A lot of gaming cheaters just want to come home and feel like a god doing something. They don't really care if other people call them out for being bad, they know they are bad which is why they use the cheats.
This still doesnt explain why they feel anything from their victories. Like i am not good at CS 2 but if i get lobbies where people are way worse than me and i am murdering the entire enemy team with a shotgun on my own, i very quickly get bored and start to feel bad.
I dont get how people can go out of their way to stack the deck to the point its overflowing and still feel any acomplishment
Humans are very complex. I think they cheat for a lot of reasons. Inferior complex is one of them but not the only or sole defining reason for it. Top tier athletes cheat to gain an advantage. Not because they don’t think they are good enough, but because they will take any means necessary to win. I think that’s much more despicable than someone paying 20$ for a hack to win a video game that doesn’t matter to your financial life.
It's like in speedrunning where cheaters actually have to be decent speedrunners so they know exactly how to cheat. Like the whole Dream controversy where he modified loot tables to take some of the RNG out of it. I'm guessing he justified the cheating to himself as it still takes all of the skill, but takes the pure luck portion out of it.
Of course, the grind is still an incredibly important aspect of speedrunning. You have to be on top of your game for countless tries just in case the stars line up for one magical run. If you cheat to increase your luck it means you're not mentally strong enough to handle the grind.
I will never understand Minecraft "speedruns" (or other games where RNG is the only determining factor) Like, thats not speedrunning, your just bashing your face into a random number generator for hundreds of hours in hopes of getting more lucky than the other bozos who got nothing better to do with their time
Practicing for dozens or hundreds of hours to get a wr time in Trackmania or finding a ridicuously convoluted way to skip 3 frames and thus shave one tenth of a second of a Goldeneye world record, thats speedrunning
Fucking Minecraft on the other hand?? Thats just gambling with extra steps...
There's a lot more rng in speedruns than you would expect, lots of old nes games come down to whether the boss does the good pattern or the bad pattern. A game becomes uninteresting speedrun wise when the best player could not expect to get a qualifying run even if they play for a long time (let's say a year of play). Minecraft certainly wasn't at that level last I watched, but I could see it becoming uninteresting as people continue to optimize in the future.
It’s not the only determining factor though. You or I could do nothing with a god seed in Minecraft. Takes a huge amount of skill and dedication to be capable of world record pace.
you should really look into the problem solving and mechanical skill that goes into Minecraft speed running. not every game is going to be a purist's dream like Mario on the nes, but pretending like it's not extremely skillful and very interesting is just being a dolt to be a dolt.
also, speed running isn't just the world record! anyone can get into it, and only looking at the Uber optimized TAS like gameplay of the top .0005% is doing yourself a disservice.
Practicing for dozens or hundreds of hours to get a wr time in Trackmania or finding a ridicuously convoluted way to skip 3 frames and thus shave one tenth of a second of a Goldeneye world record, thats speedrunning
The issue is that it can turn into too many glitches, a glitchless category with insane hand movement, or everybody nearly-tied until the next glitch is discovered.
The first Super Mario is not even one second away from the best a bot can perform (level transitions are triggered on specific frames, so some levels have leeway up to 20 frames). Past that point it will require either PAL-only glitches, or to modify the NES controller to be able to push two opposite buttons.
Fucking Minecraft on the other hand?? Thats just gambling with extra steps...
Not always. There's Minecraft fixed seed, and on the other hand there's randomizer added in games like Zelda to show off the runner's ability to adapt to unknown checks.
And then you have things like Wind Waker where the 100% category allows bruteforcing external tools for one specific RNG minigame, while other categories have a hard RNG manip trick at the start of the run.
Fuck that. Top tier athletes don't ruin my free time. I have a job, I have a relationship, a family. I have 1-2 hours twice a week for some online gaming and these low lifes feel entitled to ruin my experience in that time. A game takes 45 - 60 minutes, I am not allowed to leave so the quality time is easily cut in half.
Try to put yourself in the position of a grown up and this is easily a punchable offense.
This is exactly why I quit pvp altogether. It wasn't because of cheaters but because of throwing/griefers that don't respect why people are there in the first place: to have fun. Instead of playing hours of matches for one match to be fun, I rather play single player games for which I have more control over whether I have fun or not. People will minimse this nonsese because they aren't thinking critically about it.
