There were a lot of accused cheaters, and I vouched for people who were obviously more skilled than cheating. My brother even got banned once.

And why? Skilled gameplay can be undistinguishable from cheating. My brother started “flick-aiming” (I followed suit) - the logic is that it’s easier to track something when everything else isn’t moving (imagine how much easier it would be if you could aim without turning your “head”) and without compensating for mouse lag [1]. Guess what? It looks like aimbotting.

I make a few assumptions when looking for cheaters:
1. Cheaters can’t move (this also makes them easy to kill)
2. Cheaters don’t have tactics.

So if a guy kills 8/10 Ts in de_rats (it looks very impressive), he’s probably not cheating. It’s not actually that difficult if you’re good and a little lucky - everyone else is probably dead - and is probably the easier way to come out top. The sitting duck with impressive aim is probably cheating.

[1] I lament my camera’s lack of a proper viewfinder when I do a high-speed burst at 10x zoom and am completely unable to keep it pointing in the right direction. It’s obvious why: the image processing pipeline is about 0.4s long, and eventually I’m compensating for something I’ve already compensated for. The image stabiliser results in the same sort of effect, and I suspect that it’s non-negligible even at 50 fps (PAL [2]).

[2] Yes, PAL is 50 FPS - the F that matters, anyway. It’s a pity that most movie players (and, presumably, some encoders) deinterlace into p25 and not p50; motion is obviously more jerky even at 30 fps, and being able to track people move is what it’s all about [3].

[3] Cops ought to crack down on people with flashing bike lights. I can see you’re there, but I have no idea where you are or where you’re going - it’s like playing a game at 4 fps [4], but with lots of black between each frame. They used to pay people to do this full-time with RADAR blips.

[4] I was better with the shock rifle at 10 fps (320×240) than I was on a better computer (more like 30) . This contradicts everything I’ve said above, which is puzzling.

I cant really speculate on gamers perceived worries regarding cheats, but its common sense that non public - privately coded cheats stand less chance of being detected by skilled player/cheater and are thus more feared by gamers than your average publically released “hack” - regardless of exploit type/technique

Lob me a mail if you want to talk about this further offline.

Glad you found my article interesting. I’m a bit uncertain what you refer to when you say “your theory holds little sway”, maybe you could elaborate? Do you mean that while the kill cam may assure the average player that someone is not cheating, it does little to reassure a competitive, skilled player, who may be aware of cheating methods which are far more subtle. If so, I certainly agree with you, and I was never trying to argue that the kill cam had much impact on determining the real truth of cheating, just on helping reduce the perception of cheating.

The name of your website — xraygaming — reminds me again of how much the ability to see enemies through walls dominates the typical player’s perception of the activities done by a cheat. And ironically there are so many other ways to achieve this information gain which do not involve xray vision … voice communication from teammates (alive or dead), behavioural profiling (you study your enemy and can predict where they will be), sound cues (as you point out yourself above)… the list goes on.

And worst of all, xray vision (or the ability to locate enemies beyond your field of view) is the one class of hack which can be made completely undetectable. I hope to be publishing some results on this blog shortly of my own studies on passive analysis of the packet streams from tactical shooters, to consider what sorts of cheating can be performed whilst being guaranteed undetectable (i.e. not even running on the same PC as the game).

So what sort of cheat/hack/exploit do you believe is most worried about in the perception of the 1% of gamers who might consider themselves skilled competitive gamers? (this may not be the same as the actual most common cheat used by the 0.1% of gamers who do cheat)

Mike.

At a higher skilled competitive level however, when players use comms software such as Ventrilo, or make reflex shots, or little or no cursor movement shots with an aimbot, in a world where even a slight competitve edge can make a world of difference, then your theory holds little sway unfortunately. Also the use of sound in CoD4 is a great aid in wallbanging.

The kill cam is an interesting concept, but at a higher level provides very little indication of hacking.

bl!nder

http://www.xraygaming.com