[garrettjoecox]

Years ago for educational purposes I decided to venture down understanding how easy/difficult it was to create a hack for Counterstrike.

After just a few hours of watching YouTube tutorials and translating what I could grasp from C/C# into JavaScript (the only language I knew at the time), I had a working Node.js executable that edited memory offsets (using data from hazedumper[1]), letting me see enemies through walls and auto-fire as soon as they entered my crosshair.

I obviously only tried it out on an alt steam account for fear of the infamous VAC ban, but no such ban happened. I only toyed with it for a few weeks as I then grew disinterested but that definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for the "effectiveness" of VAC if a script kiddie like me at the time could throw together something custom in just a few hours, I'm sure it'd be much easier now with ChatGPT...

[1] https://github.com/frk1/hazedumper

[mschuster91]

> I only toyed with it for a few weeks as I then grew disinterested but that definitely left a sour taste in my mouth for the "effectiveness" of VAC if a script kiddie like me at the time could throw together something custom in just a few hours, I'm sure it'd be much easier now with ChatGPT...

The thing is, VAC doesn't immediately ban you. Or anyone else. It's looking for suspicious patterns across hundreds if not thousands of players and collecting evidence over weeks if not months to make sure they got relatively low false-positive rates and don't end up banning people for a Windows update gone wrong... and additionally, it raises the iteration time for cheat developers as well, and that's the true point. Show cheaters immediately that they're spotted and the only thing you enter is an immediate arms race.

Your way of writing a cheat was probably detected but since no one else used it, VAC didn't trigger.

[david422]

Blizzard's battle.net used to do that. They'd ban in waves. I imagine immediate bans would make it much easier for cheat authors to figure out which cheats were detectable and which weren't.

[Ekaros]

I haven't followed recently, but what I have understood is that clear known old public hacks can result immediate ban. For newest hacks they will gather cohort and then do them in wave. Thus making it harder to evade detection or notice what exactly was detected this time.

[DrillShopper]

If people want to test these kinds of exploits, you can do so on a server that is not VAC-secured. That won't risk your account being VAC banned. (Of course, if you really want to be sure, use a secondary account and a server that's not VAC-secured)

[sim7c00]

in this case id also recommend goldsrc games.

a) more info is readily available b) dedicated server u can run locally even on a potato

no need to test against online folks, there's fine bots available.

[tines]

Unlikely. Last I looked, VAC only looks at a few gross elements, like the names of the DLLs loaded into the game's process. If you don't match a blacklisted name, you're probably not detected.

[fc417fc802]

And user account names. At least at one point you could catch a ban for having an account named "catbot" when running on a linux box. Admittedly that was probably quite a reasonable litmus test in practice even if not in principle.

[cat1750309572]

I'm surprised someone remembers this, considering how long ago it was, the fact that Valve publicly denied this later, and that most people (on the side of publications reporting that situation initially and outside observers on reddit and other platforms) didn't understand/didn't care for the difference between linux user account names (that caused the bans at that time), steam display names, steam account names and steam custom profile urls.

[antarctician]

I have a suspicion that that was FUD spread by the cheat creators. Back then I decided to test that by creating a user named like that and running Steam from there. My account did not receive a ban.

[cat1750309572]

It was real, but maybe the username wasn't the only data point they used. Considering that:

1. Brand new Steam accounts were banned after logging in to Steam client, before even launching any game

2. Replacing "catbot" in user accounts with a random string stopped the bans completely

3. A linux VAC module, dumped similarly to the method described in the article, had access to usernames - I think it was via a getpwent() call. It also collected some other info about the environment (I don't have that binary anymore).

You can probably agree that user account names played at least some role in the bans, even if they weren't the only factor.

* I can't provide concrete evidence for either of those three points as the events took place 8 years ago, feel free to not take my word for it. Maybe you can find someone else from that circle who still has dumped VAC binaries, links to the empty banned accounts or a clone of bot orchestration software repository with a commit that renamed the user accounts and stopped the bans. Maybe even chat logs from that era.

Anyway, at this point it's just a funny piece of tf2 cheating history that has zero impact on anything anymore. So you might as well think it was all fake and I'm just making stuff up, it doesn't matter.

