3kliks rough draft script

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 well 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 why 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMbc5Jo7LC0
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 to get into Prime matches without having so many of their first experiences with CS:GO marred by blatant cheaters.
TRUST FACTOR
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!
WHAT DOES HE THINK OF THE ANTI-CHEAT METHODS?
He 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 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 will probably also ban innocent people in the process. He suspects it bans hundreds of innocents a day just because they happened to be running the wrong programs running 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 think that cheat makers future-proof their cheats with Battleye in mind, so he thinks this carries across to CS:GO cheats and makes them more advanced and more difficult to spot as a result.
EXAMPLES OF IMAGINATIVE CHEATS
He also showed me many of the ways you can break CS:GO, many of which are far lesser offenses than flat-out cheating. 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 the 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pt5RPlxhwc
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TiPg2wnt5g0
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. Though 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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7RCB_9XmGc
FUTURE OF HACKING
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, rather than despite, so much money being on the line. 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 damaging 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 were being played. And it’s human nature to want to find an advantage. 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.
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.