A new exploit hit the cheating scene today.
Players would find themselves on a server with spinbotters- these are obvious cheaters
that an honest player doesn’t stand a chance against at the best of times.
Of course, these cheaters will quickly get reported to overwatch where they’ll swiftly
be judged and probably banned.
But then, just as the game ends… the server crashes.
The cheaters get the win, and the corrupt demo denies any overwatch retribution.
This is just the latest in a long line of imaginative and destructive cheats the game
has faced.
I did a video recently on VACNET’s deep-learning approach, designed to combat cheaters.
But what do the cheaters think of this?
What do cheaters think of… cheating?
Well, who better to ask than a cheater?
Luckily for me, I was contacted by a member of that community who discussed it all with
me in great length.
Although I hate cheating, would never do it myself and so on, I do appreciate this and
will keep him and the cheaters in this video anonymous.
Try not to be angry, please don’t spam the downvote because you hate cheaters- that won’t
hurt them, only me.
Besides, surely the best way to combat cheating is to understand it yourself?
This is intended to be an investigative video to help inform you about a community that
is otherwise hidden from the rest of us.
Unless they’re spinbotting, of course.
He explained to me how cheating is a hobby to him.
He enjoys investigating new cheat methods and even writes them himself.
He has been banned on multiple accounts, but also has many more that haven’t been detected
yet.
There’s no way of being 100% sure about what he says and what he knows, but I found
the discussion fascinating.
It helped me to see things from a new perspective and hope you find this video, if nothing else,
entertaining and thought-provoking.
He even invited me to a lobby, complete with 4 cheaters.
The warmup began.
My teammates revved up their spinbots.
Immediately abuse was hurled back at us from the other team.
And then, before the match could even begin, they demonstrated the crash bug to me.
My view lagged out, the classic ‘server has timed out’ error appeared, and then
I was booted back to lobby.
I wondered if this would give me a cooldown, but instead the option to reconnect soon disappeared
and it was as though the match had never happened.
It wasn’t even displayed in my match history- though he says it is if they crash it after
the game finishes.
I even tried to connect to a corrupt demo.
This is what happens.
So, what got him into it and what are the basics?
He told me that a friend bought him a cheat ‘as a bit of a joke’.
He started out by using it cautiously, avoiding VAC servers and so on since he had some nice
skins at the time.
He frequently used the term ‘legit cheat’- these are cheats that are difficult to spot.
They may assist with your aim a bit, or give you information about stuff you shouldn’t,
like where the enemy is or their health and weapon situation.
But cheaters using a ‘legit cheat’ do so to try and hide that they’re cheating
and it can be difficult to detect.
His first cheat had a pretty good ‘legit’ mode, though whenever he came up against other
cheaters it also had a ‘rage’ setting to help beat them.
‘Rage’ cheats are the opposite of a ‘legit’ one.
If you’re up against one of these, you know it because they’re usually spinning super
fast and killing you even before you have a chance to react.
Spinning is one way (and the least effective!) method of confusing other cheats.
It’s an anti-cheater cheat, if you will.
It creates a separation between the player model and hitbox, similar to fake lag, to
trick players and aimbots into aiming somewhere away from your actual hitbox.
There’s a lot of money to be made in the cheating community.
People subscribe to them monthly for a set amount.
Some are free but not that good, others are invite only, some are even more secretive.
And buying new accounts is of course big business too- why do you think CS:GO is in the top
10 most bought games on Steam every week?
He says that brand new accounts straight from Valve are cheap, but good money is spent to
get access to stolen accounts with thousands of hours and a good standing.
He says that he’s bought some of these before, but tries to only get accounts that have been
abandoned for years and happily returns them if the original owner comes back.
What’s so fun about cheating?
We all know that some cheaters enjoy doing it to beat other people and to reach Global
Elite.
But talking to my source revealed something I hadn’t expected.
Soon after he started cheating, he discovered the HvH community.
This is short for ‘Hack VS Hack’.
This is where the entire server is full of cheaters and they try to out-cheat the other
team.
They’ll normally ask at the beginning ‘hvh?’
and if the other team agrees then the spinbots begin!
He soon grew fond of this mode, claiming that it’s 50% about calibrating your cheats,
the same way as you would tweak the engine of a car.