[SteveNuts]

I'll never understand what people actually get out of cheating in games. I'll admit I've tried it a few times just for giggles (way back in the Age of Empires II/MSN Gaming Zone days), but the novelty quickly wears off and then it's just not even fun anymore.

There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

[Frotag]

I've botted in a few MMORPG games and the appeal is that it's basically a new perspective on the game. Also makes it more of a technical challenge than a test of mechanical skill or free time / patience.

It still feels like a game in the sense that there's progression and rewards for progression. For example, learning how to read cooldowns means you can make smarter macros and double your income / cut kill time by half. There's even different "build paths" in that you can choose to go the memory reading build (fragile but reliable), network sniffing build (less fragile but expensive), or computer vision build (easy but unreliable and expensive).

From a technical perspective, the appeal is having an excuse to try out new stuff like SAT solvers, rules engines, or whatever ML thing I just learned about. It's also a good exercise in all the math and data structures + algos stuff I've learned but never use at dayjob. Optionally, building a UI to manage the bot is fun for the same reasons, an excuse to try out new frameworks / design choices / etc. It's basically another programming job but without the icky business / customer considerations.

Though I do agree that cheats in any PvP scenario is pretty lame. It has a much bigger negative impact on other players, and it's not as much of a puzzle (mostly aimbot and pathing). In comparison, PvE games are usually social and unless you're running a swarm of VMs, you're unlikely to affect the economy or otherwise inconvenience anyone.

[Frotag]

Can't edit my comment anymore but for anyone that's played Factorio, it feels a lot like that. Both in the way you slowly switch out hand-fed systems for automated systems that build on each other and in how you get a unique base (bot) out of it in the end. Plus there's something exciting about beating the game in a way the devs didn't envision and one that other players haven't.

[jowea]

It's a technical challenge for the script kiddie making their own hacks, but from what I gather most PvP cheaters nowadays are paying (!!!) a subscription for their cheats.

[kevingadd]

One anecdote: I "cheated" at EVE Online by writing an elaborate set of modding tools. Most of it was automation for really finicky tedious stuff like drone management, or automation for things like broadcasting your current target to other players in your party. I also hacked in workarounds for bugs in the official client. It enhanced my experience with the game a lot. On the other hand, lots of players were just botting.

I also maintained a browser addon for a while that had 100k+ weekly active users that added various features to a browser-based game. Eventually that game had such bad problems with botting and cheating that they had to introduce an anti-cheat system, and we basically got into a little arms race for a year or so where they'd add a new detection system and I'd circumvent it. Similar to the EVE Online modding it was things like workarounds for bugs in the game, improved UI, keyboard shortcuts, etc. Eventually they drew a line in the sand and said anyone using addons of any kind would get a permanent ban, so that was that.

I think the vast majority of cheaters are just in it to ruin other people's fun but sometimes people are violating ToS for a better or different experience with the game. It's unfortunate that the prevalence of malicious cheating means that anti-cheat technology also has to basically ban modding for fun.

[miamibre]

It's pretty simple, nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means. Outside of a few games like minecraft, every other game is designed around winning. 6 of the most played games on steam right now are some combination of competitive FPS / pvp survival or Dota 2. All of these games give you way more rewards for winning over just casually playing so over time the community is incentivized towards maximizing ELO, mastering the meta, and finding any ways to gain an edge on the competition.

I won't say it was better back in the 90s/ early 2000s but games had lobbies and people would just naturally drift around until they found one that satisfied their needs, be it playing more causally or for a more hardcore experience. Nowadays matchmaking is all controlled by the almighty algorithm which is just a glorified ELO/MMR system and dumps people together regardless of whether or not the game is "fun" for them. Worse yet "Quitting" is actively punished so you just have to stay in the game being frustrated and angry at your teammates until you lose. I always use pick up basketball as an example of how lobbies should work with people being given the choice of playing until they are tired/bored and punish trolls by excluding them forcing them to seek out another court or just start their own games.

