[a_e_k]

It's been a long time since I played a multiplayer shooter, but I used to have admin on a UT2k3 IG CTF clan server. One oddly strong memory I have from those days was banning cheaters and swapping lists of banned UUIDs with the admins of our peer clans. Nowadays I read about rampant cheating and banwaves, but I think there was something to be said for local decisions around banning and the immediacy of it. It certainly felt like a cozier community, at least.

[dylan604]

Not being a gamer, I'm not familiar with the level of cheating possibilities in modern games. I hear about it being done and the banwaves. What are players doing that is considered cheating?

[vehemenz]

Invisible walls and automatic aiming. It ruins the experience for anyone trying to get better at it. Especially now, with automatic matchmaking. You have to climb the ranks and beat the cheaters, whereas before you just had to know which servers had the good players in them.

[dylan604]

Okay, but how does a cheater use invisible walls and automatic aiming? Are they patching their local binary of the game to give them features other players do not have? I know playing against a cheater sucks, but I'm really curious on how the cheats occur. I'm guessing this is like anything else where one clever person figures it out first, and then the rest of the cheaters just use the trick without knowing anything about how/why it works. I guess I'm getting at the point that I might be impressed with the original discoverer, and they kind of have a HNer's mindset

[maccard]

> Are they patching their local binary of the game to give them features other players do not have?

Pretty much. It's often a little more sophisticated, (e.g. it's common to use dll injection and not actually modify the binary) but yes