Cheating in CS:GO is its own small sub-industry, a hard-to-kill parasite riding on the skin of one the PC’s most popular games. Some ne’er-do-wells get off avoiding the notice of the VAC system for as long as possible.
Others leverage cheating as a profitable enterprise , offering premium programs and services. Some professionals have even used cheats during competition (with disastrous, career-ending consequences). For Valve, combating the risk of hacking is an endless war. Just last week, Valve’s elimination of a popular Team Fortress 2 Cheat nabbed nearly 170 pro TF2 players. And last year, it dealt over 1 million bans to suspected accounts; with ownership counts likely exceeding 20 million, CS:GO likely represents a significant chunk of that figure.
Earlier this year, CS:GO player AndroidL was inspired to take matters into his own hands. In late January, AndroidL created and dispersed a pair of free hack programs on a popular cheat forum. Unbeknownst to their downloaders, the programs were time bombs. They’d function normally for a set period of time before permanently skewing the user’s view angle to an abnormal tilt and enabling a constant bunnyhop script—huge, obvious red flags that would immediately trigger a VAC ban. Although clever, the first few hack releases earned modest attention—roughly 1,000 downloads apiece, according to AndroidL’s Reddit post.
AndroidL had to take matters in his own hands because he thought that VAC lacks the capability to detect all cheaters. AndroidL says.
“I think Overwatch is a very good idea, It’s another filter cheaters have to go through, but the only reason Overwatch exists is because VAC lacks the capabilities to detect all cheaters. Although I believe VAC is a good safeguard against cheaters, I don’t believe it is a strong enough safeguard. There is little to no effort involved for a hack developer to bypass VAC—it is a decent system to keep away the masses of people using public cheats, but other than that VAC is essentially futile I do have a plan with similar tactics and I probably will do this again sometime,” AndroidL continued. “It would be great if I could cooperate with Valve to get a larger number of cheaters banned. Taking cheating into our own hands seems to be the only solution right now, and I encourage others that have the skills to do this to create similar fake hacks. Furthermore, I want to put off those thinking about cheating. This wasn’t the first fake hack, and it definitely won’t be the last.”
What AndroidL did was really great and helped a lot of community members by reducing the number of hackers but still a lot of hackers remain and are still using hacks to annoy us, I think valve should really collaborate with AndroidL and start working on a system that is more useful and capable of eliminating the hackers straight away.
Tags: AndroidL cheat csgo Overwatch VAC valve