Now that i have sworn off all competitive multiplayer games because i used to be a real fiend with several thousand hours in Dota 2 i have come to realize that as fun as the game is the fundamental failure of every matchmaking system is that your fun will always be dictated by how often you win because that's the only thing that is rewarded both in the game and by the community. If you look at any forum for these competitive games it's always the same complaints with people bemoaning that the balances is bad (AKA i don't win because if i did why would i complain), the game is too hard for newbies (AKA i don't win because the skill level is too high), and that the community is too toxic (AKA i don't win because i don't take the game too seriously and people get mad at me).

I'm much happier playing singleplayer games or exclusively cooperative games like Helldivers and Deep Rock Galactic and think most people would be too but they need to come to the realization that it's not the games fault per se but the underlying mechanics behind the matchmaking systems.

[IsTom]

> fun will always be dictated by how often you win

Matchmaking is designed so that you win roughly 50% of the time (except for the very top), no matter how well you play. If you focus on playing better it's going to be a treadmill by design. OTOH some people accept that you're going to lose 50% of matches anyway, chill and keep to lower ELO.

[tanewishly]

I can see that working in a 1-v-1 game, but how does that work in a last-one-standing game? Each game would have 1 winner and N-1 players who lost.

[RegnisGnaw]

On average you are the N/2 player to be eliminated...

[SirMaster]

Well they need a better matchmaking system in counter strike 2 then because I'm currently sitting at a 35% winrate...

[Arnavion]

Cooperative games do still have the problem that you either need to have friends with the same interests and gaming schedule as you (the last one especially gets more and more difficult with age and real life responsibilities), or you play with randoms and then all the same annoyances with multiplayer games that you listed apply.

[jpsouth]

Helldivers 2 was exceptional for this in my experience - I met some great people from matchmaking, both when I was playing with IRL friends and solo. I know it’s only a video game but it truly felt like a proper bonding experience when you were trying to save the last of your team, or when you harmonised in such a way it just felt tactically perfect.

I need to hop back on that game.

[_carbyau_]

I saw a forum interaction: "game is not fun, always losing" with the singular predictable response of course being "get good".

But if the complainant actually got good then all that did was reverse the roles...

[npteljes]

I think you a misunderstand why people cheat. There is nothing "nowadays" about playing unfair. Minecraft is also a bad example, as it's also cheated, and botted to hell. If there is anything to gain in any context, and you get enough people interested, the people will try to maximize that gain, and some will not care about the rules, or the intent of the context.

I do agree about the conclusion though. The solution for the disappointment in online matchmaking is singleplayer, and multiplayer with friends. Both completely eliminate the bad actors.

[ascagnel_]

I'd say the pendulum is swinging in the other direction -- Fortnite is bigger than most everything on Steam, and everything in that game feels like it's designed around you making progress through its battle pass in some incremental way. The world map has puzzles, there's a fishing mechanic, and it comes with a suite of non-combat alternate modes.

[frollogaston]

PC game market is also smaller than mobile games

[ascagnel_]

Speak of, it's been wild over the past 12-18 months to start seeing full-fat modern console games starting to hit phones.

[oersted]

> nowadays the ONLY way to have fun in most multiplayer games is to win by any means

That’s quite the hyperbole, I play plenty of multiplayer games and I enjoy myself plenty wether I win or not. Granted, games like Dota, Counterstrike or Tarkov are designed for a certain ultra-competitive audience, that’s fine, but there’s plenty of choice besides, more than ever.

These competitive games might be at the top of the charts, but they are rather niche in the grand scheme of things. It's just that the kind of people that play these games, they end up only playing that one game for years for a few hours a day. But in reality they are a minority and there are many more players spread out among all other games.

I think you are projecting your motivation to play games onto others, there are many reasons to enjoy games other than just getting those fake points at the end, and not everyone is as sore for loosing.

[Nextgrid]

In games where available weapons/gear depends on some global "level", this could be a way to get your desired weapons without having to grind for weeks/months. I guess a silver lining of "pay to win" games is that you can now pay to avoid that.

I remember trying to hack the levelling-up mechanism on Crysis 2 - it worked by sending your post-game stats (client-side) to a master server, so editing those stats in memory before that happens would work (there seems to be no tracking of stats on the game server side - even though they could've had the game server relay that to the master server).

Memory is fuzzy but I think I managed to level up to a stage where I got the weapons I wanted. For my defense this kind of "cheating" only "cooked the books" on the leaderboards and did not give me any actual advantage in-game.

