The view of video game pros on the cheaters problem in our industry

Video games… a universe full of possibilities for creation, construction, writing, art, and fun but also frustration. Frustration is often caused by the realization that there will always be those aiming to be better at a certain video game through unfair vantages, or cheats.

How many times did we fall in love with a videogame, a videogame that fills our hearts with outstanding gameplay, mechanics, graphics, game modes, and everything else, but once in a while or very often in a while we come across someone who changes the rules of the game for their benefit, turning our experience into something frustrating that can lead to uninstalling the game and look for a better one.

Cheaters are a problem. If before we had people cheating because they were bored or because it could be fun in certain contexts, nowadays with the exponential increase in the number of gamers and with this industry being worth more and more money, cheating is now an activity that can be very lucrative and therefore, it has been gaining more and more adepts. All the best videogames out there are impacted, especially competitive multiplayer titles.

There is one type of game where this becomes more visible, the FPS (First Person Shooter): video games characterized by first-person view and weapon in hand where cheats like aimbot (like the name implies, a cheat that automatically aims for you), rapidfire (a program that helps you shoot faster than any human can), triggerbot (an aid that makes it so that as soon as a player crosses an opposing player the gun fires by itself), among others, are becoming a constant part of this type of video games. This leads to the community being more and more disappointed with the direction the games are taking.

In this article, I wanted to focus on what the video game community thinks. Therefore, we invited industry professionals -pro players and a streamer- to share their thoughts with us.

cHs_tv is Christian Santos, a professional gamer of Call of Duty: Warzone, the free-to-play battle royale from the Call of Duty franchise, a game from Activision and Raven Software. It is undeniable that this video game is one of the most populated in terms of cheaters and where the community makes itself heard most about this issue on social networks. Activision, the company that owns the title, has already banned more than 200,000 accounts since the launch of the game until October last year and it seems that the problem continues despite the developers' many efforts on ending it. In the words of cHs_tv, who represents Legionfarm and has been playing since launch day, “there have been times when there was a 100% chance of catching 1 or 2 cheaters per game”. If you think that these cheaters only appear in casual games, you are wrong, but cHs_tv tells us that even in tournaments it is possible to catch cheaters, “I have played in many tournaments where I met “strange” players (…) and after a while, they were caught (cheating) or they could even be exposed by someone. But not everything is bad, the same cHs_tv tells us that he has caught fewer cheaters in the game nowadays (although he still finds them) and that these tournament cheaters “sooner or later stop playing or lose that ‘talent’ they had against the good players in international tournaments”.

This is the reality that a professional FPS player faces… another example of this is Adriana “yuN” Barbosa, professional CS:GO player, former player of teams like Galactics Esports or Ambush, and now representing AYM Esports. Her experience with cheaters is a little different since she tells us that she doesn’t remember ever having encountered this type of player in tournament games or leagues but that “in the “faceits” or “matchmaking” game mode (CS:GO has several types of game modes and these are two of them) is the dish of the day. The player goes on to say that “this problem is very serious! This is the game I play every day, it is my career and so I see it as more serious than other games.” When I asked her if she thought that if this video game was protected by a viable and working anti-cheat solution, more players would play the game, she was adamant: “In my opinion, yes, and more so the younger players who don’t know how to play very well yet, catch cheaters, don’t like it, and that can lead to people quitting the game, which nobody in the CS community or any other game wants. We want the game to grow healthily and be even more successful.”

Francisco Alves, known as K4shera, pro player of Apex Legends, the Electronic Arts (EA) shooter that has been gaining fans in recent years and has begun to gain prominence in the world esports scene. This Portuguese athlete has achieved excellent results in Europe. He has already won the European “Apex Legends Global Series 1”, still without an organization to support him and his team. Something that happened shortly after this victory as he now represents Acend. K4shera is direct in his answer when I asked him if he had ever encountered cheaters in Apex Legends, not only in casual games, but in tournaments and other professional games: “every season, all the time, ranked apex is full of them, apex is a game that at the professional level has not had many bans. I suspect several. Just this season a player from the South America region was caught cheating in the pro league and nothing was done to that player”, It is well demonstrated here how much cheaters are present in this battle royale that fights to be among the best, but this may still be a cause for not achieving it, K4ashera continues “the amount of seasons that this game has seen ruined because of cheaters, in which players have stopped playing because of cheaters, in which pro players lost opportunities because of cheaters … “Remembering that this problem besides being annoying is directly related to careers that may have been destroyed and to the fact that a larger player base has not yet been reached in the video game. I also asked him if the pro players have a place where they can report cases like this, and the truth is that it seems to be all kind of shady, that it’s not official, he tells me that they can report a cheat related problem to two Twitter users, “a Japanese one added recently and an American one. Some pros are listened to, they do their best, but we always felt that this system is not at all efficient and that having to use these public platforms so that something can happen is not at all the best way to do it”.

Still, within this theme, I then went and collected the opinion of a video game professional in another area: the live streams on Twitch. Streamer on this platform for 10 years, 8 as a professional and twitch partner, Bruno “Impakt” Moutinho was also professional in several video games like Quake 3 Arena, CS 1.5, 1.6, Source, League of Legends, Overwatch and Streetfighter. From all these experiences in video games that Impakt told us about, cheaters have always been present, but never in tournaments or while he was a professional in a video game. They are present in his daily life by playing online games in his stream and especially shooters as Impakt tells us “Whenever I play a shooter the cheating community reveals itself quite easily and in a very noticeable way. Examples are CS, Call of Duty Warzone, Valorant and so on. I feel it is easier to create cheats for these types of games than for a genre like MOBA”. Warzone seems to be the game where Impakt finds the most cheaters, during this interview, the streamer mentioned the title several times pointing it as an exceptional case in this problem, examples of this was when he told me that “there are video games with serious problems with cheaters, like Warzone — something that greatly damages the perception that the community has of the title itself”. When I asked him what implementing a solution like a functional anti-cheat, one that would work around 99% of accuracy, would do to the video game market he replied that “the day I am assured that most cheaters (in that 99% range) will be removed from the game, and that number will be maintained, is the day I will install Call of Duty: Warzone again. This jus just me, but I feel a lot more people feel the same way”.

All these are reports from people who, more than the “average gamer” live off the game, it is their profession that is constantly put at risk by this problem that has long been identified by video game studios and that they try to combat on a daily basis so that they can give the player another experience, one that is thought of from the start, which is for the player to enjoy all the mechanics, gameplay and story that the studio has prepared for him without the interference of these cheaters.

At Anybrain we are aware of this problem and we like to talk not only to the gamers represented here by the interviewees but also to the game studios that more than anyone else feel the negative consequences of this problem. We work daily to give our partners an anti-cheat solution that works, thus allowing the video game ecosystem to be more and more a place where the gamers can happily enjoy the video game that the developer worked tirelessly to create for them.

We wanted to thank all the interviewees for their time and answers essential to this blog post's production.
By order of appearance, we thank: Christian Santos, Adriana Barbosa, Francisco Alves and Bruno Moutinho.