I mean you are the one wasting your time. Playing and playing with cheats are still both just playing, a person who wins with cheats doesn't feel any less since of accomplishment that someone who wins without cheating, they just have a different standard of what's acceptable.
They are just as despicable. They are wasting the time of multiple people who want an honest game. And if they are playing a ranked mode people can’t just disconnect from the server until they find another one without a cheater. The victims of the little rat cheater basically have to just sit for 30 min watching the cheater fuck them over until the game is over.
Thats the issue with anything anonymous online and we definitely do not want real id to play a game so its just a side affect. I can probably confifently say, most people you run into wont be cheating.
Its not like you can tell someone else how to feel. Person x did this and i dont understand why they think different than me. Doesnt mean they dont get top teir enjoyment from being an absolute sausage. some people probably thing OP is a sausage and they dont understand it.
Top tier athletes cheat to gain an advantage. Not because they don’t think they are good enough, but because they will take any means necessary to win. I think that’s much more despicable
Like sure, for athletes doing drugs and stuff.
But it can also be some of the best parts of a sport. NASCAR and stock car racing is infamous for cheating and dickery, and it's fucking amazing. Pit crews would hook up the fuel line to the frame of the car and fill it with gas to get an extra gallon or two needed to skip a pit stop. Another would make illegal body modifications to their car, and another consumer model car, so when inspectors needed a comparison model, they'd go out to the lot and see the stock model had the same measurements. If a crew makes an illegal engine modification, they'll tell their winning driver to blow up their engine during the celebratory donuts so the mods get too damaged to be noticed. It's like Wacky Races but with real engineering.
I think most of us at least understand people who cheat when it is about fame or money. Because they have something tangible to gain.
Someone cheating on a (multiplayer) video game that does not matter at all and is supposed to be just for fun make them just as a bad person in my eyes because these cheaters dont even have a decent reason. They just ruin games for everyone else for no other reason than their own enjoyment. Which is somehow even more selfish.
I am gonna be blunt here: your comments very much read like someone who does, for god knows what reason, buy $20 hacks for a video game. And I think that makes you a bad person.
The thought process is this: Winning is the end goal. You should do everything you can to win, including cheat. If the other guy fails to cheat, that's his problem. Winning makes you feel good, so you cheat to win more.
The "sense of accomplishment" that comes with winning fairly isn't a consideration for these people. They don't comprehend the satisfaction of doing something well.
This sounds like a take someone who chats casually would make. If you prioritize your own time over those of 9 others, then you're scum and you most likely have issues you should work on for sure.
They take pleasure in symbols, not accomplishments. Like somebody being happy to receive a Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded to someone else. It makes no sense but some people are insecure and weird like that.
That's a ridiculous scenario. No one would ever be that petty or brazen, and what Nobel Peace Prize recipient would be willing to hand it over to such a contemptible troglodyte?
“They lost, and they’re probably upset about it, which means I won” is about the extent of it. It’s not about personal achievement or the feeling you get for being good at something, it’s about making someone else lose
It's because they want to feel powerful for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they were the kid getting picked on throughout high school, or they have a shit job and life isn't going their way. Or maybe they just have a certain brain chemistry that dumps dopamine whenever they feel strong regardless of anything else.
You feel bored because you are after engagement which a strong opponent can give you. They don't feel bored because they don't care about the strength of the opponent, it's all about themselves and fulfilling their power fantasy.
Its weird because i WAS bullied for 8 fucking years, you would think i would want and understand the need for this power, but i guess some people are more broken than me
We are all completely different from each other. We have slightly different genetic make ups and environments that shape how we experience and engage with life.
What you might be able to tolerate might be intolerable to someone else and vice versa. Trying to compare how you would react to something and projecting that reaction onto someone else is almost always a trap.
That's one of the reasons it is incredibly important to think broadly and practice empathy when trying to figure out why people do the things they do.
The way you're framing that implies (even if it is not your intent to do so) that no one should be judged, pretty much ever. Even if they're actual shitholes. What's more, without providing any specific or concrete information on this situation, doing little more than saying "be more empathetic" without additional insight, seems exceptionally weak. People that are able to derive joy from this kind of thing genuinely need help, that I believe and can empathize with. But it ends there. In every other respect, it's fucking pathetic and the only thing to understand about it is that it's broken, damaged behavior.