[candiddevmike]

I wish more games let folks choose to grind for things or just have everything unlocked without grinding. I already have a job, I just want to play a game without another grind. I know some people love the grind, but I don't, I much prefer the L4D style "play what you want, how you want".

[Nursie]

It's a nice idea, but it won't be applicable to all games...

I'm thinking of Ark:Survival Evolved here, where the grind on 'official' servers is insane - for example taming a Wyvern required you to be online more or less every two hours for three days. On the unofficial servers these were downtuned so you could do things a bit more easily.

But when we briefly ran our own server and realised that we could use god-powers to get the stuff we wanted without the grind... it turned out there wasn't really anything of a game left.

[Nextgrid]

The prequel to this game (which had a bit of a cult following due to its insane hardware reqs, but frankly the multiplayer gameplay is good and sorely missed) explicitly did not have any global leaderboard or score system - instead, the "leveling up" was per-game-session and it took merely ~10-15 kills (~20 mins on a busy server) to earn enough points to acquire all the weapons you needed.

[Workaccount2]

For a lot of them, they aren't cheating, they are compensating for bad teammates, bad servers, other cheaters, bad hit reg, bad sound effects, bad whatever they can dream up.

Cheating is "this is my actual skill level if there wasn't so much bullshit happening to me"

Of course this is all a lie, but it's what they tell themselves.

[tines]

This is only true for the people who use the cheats, not the people who make them.

For the people who make them it's an intellectual exercise, like solving a puzzle, it's an end in itself. That and the social credit it gives you among your technical friends.

[esyir]

For the people that make them, they're largely making them for money.

[globalnode]

this discussion made me think of the people who build nukes vs the people that use them.

[eszed]

My perception of the psychology is a malformed competitive drive. Competition is fun! But when it gets someone to the place of "Must win at all costs" it can be life-destroying. For the video game cheats, I think it starts out as "Must beat the other players", but then that gets (mostly) boring once they are actually are beating the other players, and it shifts to "Must beat the anti-cheat system."

[esyir]

I think you, and a lot of other people really overestimate the number of people for whom the technical challenge is why they cheat.

Seeing that the cheating industry is relatively large, and functions on a subscription basis; For the vast majority of cheaters the challenge is entering their credit card to get their cheat subscription.

These are people who want to win at all costs, other users be damned.

[vintermann]

Maybe they think they're smarter than the others for using a cheat. "Outsmarting the system" etc.

[jajko]

> Competition is fun!

A bit, sometimes, maybe, for some. The only person you really need to compete with is your past you. The rest... it certainly leads to less happy life, unless you keep winning way more often than the rest.

And uncontrolled, it can very easily spiral into rather destructive personality patterns over time. Parents often fuck up their kids having them compete as much as possible, laying seeds for later issues. Competitive people always compare themselves to others, never happy with what they have, regardless of how much they achieved. Literal opposite of searching for happiness in life.

I don't know about your peers but I see this behavior often in high performance environment, high achievers with sad inner lives.

[beAbU]

At this point games like call of duty, especially warzone, is completely unplayable to me due to the massive skill gap. I spend more time in the game lobby than actually playing the game. Warzone is especially bad as you are kicked out when you die, no respawn. It makes for very frustrating gameplay.

I seriously considered cheating at some point just so that I can actually have some fun and get to the end-game without constantly fucking dying. But then I remembered there are other games that I also enjoyed playing, and then I stopped playing CoD.

[bee_rider]

In single player games it is just another way to have fun. I mean, Minecraft creative mode is essentially equivalent to turning on all the cheats. It removes all the built-in challenge and then you come up with your own game.

It doesn’t seem very appealing to me, but I don’t think there’s any particularly interesting psychology behind it. Rather one could say I lack creativity and need monsters to motivate me to build anything.

Cheating in real competitive games is rude, though, for sure. But most people don’t play top-level competitive games.

Cheating in pseudo-competitive games like Overwatch or Dota is both rude and stupid. Because the game can just find people to match your cheat-augmented skill level anyway.

[cat1750309572]

I was a cheat developer and I did hang out with cheaters and other developers. I'm surprised people in this thread haven't mentioned one big motivation for cheating yet. Plain old trolling, making other people mad at you, making them insult you in chat, etc.

