Cheating in Esports

Cheating is just one of those annoying things you come across when playing esports casually. That is, as a mere amateur or enthusiast of competitive video games. And it can be a very depressing experience to learn that your hard earned skills can simply be nullified by someone with a software that costs a very modest amount.

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My own experience

I remember for instance that back in 2011, I gave up on playing StarCraft 2 when I learned how easy it was for people to use a maphack tool and just ruin your games with it. There’s literally nothing that can be done against someone who’s so desperate to go up in the rankings that they’re willing to cheat to achieve this goal.

Sure, companies can develop anti-cheating software and they even catch some of the people who break the rules. But, just like viruses evolve, gradually becoming resistant to antibiotics and requiring new ones to be developed, companies need to keep up with what the cheating market is doing because it is constantly looking for new ways to fool the system.

Cheating in CS:GO and Dota 2

Cheating in Real-Time Strategy games is a pain to deal with. But wait until you play First-Person Shooters such as CS:GO, where the cheaters have become so sophisticated that they often understand how cheaters are caught and how a cheating software can be used to perfection without anyone detecting it. The whole experience is very painful to go through as a player, which is why true esports fans always have a champagne ready in their refrigerators, for when some big event happens in relation to a cheater or group of cheaters being caught.

Well, I recently opened my bottle and had to replace it with another one, when Forsaken, a CS:GO player, was caught cheating at *drum rolls* a professional CS:GO LAN tournament. That’s right. Right now, if you search the dictionary for synonyms of the word “stupid”, you get a picture of this guy.

The only other similar event I can think of in recent memory is one in which a Dota 2 player was caught using scripts during a qualification match for The International 2018. And not just the guy, but his entire organization tried to defend him by claiming that he wasn’t actually cheating. It’s just that his Razer mouse was programmable and so he didn’t know he wasn’t supposed to install automatic scripts on it. You can imagine the good laugh everyone got from that statement.

The cheater’s mentality

Understanding people who cheat is beyond me. I mean, how empty on the inside do you need to be to be able to live with yourself and take pride in a victory that’s totally fake? And yet, people still do it. It’s not just a few bad apples either. In esports like PUBG, Overwatch and CS:GO, we’re talking about millions of players who got caught cheating. That’s a pretty depressing thought but that’s just the world that we live in. It’s more than a gaming problem. It’s an ethics problem.