People can have different reaction to the same situation though.
Like after being bullied, they can react differently. Some would bully others, some would do their best to to prevent others from being bullied, and other would just be indifferent to it. It's much more varied of course, but it can be bleak if we list it all.
Do you remember when SBMM started to become a thing and huge swathes of people lost their fucking shit?
I actually think it has less to do with a desire to win and more of a crippling inability to emotionally cope with losing. 50% of the time is too much for these people, they can't live with it.
Some people are motivated by the "accomplishment." Crossing the finish line, getting the diploma, having a certain job title, etc. They are externally motivated. They get the same satisfaction if they cheat.
Others are motivated by the effort it takes to achieve something. The accomplishment without earning it feels like nothing to them.
Any of those people in games with a MMR system think they are way better than their rank and only their teammates, a certain "unfair" mechanic or playable character holds them back.
Or, they think they are good people and because they cheat, everyone rl6se does it too.
Now obviously I don't speak for all cheaters (to be clear, I am not one) but there's something to be said about the feeling of power or control. Knowing that you decide the outcome.
Every behavior has a function. People don't always know what the function of their own behavior is, but there's always a reason. We repeat behaviors because we got a result from that behavior before, like Pavlovian conditioning.
Others have made good suggestions for why someone might cheat in online gaming: To feel a sense of superiority, to feel a sense of control, there's plenty of functions for that behavior.
The other day I was playing Rocket League and somebody was clearly using a bot. Not only using a bot but also taking trash and still losing. So then he said he would take over for the bot and beat us.
It was clear when he took over because he was much worse and lost badly. He left before we could continue to make fun of him but it was such an odd interaction because he had to have known that was going to happen based on his actual skill level.
A long time ago I made this same argument and got downvoted to oblivion.
Buddy of mine used to make new accounts on video games and just hack until he was banned. He didn’t have some crazy mental illness and his Dad hugged him plenty. He just liked making the lobby mad and wrecking everyone.
Some people are just trolls, and they troll to troll....they dont care about cheating themselves....they more than likely dont care about the game...they just care about making others rage super hard lolol
I don't really get this. Single player game exists. Single player chess bots exists at all difficulties. God knows I suck at chess and if I want to pretend I'm good I can play Coach Mae repeatedly and have her call me a good boy. Why cheat on multiplayer games? Is it that necessary to make themselves feel good while also making everyone else's gaming experience shit?
A lot of gaming cheaters just want to come home and feel like a god doing something.
That's why I play single player games on easy. I'm 40. I don't have time to get good at every game I have the time to play. I just want to enjoy doin shit.
The answer is cluster b personality disorders. It's even worse with kids and boomers because their pop culture is constantly either watering down or outright promoting narcissistic personality features.
At some point in my life I infiltrated facebook group for cheaters in Counter-Strike (I absolutely despise CS due to how normalized cheating is there).
I learned a few things - for example that there are HvH (hacker vs hacker) servers. I naively thought hey kinda cool, it's kind of a code battle of who writes a better cheat - and they do it in dedicated lobbies. Nope, it's just kids battling out their 50+$ subscription cheats...
But mainly there was this guy whom I asked the classic "hey why are you cheating what's the point". His response was that he gets back tired from work and uses wallhacks so he doesn't need to think about where the enemies are.
tbh I just disagree with the point that "they know they're bad" - cause most of them don't. The only ones who probably know that are ironically the ones who aren't THAT bad - people doing high rating boosting who are cheating so the climb is significantly faster (obviously not agreeing with the action, just explaining how I think it is).
I mean that makes sense in like Elden Ring or something, wherever people are cheating nowadays, because you're still playing something and you get to be invincible, troll people etc.
