cheating in videogames : everything you need to know.
back in the days, specifically games like quake, people found that you could bork your video settings and the GPU would not render the walls. This was the first PvP hack, now known as wallhack. Hacking single-players videogames existed since forever, and exploiting faults in the system was almost considered an art, integral to the gameplay. As such, at this stage "cheating" was considered "being smart".
The various quake/UT/CS 1.6 communities, who began the eSports movement, did not take lightly to this, and went down hard on any sort of cheating or exploiting.
This is about the time that aimbots started happening.
When later WOW exploded in popularity and everyone and their dog became a "gamer", the VAST number of casual gamers made fertile ground for cheat developers; gold cheats, macros, ESP, radar, trading hacks, more or less the whole set of hacks existing today. This due without a doubt to the number of casuals who had no concept of eSports "fairplay" and who were willing to pay money for ingame gold.
the massively successful F2P/P2W Combat Arms also contributed immensely to the cheating panorama by catering to idiots who would win with their wallets.
CHEATING TODAY:
there are two kind of games, broadly speaking, when it comes to cheating: company controlled, and community controlled.
if you go today into quake and cheat, you will IMMEDIATELY be kicked, banned from that server, and within a couple of days max your account will be suspended.
this is because 1. players have enough experience to tell straight away that you are hacking. 2. there is a votekick system in place that everyone uses on a regular basis (and no, it doesn't generate drama). 3. the servers / lobbies are privately owned and have admins in-game. 4. the management relies on external, community-driven organizations (such as ESReality) to confirm hackers and will ban anyone confirmed.
for a hacker, life in quake is impossible. you won't last half an hour before you are banned from every server in existence.
there are very few games like quake and those who are like quake generally last long and are profitable. and the closer a game is to this community-owned system, the more they tend to prosper.
on the other hand, in company-owned games, the situation is vaaaastly more complex.
1. banning hackers means that other hackers know their hack is vulnerable.
2. hackers are profitable; people buy new accounts to use a hack, which they would not if that hack was known as vulnerable.
3. there is more population, therefore more money, therefore more invested into making superior hacks.
4. there is a vastly more casual population that cannot be trusted with a votekick + ban feature. i have been kicked ZERO times from quake. i have been kicked countless times from Blacklight (a CoD-clone) for "hacking". as the game operator, you will be flooded by reports of hacking, mostly false, which means there is no way to monitor the population.
end of part 1.