He talked me through how cheats predict the chances that a shot will land, or how much
damage it will do, so you can adjust the sliders to ensure you’re not wasting your bullets
on unlikely or low-damage hits.
This requires a decent understanding of the game itself, so there’s a fair degree of
skill involved.
And the other 50% is about learning the level.
Where you can stand so that your hitbox is behind cover, and about discovering one-way
wallbangs to gain the advantage.
Although there are always exceptions, he believes that the majority of cheaters (particularly
obvious ones) would actually prefer to play against other cheaters.
He said that Wingman was great for this for a while- it didn’t seem to popular with
youtubers or normal players, so almost every game would comprise entirely of hackers!
This was great for the HvH community.
That is, until Valve cracked down on it.
He told me that HvHers are the more skilled cheaters who typically know how to hide legit
cheats and can avoid detection pretty well.
European servers are better for HvH, but he thinks that in North America, most people
beyond mg1 rely on legit-cheats and that the good, non cheaters will be found on services
like esea or faceit instead.
He says there’s no hiding cheating from a cheater.
He can look at you with walls and can determine your rank and the probability that you cheat.
A lot of the time he doesn’t cheat until he’s dead, which is when he says it’s
fun to turn on the wallhack so he can watch teammates being blatantly terrified to defuse
the bomb because they know where the enemies are, but at the same time they’re trying
to hide it because they’re closet cheaters.
This made me think that it’s a lot easier to spot another cheater on a server when you’re
cheating already.
It’s bad closet cheaters that he justifies toggling his rage cheats on for, stating that
most cheaters have some kind of ‘moral standard’.
He doesn’t find fun in cheating against honest players.
He claims that cheating has improved his skill level, even when he isn’t using them.
He believes this is because cheating has helped him to understand how players (and other cheaters)
behave in CS:GO and to develop better counters to their strategies.
What he really wants is for Valve to create a gamemode for cheaters so that they don’t
interfere with normal players and risk bans.
He got genuine enjoyment from wingman HvH games and would like a way to find them more
often.
Matches are usually done on private servers but he would really like some kind of ranked
mode to give cheaters the same sense of progression that normal players get from improving, without
the risk of overwatch or fear of upsetting honest players that normal matchmaking entails.
One of his reasons for reaching out to me was to get this idea out there.
It’s something that he believes a lot of cheaters would want.
He also thinks it will help honest players who don’t have phones on their way to prime
status.
Right now so many of their first experiences with CS:GO are marred by blatant cheaters.
It’s at this point I asked him, if he wants a separate gamemode for cheaters, then surely
a low Trust Factor score would be a blessing for him and would give him what he wants.
Plus, it would explain why he suspects most players at his ranks of cheating!
But he said he thinks most people don’t have a good standing in the Trust Factor,
unless their account’s 4 years old and with thousands of hours play already documented.
I asked him what he thinks of CS:GO’s anti-cheat methods.
He said doesn’t think a lot of the anti-cheat methods.
He says it’s easy to make a cheat undetectable and that the information you need to do so
is readily available!
He dislikes the large, popular cheating Youtubers who publicise this stuff, but sent me some
examples to justify his point about the availability of these cheats.
As for the new deep learning VACNET, he suspects it only detects blatant cheaters and that
anyone with a bit of sense can avoid it.
He also talked about ‘Untrusted Bans’- these used to be almost automatically given
out to aimbotters who were blatantly headshotting players behind them.
Then, last year these kinds of bans started being handed out by Overwatch, which is when
the cheating community suspected that a system like VACNET was being developed.
I guess it makes sense that cheaters are some of the first to aware of new anti-cheat methods.
And while untrusted bans are instant, he thinks there’s a delay of between 8 hours to a
week for other kinds of bans.
As for VAC, it bans you if it’s sure that you’re cheating- this gives cheaters quite
a bit of freedom.
Battleye on the other hand is a much bigger challenge.
It’s not necessarily a ‘better’ anticheat, but it is a lot more AGGRESSIVE and invasive.
It will detect a lot more cheaters but he thinks probably also bans innocent people
in the process.
He suspects it bans hundreds of innocents a day just because they happened to be running
the wrong programs in the background.
I asked him if he thinks cheaters move to CS:GO because so many other games are using
Battleye.
