Hackers And Cheaters And Glitchers, OH MY!

I think if we want to know why people cheat in video games, we have to look at why people cheat in other things. Let’s take this from the perspective of someone who is in school and cheats on a math test.

If you have to cheat on your math test, it means that you are either failing to grasp the information because you’re lazy or you’re failing to grasp the information because you suck at math. It stands to reason, then, that if you have to cheat at a game, you are either failing to be successful at that game because you aren’t putting enough time in it to become proficient or you’re failing to be successful at that game because you suck at it.

The first of those two is easy to overcome. Spend more time, get skills, do better. The second one isn’t so easy. If you just straight up suck, there’s not much you can do about that. Sure you can spend more time and perhaps get a little better but it is difficult, if not impossible, to go from sucking to not sucking because when you suck so bad that you have to cheat, it is generally an indicator of an underlying suckage which won’t be easy to overcome.

If you’re too uncoordinated to use a controller or mouse/WASD combination, that’s going to be a tough one. Fine motor skills aren’t for everyone and if you don’t have them it will be difficult, if not impossible, for you to gain them. In this case, you can either accept the fact that you suck and just carry on sucking or you can quit playing the game. That is, if you’re a decent person. If you’re a cheater, though, you’ll just download the latest aimbot and get to work on killing people.

Note – this doesn’t mean you’re good…It just means that the person who wrote the aimbot software was good at programming cheats. You still suck at the game, now you just suck AND you’re a cheater.

But what about the people who cheat just to ruin it for other people? Well, that’s a completely different situation and in order to address it I would have to go in to a long and drawn out analysis of anti-social personality disorders, impulse control disorders and a whole slew of other things which would require me to break out my copy of DSM IV and I can’t be bothered to argue with all of the armchair psychologists out there so I’m not going to do it.

What it all boils down to, though, is that these people lack social skills, they have low self esteem, they’re most likely completely unable to get laid and they think that making other people’s lives miserable is going to somehow make them feel better about themselves. Basically, they’re losers.

And why don’t the gaming companies do something about all this? That’s simple! It all comes down to economics.

You see, the gaming companies have to employ people. Many of the people they employ are coders. Those coders cost money. When a game is released, the gaming companies get a massive influx of money from the sales of their game and that money goes into the bank with the purpose of being available to pay people and be used for marketing, etc…

Once a game is released, most of the team that was working on that game will be re-purposed – that is, they will be moved to other programs. A small staff will be kept on-hand to write updates and bug fixes and DLC for the title but the heavy hitters mostly get moved to other stuff. When you make a complaint about a hack or a glitch or a cheat, the gaming company has to determine if the thing which was reported is worth their time.

If it is something that is difficult to recreate, they often won’t worry about it because it is difficult to recreate and will take too much of their time to fix. If it is something which is easy to recreate, they may think about fixing it but if it is going to take up too much of their time and money, they forget about it. It gets swept under the rug because the powers that be can’t be bothered to think about it, let alone pay for it. If it falls in to the sweet-spot of easy to recreate AND easy to fix, it may get some attention but the fix is going to come far down the road…there will be no quick solution here.

So why don’t they ban the people who are doing the shenanigans? Well, that comes down to economics as well. The more players you have, the more copies of a game you will sell. The more copies you sell, the more money you make. If they start banning all of the people who cheat, they will lose money on future sales because their player base will be smaller. There’s also the issue of people bypassing cheats by either making new accounts or, if the gaming company bans a cd-key, going and getting ahold of a new copy of the software.

It is a vicious cycle.

Basically, people cheat and grief because they either suck or they’re hopeless losers. Gaming companies don’t get rid of those people because even though they suck and/or are hopeless losers, they effectively pay the company to look the other way.

In some cases, these gaming companies will use third party programs which detect and automatically ban cheaters, like punkbuster, but we all know that punkbuster can be bypassed and is fairly inaccurate in its cheat detection. A LOT of companies I wrote to replied back with “we use punkbuster in all of our pc based multiplayer games”, thinking that I would smack my forehead and say “Well, THESE guys are on the ball! Guess everything is in order”. Well, sorry but that shit doesn’t hold water. Using punkbuster to stop cheating is like putting your faith in a quadriplegic chihuahua to guard your valuables.

I know this all sounds hopeless…How can we get past the cheaters and hackers and griefers to a point where we can enjoy our gameplay experience? Well, fortunately SOME companies out there are doing something about it. Unfortunately, though, only one of them actually has the balls to talk about it.