After reading a few forum posts and journals lately its clear that cheating is still seen as a problem for a lot of the ET community, but is there really anything we can do about it?

Lets be realistic after all, cheating isn't hard to do in any game - you just have to be able to google for an installer for your game and you're pretty much set, but why was it famously bad in CSS? Why is it a big problem in ET? - It's easy and risk free!

If you look at the amount of players of ET its plain that there is a massive amount of people who are outside the mainstream competition scene, casual players if you will - they also get annoyed by cheaters but when you can change server / call a referee it's not a huge problem..

In any game with a lot of players you're going to have cheaters, our problem is that with ET being free it's pretty much possible for anyone to try cheats and get away with it, but even if you are caught you don't stand to loose anything.

Some cheaters just use their hack to own lots of people for fun - usually public cheaters, they may not even bother with humanised aim or covering up use of ESP etc. Then there are those who want to use the cheat to play in matches on a good skill level, the people who take the time to set up the cheats to give them a nice skillboost but try to keep it to a level where they can get away with it, and it can be damn hard to catch them out if they have half a brain!

At some point in the last few years there was a noticeable amount of cheaters in the ET scene, maybe due to more people hacking in matches, maybe due to people getting clued up on hacks and becoming suspicious, but either way - this lead to our friendly inquisition, #cheatbusters.et

So now we have a group dedicating time to catching out the scum where they can get evidence to remove them from competition play, but.. Is there really any point?

Not that I'm trying to detract from the work the cheatbusters do, but once you have spent an hour getting the evidence together and presenting it to the community, how many of the busts lead to real bans?

Not one!

You simply can't ban anyone from online play in ET because it's easy to get a new guid (PB and ETPRO) and take up a new name, then only IP records are any use and many people have dynamic/shared addresses so this doesn't work in a large amount of cases, and anyway you have to prove it was the old cheater again first.

Quite simply in a free game with no reliable auth system - cheaters are free to come and go as they please.

SO, unless someone comes up with a system to ensure players identity which is reliable, its just a waste of our cheat busters own time for them to lead a witch hunt against people we can't prosecute properly, and what's more - busting all these players only goes to reduce the size of the competition scene as honest players loose faith in their eFriends and community!


Disclaimer, cheaters smell of fish