He doesn’t think so because there’s a challenge to defeating something like Battleye,
and this challenge is one of the reasons that cheaters do so in the first place.
He does believe that cheat makers future-proof their cheats with Battleye in mind, with any
developments also carrying over to their CS:GO cheats which also makes them more advanced
and more difficult to spot as a result.
He also showed me many of the ways you can break CS:GO- and I’ve got to say, there
are a lot of ways you can do it.
He showed me how easy it was to change the number of wins.
He says this can make an account look super legit at first glance, though he says it’s
pretty easy to investigate and to call this kind of abuse out.
There’s a medal changer that allows you to make your own, and a rank changer that
literally lets you change the skill level you queue up against!
He uses this to be able to play with friends.
And as some one who doesn’t cheat, I’m kind of jealous of this.
You ever heard a water sound from an AFK player when they return to their PC again?
This sound means that there’s been a difference between the timer on their PC and the server.
This is an easy way of detecting tick-based manipulation, possibly to speedhack, or to
fire 2 shots at the same time, or to instantly explode the bomb and so on.
You can backtrack by 12 ticks to get more time to hit a shot- this makes hitting people
through Dust2’s double doors a lot easier.
And if you ever see a player skating across a level, that’s the sign of an anti-aim
being used.
This is pretty easy to spot in practice, but a lot harder to notice when the player is
stood still.
When defusing the bomb, perhaps?
He says that this kind of anti-aim is a lot more effective against other cheaters, since
honest players are approximate in their shooting and will probably still land several hits.
He says that Valve’s crackdown on wallhack has made it more difficult to do, though occasionally
you’ll still spot a player from across the other side of the map.
He tried explaining some kind of elaborate p2p information sharing that got around this
limitation, though it requires multiple cheaters in the same match to be effective.
One thing he doesn’t get is Valve’s crackdown on skinchangers.
If you try changing your weapon skins, Valve VAC Auth’s you, which disconnects you from
the game.
But he doesn’t understand why they’re so strict about something that’s used for
fun and that was totally acceptable in earlier Counter Strike games.
He says that some of these custom skins have so much love and effort put into them and
believes that Valve could learn a thing or two from allowing a certain degree of skin
manipulation.
I asked him how many pros he thinks cheat.
And he surprised me- he doesn’t think many do.
That they have too much on the line to cheat at this point.
He was shocked enough when he lost a 150 win account.
He doesn’t think that pros would take the risk BECAUSE so much money is on the line,
rather than despite it.
Pros in China can even face jail!
He didn’t know if it would be cheaters, Valve or honest players that would give up
on the cheating situation first.
But he does believe that, in a way, cheaters help Valve.
Because they are continually testing and exploiting the game in a far less damaging and more public
way than if it were left to other, more dangerous communities to do.
Scammers, for instance.
The inventory changer has been made public- had it been discovered by scammers and remained
private then many more people would have lost items from their inventory and Valve would
have been none the wiser.
And that server crashing bug?
They wouldn’t have known about it were it not for cheaters and their inquisitive ways!
Imagine if it had been left quiet until an important match was being played.
We’ve got to accept that in a community as large as CS:GO’s then there will be people
wanting to gain an unfair advantage.
Rather than to hide it under the mat, it’s a lot better that we embrace it and instead,
look for ways to counter it whilst minimising the number innocents caught in the crossfire.
If a cheat-free game was an immunodeficient person in a sterile environment, CS:GO is
a dirty guy wallowing in sewage with a battle-hardened immune system.
Cheating helps keep Valve on their toes and keeps any exploits or advantages short-lived.
The people I queued with at the beginning of this video, they made a mistake.
Earlier in the day they failed to crash a server at the end of a match.
Since it only happened once they thought they might have been okay, but within 6 hours,
all were overwatch banned for spinbotting.
They suspect this could have been something to do with VACNET.
But he tells me he has no regrets.
That for a short while at least, it reminded him of wingman, where they were free to HvH
on official servers.
Thank you to the cheater who spoke with me, who I shall keep anonymous.
If you liked this video, you may also like my recent video about VACNET, which is Valve’s
new, experimental cheat-detection system.
And you may also like this skill video of mine from years ago because I was so good
I might as well have been hacking.