Got quite a number of responses to this article. I was pretty awed to realise that over 3,000 people read it in the first few days it was up. Read their emails here.

Cheating little gaming bitches, pardon my french.

You know, nothing pisses me off more than knowing the guy who just killed me is a cheater. Makes me want to tracert the guy's IP addy and go beat him within an inch of his pathetic little life for real. I simply cannot abide sneaky little bastards who have to cheat to win. If you had to cheat you didn't win Mr. Loser. You are just an idiot who is ruining the game for everyone.

The reason for this entire rant is Counter-Strike. I've never seen so many people cheating in any game before. Not to mention the fact that most of them actually seem proud of the fact that they are cheaters and can get away with it.

Punkbuster defines a cheat this way: (And I agree)

Cheats are usually black and white issues. Certainly, any "hack" or unauthorized alteration of the original program code is considered a cheat even if it is harmless simply because it cannot be verified as harmless. Bug exploits that create an unfair advantage for players who know about the bugs and how to exploit them are also considered cheats. Also, outside programs and/or device drivers that "help" players to perform better are cheats (for example, by helping them aim better, eliminating dark areas in the game, or making walls invisible). Programming scripts using commands provided and documented by the original software developers are not considered cheats unless they are exploiting known bugs to gain an unfair advantage. Grey areas are considered on a case by case basis and every effort is made to conform to the opinion of the collective community. In some cases, detection of certain cheats can be turned on and off on a server by server basis by the corresponding PunkBuster server admin.

The beta versions of CS have some huge cheats in them, which quite a number of people seem to go out of their way to find and exploit. Stupid "laser" models that allow you to see where snipers are looking, even through walls. Cheats that make you harder to hit. Cheats that put big flashing circles around enemy players. Cheats that allow you to see though walls and shoot people across the bloody map with the AWP. The list goes on and on. Recently I've seen some new bugs in the 1.0 release of the game. Skin cheats that turn your model into a chicken, a helicopter, or the enemy team. (This one is really cute.) Cheats that make you completely invisible. People are also taking advantage of a cheap little bug that allows you to become invulnerable to damage when crouched in any water. The list goes on and on. There are even web sites dedicated to ways of cheating on Counter-Strike, which I simply could not believe. I would be ashamed to have my name associated with anything of this sort.

Cheating not only shows a complete lack of personal honor and respect for other players, it also ruins the game for everyone. Once a few people start using stupid cheats, even people who would not normally think of cheating get into it, usually just to defend themselves against the cheaters. Once cheats get as wide spread as they have right now in CS, the game simply ceases to be any fun. It also costs the company that makes the product money. They have to spend time and staff trying to fix the leaks that these idiots are taking advantage of.

Regrettably there has been cheating in gaming since day one. Cheating in single play is just fine. After all, it's your game. If you want to beat it by cheating, well, nothing wrong with that. The problem started with Quake I as near as I can tell, when people started looking for holes in the game to give themselves advantages in games against other humans. Apparently if you can't beat 'em, cheat and kill them that way. I was talking to a friend who could never figure out how the guys he always played with were so good. Turns out they were... Surprise! Cheating. They were using a bug that allowed them to see any player though the walls, and also put a smoke trail behind the guy's players model so he was dead easy to follow. I saw a few skin cheats that made enemy players glow brightly so that you could see anyone standing in dark corners. While it's useful for catching "campers", I really don't think that's a bad tactic. If the level designer didn't intend for people to camp, he wouldn't have dark corners, would he? There were also some wonderful little things called "aiming bots" that allowed your computer to shoot people for you. One would be tagging along behind a guy, and suddenly a rail fires out of his back and kills you. Really fair. I saw a cheat for Quake III that allowed you to see a little "pip" wherever an enemy player is. Makes it very simple to follow a player through the map when you can see his location at all times. With Quake III at least they tried to stop cheating with a "pure" option on server side. In theory this should check everyone's pak files and won't let them in if they've hacked the game in some way. I've always hosted pure servers and played on them, just to prevent people from cheating their little asses off. I suck horribly at Quake III and certainly don't need to get beat on any worse than I already do. Unfortunately, again a friend of mine showed me a way around it. Someone found a way to hack your Quake III so that it will allow you onto pure servers with modified files on your end. It annoys me that people will actually sit down and hack their way around anti-cheat measures. Then again if you're going to cheat, why does it matter if everyone else does it I guess. I'm sure there are tons of other cheats for Quake out there, I've never been a big fan really.

Starsiege Tribes is another excellent and popular game that has a sorid history of cheating in some very inventive ways. Happy mines, giant flags, and the legendary "autoaim.cs" (I purloined a copy finally, but it doesn't actually seem to work. :) I could never figure out how guys could catch me when I was running around near the edges of the map with the flag, hiding. Suddenly someone would pop over a hill and cap me, seemingly knowing just where I was. (For those of you heathens out there who have never played Tribes, the maps are usually several kilometers by several kilometers. The chances of just stumbling on the flag carrier are pretty low when he's off the beaten path hiding somewhere.) Turns out there's a cheat that makes the flag that's on your back 60' tall. The damned thing sticks out over everything. If the cheater is within 400 meters of your position he can spot you inside buildings, behind hills, whatever. Another cheat allows people to buy hundreds of health boosting kits. Normally this should just increase your health to maximum and stop. But due to a bug in Tribes, it actually continues to increase your health for several minutes. So unless you take a hit that instantly kills you, you survive and regenerate your health. Over and over again making you virtually unkillable. Another little thing I consider cheap as hell is some of the skins that people use to give themselves an advantage. Always wondered why I couldn't hit a few of my buddies with mines, grenades, and why they never got caught by a turret. Watching their screens during a LAN party I came to the realization they'd loaded new skins for those objects. They were not a dull gold colour and stood out amazingly well against any surface. No wonder my defensive mines and turrets never worked. Another cute cheat puts a big flashing icon over mines and turrets. The "evil" turret bug allowed people to make their deployable turrets invulnerable. The invisible beacon cheat is also rather amusing. It allows you to plant target beacons before a game on a map. When you play on that map, you have all the important targets beaconed and easy to hit with mortars. No one else can see the beacons and they're indestructible.

Luckily for those of us who are honest Tribes players Dynamix has been excellent about patching the bugs that people are abusing. Regrettably, that probably creates delays in Tribes 2 and other projects they are working on, which pisses me off. There's also help at the server side for those bugs that Dynamix hasn't been able to fix. Ex. Heavies flying scouts etc. (While we are on the topic, I also hate little pukes like "No Fix" who attack servers and crash them just for fun. It's very expensive in both time and money to run a server, and you don't get compensated for it generally. Piss off and stop trying to wreck our community.) The BWAdmin mod fixes many of these bugs, and is highly recommended for server admins.

For Counter-Strike there's Punk Buster, a server and client side mod that fixes skin cheats and quite a number of other bugs that allow people to be cheap little mofos. Check it out HERE. You can also visit Next Wish's site HERE. (Next Wish's cheat fix is particularly good as it is client side and catches those cheap little bitches who like to run around invisible. They look like a bloody rainbow and are dead easy to kill.) And thank them when you're there. People like this may save the online gaming community from those of it's members who insist on trying to destroy it.

It's interesting, I've seen a few polls around asking people if they've considered quiting various games because of the cheating. Almost 50% said yes. I certainly have. Luckily the bastards who run around cheating don't tend to do all that well, even with their extreme cheapness. Guess it shows you that skill and integrity do win out in the end, thank God.

Marauder out. Gonna go test my anticheats on some pubs and kill me some llamas.