ST-CS-10-339-75
March 2002

3.  Identification  (U)

Perhaps the most saddening aspect of cheating is that it devalues skill. When spectacularly skillful kills occur, the immediate feeling is that a cheat was employed - after all, cheats are dreadfully common, and it's far more likely to run into a cheater than a player who really has spent several years developing the necessary level of skill.

As such, instead of being at ease with being killed in the knowledge that the opponent is truely capable and has earned his kills, the feeling is of anger at the opponent for the selfishness shown in using a cheat.

It must be understood in the first place that impossible kills happen, and not by chance, but by skill. To prove the point, consider the following video footage.

The Counter-Terrorist behind the wooden wall was firing his weapon into the wall, and at such an angle that the bullets fired also impacted upon the concrete wall of the house.

When a bullet was fired, a line could be mentally drawn back through the two impact marks, the first on the wooden wall and the second on the concrete garage wall; the hostile CT has to be somewhere on that line.

Since the CT in question was turning on the spot and firing, it was possible to draw multiple lines back through multiple pairs of bullet impact points and thus triangulate onto his position.

The author mentally executed this process and fired at the point where the CT had to be, and a kill was achieved. The immediate and highly understandable accusation was that a cheat was being employed, since the kill was achieved with a single deliberate accurate shot blind fired through a wall.

So, when is a cheat a cheat, and not an elite player?

Cheats posses certain hallmarks which by and large can be used to decide the issue; the basic issue here being that cheats can do things which no player can do. However, at the same time, cheats sometimes fail in ways that are generally not recognised, and players when observing these failures wrongly conclude a cheat is not in use.

A primary give-away with cheat use is that when an aimbot is in use, the player is able to turn through any angle in one frame, rather than turning at the speed of a mouse being moved from side to side. To spot this, trail a player when dead and lock your view onto his. If the player is instantly changing angles (and the end point of the movement being a hostile player), he is cheating.

Another way of noticing this behaviour is when a cheat engages two or more players. When the first player is killed, the cheater's aim will instantly shift onto the next player. This is particularly noticeable if the aimbot is set for headshots, as the cheater will be instantly switching target and scoring headshots while doing so.

However, it is also important to realise that aimbots can and do miss.

As can clearly be seen, the aimbot tracked the target perfectly, first locking onto the head and then one frame later moving onto the pelvis (which is where the cheat had been configured to aim) and the player firing the AWP was stationary - and yet, no hit. Seeing a suspected aimbot using player miss proves nothing.

Aimbots can be configured to aim for any body part. Only the more blatant cheats leave the aimbot set to aim for headshots since this results in consistent headshot kills which are a major give-away. Do not expect a cheat to consistently score headshots; indeed, expect a cheat to consistently not score headshots, since the aimbot will tend strongly to kill the target rapidly and hitting only the specified body part.

All cheat functionality can be activated or deactivated at a button press. A cheat who perhaps feels his recent kills have been over-obviously illegal can turn off cheats for a while. If a suspected cheat suddenly seems like a poor player, this could well be why.

Almost all cheat users take advantage of information overlay functionality. This also permits them to be aware of a player approaching around a corner, and so the cheat will typically open up the instant the player becomes visible as he rounds the corner; there is no reaction time which normal players require.