. Best ping I ever had at those times was 120-150ms IIRC. On that particular server it was more past 300.

Boy those were the times.

I mostly played on an unstable terrible dial up (under 300ms was a fantastic day). When I played on a t1 line my K/D was always higher than at home. Maybe packet loss was my ultimate foil?

Back in the day I used to play America's Army (dating myself here). I had figured out where to point and shoot a grenade at the beginning of a round and take out most of the enemy team. I don't know if others knew about this. I just figured it could be done and didn't take long to figure out where to shoot.

Well, if gamers gain that much satisfaction from other people's frustration, it's no mystery why they cheat too. I don't think that feeling is especially dependent on having achieved it "legitimately".

What? No, the satisfaction was from having done something so well someone literally didn't believe it was possible.

Not sure how you think you could get that from actually cheating.

Who says they didn't believe it was possible? They just didn't think it was possible for you, i.e. that you did it honestly.

We all know cheating is a problem in online games, so it wasn't an unreasonable belief. It's certainly possible to play chess at Magnus Carlsen's level, but if I play against someone random online and they play at that level, then of course my default assumption is going to be that they're cheating, not that they're Magnus Carlsen.

Big agree on this. I play a lot of Team Fortress 2, because it's absolutely timeless

Valve in their "infinite wisdom" decided to funnel the bulk of players into a matchmaking style multiplayer system, while relegating decades of player-run (and previously Valve run) dedicated servers to a "Community" tab that opens the old school server browser

Consequently the game has been absolutely infested and overrun with bots for the last couple years. They all play Sniper and aimbot instant headshot players on the enemy team, they're also programmed to steal a players username and steam avatar (because there is no throttling on changing that information live, even when connected to a game server)

Consequently the paranoia of most players means that even if you're just a "good sniper" (as someone with about 8,000 hours in the game over the last ~14 years) you'll almost immediately be the subject of a votekick. To which you have to get on microphone and plead "I'M HUMAN, I'M HUMAN!" and hope players don't automatically just vote to remove you

What Valve has done to TF2 has been an absolute tragedy :(

>To which you have to get on microphone and plead "I'M HUMAN, I'M HUMAN!"

In a few months even this won't be good enough.

Back when I played Counterstrike and Team fortress classic in the late 90s I would occasionally get banned from a server. The only cheats I used were headphones and way WAYYY too many hours of play time. I couldn't even tell you how many tens of thousands of times I've been accused of cheating because "no one could do that legit". One person's skill is another person's cheater.

Having said that I've run into plenty of "hackers" and cheaters over my decades of online play. I steer clear of certain types of games as the player base seems more inclined to cheat.

Found an old screenshot of Counterstrike after I got auto balanced.

https://i.imgur.com/AUFE0zo.jpg

There is https://play-cs.com now

CS is one of those games where this is actually reasonably possible, because you only need a single headshot with an AK to frag basically anyone.

If you get good enough to reliably point your weapon at their head (before they do it to you), you are basically invincible.

CS has a mechanic that makes you miss the shots if you are moving during shooting. Basically you have an acceleration vector, and this value makes your shots deviate if it's higher than zero. But it can be exploited (move the opposite direction before shooting, to cancel the acceleration vector), which makes it frustrating for players who do not train to exploit this mechanic.

It basically makes the game unplayable, because you have following 2 options: 1) play normally and get killed constantly which is frustrating 2) train to exploit this mechanic, which makes no sense

Strafing is not an exploit, it's a core mechanic of CS. Playing "normally" is playing wrong. I should note I've spent most of my time in Gold in CS so I'm also not great at it LOL.

Every video game played at the highest levels tends to have this kind of weird execution barrier. Coming from CS mechanics to my current favorite of Planetside 2, I had to learn that movement meta wasn't so important, burst and range was. The automatic guns reset their bloom in durations of just a few frames, so if you are doing it right it doesn't actually look like you let go of the trigger, which is absolutely baffling if you are used to CS burst/tap and spread patterns. And all the guns are projectile based with unrealistically slow bullets which adds some unintuitive target leading and situational preferences based on whether you need faster bullets and sprint-to-ADS times or slow but powerful at range.

And when you get to learning those parts of the game, you always end up sitting down and drilling a small part of the technique for hours over the course of a few sessions, because that's the only way to get the right muscle memory.

It's unavoidable wherever games are doing abstract things: mouse/stick/button inputs are meaningful because of the context, not because they are the actual action being performed.

When I want a game that feels fully connected, I play pinball. Virtual games get close(and work great on a phone) but real ones let you nudge the machine finely.

My strategy comes mostly from the 1.6 era, and you are right that at the time it was mostly a matter of stopping to move, crouch and headshot.

I guess you can learn how to anticipate the deviation as long as it's static and dependent on your movement speed (e.g. not random), but that's still good right? It's a skill thing, not a luck one.

stopping and crouching make sense, however the mechanic is exploited in a way that doesn't make sense.

you basically move forward and if you see something you want to shoot, you move backward for a fraction of a second. that will cancel the forward acceleration vector much faster.

also another strategy is to find a place covered by a wall, and move left/right quickly. when moving from left to right, there will be a point when the acceleration vector is 0, and that is the moment to shoot.

That’s essentially what games are. They are man-made programs with their own rules and “exploits”/quirks that one has to master to the fullest if they want to be competitively good. For a while (I don’t play it anymore) I was a top 1%-ranked online player in PES (Pro Evolution Soccer) and once a fellow player laughed at the stupidity of comparing a game in PES to an actual soccer match, which I had to agree with.

I was really ridiculously good with the AK out to sniper range. So you totally called it :P

I have stood behind a friend (let's call him X) watching him play, and like you, he had this almost uncanny ability to one-shot targets. We were in a LAN game and there was no way he was playing with any bots or exploits, since he would sometimes take over from someone else's PC when they went for a break, and suddenly this person's handle would rack up tons of kills (then someone would call out, is that you, X, on Y's PC, darn it, and we'd all start laughing).

Sometimes I would get into a near trance like existence where I just had an uncanny ability to predict the location of my opponents. Sometimes I struggled to tie my shoes.

In high school some of us would play duke nukem 3d after classes were over. I would have to handicap myself with various restrictions to make it fair for the others. At the time I did not have a computer that could handle Duke nukem so the only playtime I got was at school.

Brings back memories. Used to play waaay too much CS/TF with some work mates in the 90s. The 'problem' we had was we often played from the office after hours. And we had a DS-3 connection. 45Mbps, low latency connect at a time when basically everyone else was dialup. We got accused of cheating constantly; I suppose in one sense we were.

The key difference is that in the story from TFA, valve confirmed 40,000 cheaters with confidence. That’s an insanely huge number.

As in, maybe people are often wrong when accusing cheaters, but with numbers like this they’re often correct too!

Do you still play ? Cheaters are a whole different league now compared to 10 or even 5 years ago.

It used to be script kiddies with aimbots downloaded from somewhere, nowadays it's cheat developers making hundreds if not thousands of dollars per month from renting cheats or selling carry services.