There were TF2 bots that autonomously queued for the game's casual matches, spammed the chat, aimbotted and made the game generally unplayable for a while, you could host a bunch of them on a not so beefy computer and make them queue separately or together.

One of the features of those bots was streaming the chat logs from the matches into Discord/Telegram channels for cheaters/bot hosters to laugh at and make compilations of. It was funny and entertaining to see people having their moods ruined for no reason.

In game (TF2 specifically), when I see cheaters, they are usually also extremely annoying/purposely abrasive in other terms as well - frequent use of racial, transphobic, homophobic slurs, furry/anime/my little pony profile pictures, blatantly cheating while denying it, general smugness - they are trying to maximize the negative reactions they can get out of you. I'm really ashamed to have once been like that and I'm really glad that I grew out of it. It was absolutely not a healthy way to have fun for myself, and not a great community to spend time in (a lot of cheaters pretend to be extremely bigoted for a reaction, but some are genuinely like that). I met some genuinely good, talented people there, but they didn't stay involved with the cheating community for long, and eventually I left it too.

[ipsento606]

even if everyone only tried it for a week, that still means there will always be a certain number of cheaters in games, because new players are always joining

[bravetraveler]

I, quite literally, got a career! Started as a technical curiosity, gave me in-roads to very weird corners of the internet. Got to know many professionals I wouldn't have, otherwise.

Ultimately served as the most effective networking I ever did.

[tines]

Same here :) Best learning experience of my entire life. Would recommend.

[npteljes]

The result, and the taboo method gives a thrill. It's a power trip essentially. It is also used to close the perceived skill gap, or get revenge. Some people enjoy a very uneven power balance - in games, this means that they like to get an overwhelming win, or "stomp". Sometimes skilled people achieve this by playing in a league that is much less skilled than their own, "smurfing". Technically not cheating, but it's usually against the EULA, and creates essentially the same situation.

All in all, it's just power dynamics, and lack of compassion.

[nickzelei]

Back in the cs1.6 days there were servers that advertised as hacker servers. Obviously anti cheat was turned off, but the draw was that everyone was hacking and you could test your hacking skills. The goal was to see who had written the best hacking software. It was actually really fun and an entirely new way of playing the game.

[cat1750309572]

This still exists in various games, it's called HvH mode

[nickzelei]

TIL! That is exactly what I am referring to.

[b3lvedere]

I never cheat in multiplayer (also because i don't like multiplayer with strangers), but i do cheat sometimes in single player games to speed up progress. I lack the time and hate the grind. If a game has a very easy or story mode i will happily select that one.

[frollogaston]

It's more of a thing in ranked things like Counterstrike, which are half game half unpaid job.

[andoando]

I did a lot of cheating back when I was younger. I mean, it was just fun being a dick and a god dominating the game

[codedokode]

I think those who use cheats are mostly school age kids who do it to troll people or to boost their self-esteem.

[gambiting]

Given that the paid cheats market is a huge business and the prices are not insignificant, I'm afraid a lot of adults with stable source of income are cheaters too.

[jajko]

Sad people full of insecurities and other complexes, compensating it on strangers (well, failing miserably but there is always those few seconds of dopamine kicks). Sounds about right.

[lofaszvanitt]

Because the average joe needs the sense of achievement. Lots of people have near zero success in life, or power above something, and this is their supplement.

Plus most of the modern multiplayer games, especially fpses, are centered around a few individuals who have skills above the herd or they are playing by different rules (meaning of this is up to you...) and everyone else is just filler so that these above average players can "harvest" them. Just like Bodybuilding. You have the top notch competitors who everyone tries to imitate. And that is what sells the supplements, while all they buy is an illusion that one day they can achieve the same physique.

So let's say you have Apex Legends where well known players show how they literally obliterate everyone else. So the matchmaking (which is deliberately shit) sends these "predators" to hunt the prey, who are essentially sheeps.

People watch these streamers and try to imitate or get to know how to be at the skill level they have (which is near impossible for several reasons, I'd rather not explain). So the whole business centers around these outstanding persons, and the sheep buy the shiny digital bullshit, thinking that might elevate them to the "bigname" monkey's level.

