As the competitive online gaming and eSports industries gain legitimacy by becoming more popular and attracting mainstream attention, the question of competitive integrity lingers in the back of my mind. Can the game’s developers, community, and users maintain and uphold competitive integrity? Or will they fold under the pressure of greed and complacency?

Some of you may recall the “Konami Code” or the “Contra Code”: Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, and optionally Start/Select at the end. Cheats like the Konami Code or Contra Code were safe for the game’s integrity and were programmed into the game by the developers as a way for players to experience the game in a unique way.

Today’s cheating culture, however, is very different from the Konami Code era of cheats–particularly cheats, hacks, and exploits of competitive online games. Cheats and hacks are no longer written by developers but rather by third parties who are interested in trying to exploit a game’s mechanics, database, and/or netcode to gain a competitive advantage. Nowadays, developers rarely dare to implement in-house cheats into their games, as doing so tends to expand the attack surface that an attacker can misuse in an online competitive setting.

Some examples of modern-day scripts and cheats that exploit games and undermine competitive integrity include (but are not limited to) the following:

  • Aimbots, which are most commonly found in first-person shooter games, use automated target acquisition and calibration to the player.
  • Trigger bots are also commonly used in first-person shooter games to automatically shoot opponents who appear in the field of view.
  • Lag switches use various methods, with the main idea being to DDoS your opponents.
  • Look-ahead cheats allow the cheater to see what other players are doing first by forging a delayed time-stamp on a packet.
  • World-hacking cheats (Read more...)