[kulahan]

It’s actually probably pretty benign psychology in my opinion.

Nobody on your own team is really gonna notice if you’re cheating unless it’s speed hacks or something. So your own team is hyping you up for being a god, and it feels good.

Plus a lot of people like you - trying it out for the novelty. Most people aren’t doing it, but seeing it once ever 20 games would probably be enough to drive you insane.

[on_the_train]

Winning is fun. Cheating makes you win.

[endemic]

> There must be some very interesting psychology behind this.

It feels good when you win! If you cheat, that just means you're smarter than the other player.

[InvertedRhodium]

It’s the ultimate meta play - it’s no longer you vs the game, it’s you vs the game developers.

I ran a botting SaaS for Aion years ago, and the constant cat and mouse was what kept me going at it.

[tines]

How did editing memory offsets auto-fire based on enemies entering your crosshairs? To my knowledge this would require some code hooking at least. (Or are you using "editing memory offsets" to mean "writing new instructions into the process' memory"?)

[compton93]

Win32 API mouse input and trigger a mouse click in Windows when crosshair on enemy head (more likely when crosshair is within enemy head position).

[tines]

That would require a lot more than editing memory offsets though.

[compton93]

No they just read the memory. The whole point of an external cheat is to only read memory. They can still use Win32 to send inputs.

[tines]

How do you determine whether the mouse is over an enemy head? Is there some variable the engine maintains for that?

[dminik]

For Counter-Strike 1.6, source and GO your crosshair would change and indicate that you are aiming at a player. Not sure about CS2, but wouldn't rule it out either.

It's a bit slow, but you could grab the player ID, then check if the player is on your team or not and then fire. Either by sending a mouse input, or if I remember correctly by writing to a specific address.

However, with enough knowledge (which is mostly documented online) you could actually pull out the hitbox, skeleton and animation data and just run the line-box intersection step yourself. Easier to do internally by hooking in-game functions though.

[cat1750309572]

There is a list of entities in memory, models have "bones" for animation purposes, knowing the address of entity in memory you can find out if it's an enemy player (compare team ids), where the head bone origin is, and you also can read the view angles of your own player to see where you're looking. The tricky part would be doing a ray cast to see that you can actually hit the enemy and not shoot a wall - internal cheats can just call builtin game functions, externals can't.

[CaptainFever]

No experience, but I think the game seems to track it? The default crosshair seems to change depending on what you're aiming at.

[ChocolateGod]

Read the player position and camera from memory, read enemies positions from memory, use basic maths to detect if camera is pointing at an enemy.

or the game engine could track internally what the player is looking at (GTA does this).

[cat1750309572]

In Source Engine games, your inputs are stored in a struct ("usercmd", if I remember correctly) before being sent to the server in a client tick. You can modify that struct, a mouse click there is a bit flip on one of the fields. Rotation and movements are float fields. Modifying that struct makes your client send the "inputs" without a need to actually "call" anything.

[techjamie]

I once tried an early GTA V multiplayer mod, pre-FiveM, that used .NET as a basis. They didn't apply any protection to their mod DLL though, and it was trivial to modify it in any way one liked with DnSpy.

I used it to completely automate a grindy task on a server complete with chat hooks, and automatic teleportation to sell the items and back. And also implemented a trainer of sorts with all sorts of functions. The networking didn't appear to handle the teleportation well, and to anyone else my character never moved.

I ultimately didn't use it as an advantage in any meaningful way, I only played to see how far I could mod it and stopped, but never used it against anyone, and stopped playing once I was satisfied with my ill-gotten gains rotting on my account.

Reported it to the devs afterwards, who seemed disinterested but did at least obfuscate the binary, but neglected to do the same to the client JS API loader, so I used that to inject custom client scripts and override server supplied client code.

I'm sure people could do more interesting stuff with BepinEx/Harmony these days, but I never had enough inclination in .NET to learn to implement those. But it was still really fun to twist the game around like that.

[djm2k]

these days you can open the devtools for the web-based inventory systems and start sending malicious events straight from the console. filed as not-a-bug...

[Freban]

>then grew disinterested

*Uninterested or just you lost interest. Disinterested means "not influenced by considerations of personal advantage."