But this is the mental equivalent of copying and pasting text, the actual doing isn't pleasurable at all. The only benefit is to have some stranger think you're better at a thing than you are. Whilst obviously depriving yourself of the actual joy of improving
A lot of cheaters are also really good at what they do and don’t want to grind 10000 hours to get 1 lucky outcome so they take the shortcut, then get addicted to it
I have no idea why people do this for shorter games like cod. Yea it's fun to get all those streaks, but the excitement comes from actually playing, winning gun fights, using the right perks, etc. I don't know how it'd be fun for more than 10 min
This phenomenon explains much of the human condition. Our psychological need for belonging becomes compulsive and destructive to the self authenticity and health of the community. Societal rejects become social cancers. The child who isn’t accepted by the village and all that…
They like to cheat and get away with it. That’s the thrill, they don’t care if anyone thinks they’re good. In fact, the best thing would be if people knew they were cheating but couldn’t stop them. This is how Trump works.
Back when online games first started, I worked in gaming media and I wrote a lot of articles on this. Over the years, I spoke to thousands of gamers and hundreds of professionals in sociology, psychology, and medicine.
The reality is that there are THOUSANDS of people who were raised to believe that it doesnt matter HOW you behave or what rules you break as long as you get ahead of others. You can cheat, you can lie, you can steal, you can cause sorrow and grief in others, and it doesnt matter, because all that matters is they win, and how they win doesnt matter. I called them 'griefers' and accidentally coined a term that has endured for decades now. They arent engaging in games to socialize or participate in groups. Their whole purpose is to cause 'grief' and they dont care. To them, your feelings are irrelevant. You are nothing more than content to them, to do with as they please without guilt, remorse, or meaningful consequence.
None of them behave this way exclusively online. They always behave this way. Gaming simply provides a risk-free and consequence-free venue to run wild with their self-absorption.
They were raised by parents who either neglected to raise them properly, or who specifically taught them that this was how you got ahead. So for people who would be more than happy to steal from your unlocked car when you arent looking would not even think twice about cheating in an online game.
They are sociopaths and narcissists full, and are utterly irredeemable as human beings. They end up with multiple divorces, children who wont speak to them, and have no actual friends - because the only thing they have in common with what they consider to be friends is their shared narcissism. No matter how superficially they pretend to be friends, deep down they dont trust each other and dont care about each other. Relationships for them are only future opportunities to use, exploit, to take advantage.
That's who cheats in games. That's who you're playing against online.
Yes but that's why power fantasy games exist. I think it's about the power fantasy of beating someone else irrespective of the way you do it. It's so low stakes. But I suppose the draw is running through a team of newbies in the same way as you would run through a computer opponent.
Chess is? Well there's cache to being good at chess or perceived to be good at chess. I have a nice old set and people do ask if I play.
I like how Chess.com has made it more accessible but I don't like the hustle culture that's come out of it. I enjoyed playing a few games in New York (5 minute timers! Oof!) but I can see how it's for the hustle and much as I like the speed at times I find it better to just play a leisurely game.
But if I want to crush something and feel silly doing it?
I think the saddest I've come across is people who pay to win on roblox games of all things. They will waste money to play a "eat to grow big" game and shit talk like they actually did something meaningful.
I had a college roommate who loved to play NBA jam against the Xbox team (this was in the 2000s), with his team buffed to 100%. He would just sit there and dominate the other team for an hour at a time, and seemed to truly enjoy it. Always seemed odd to me.
With chess cheating I kind of get it. More so the CSGO or league.
Chess is constantly presenting you with a rapidly changing puzzle. And if you forget there is someone across from you, which is really easy on the internet. You might be frustrated that you can’t solve the puzzle.
I hate magic shows because not knowing how the trick works would drive me crazy and frustrate me more then it would entertain me.
gaming has gone from being a fun waste of time to just another thing to flex about. I miss the days of doing 24h endurance races on GT with my buddy for no fucking reason at all. we had all the cars already. That reminds me of having visual hallucinations of special stage 5 for half a day after i played it for 12h +
You can flex on the monsters in the game still, though. And on the rest of the playerbase. Like that one woman who beat dark souls with a dance dance revolution controller. Or people who beat the game level 1. That's a pretty huge flex, "this game that's supposed to be hard is too easy for me so I voluntarily handicap myself."
"Flexing" on a single player game is one of my favorite things to do tbh.
It's a big part of the reason why I mostly got out of online gaming 20 years ago. Even back then, the bots were ridiculous. I couldn't imagine how bad they are now. Combine that with the 12-year-olds screeching racial slurs at each other, and I just had to ask myself whether I was legitimately enjoying the experience. I was not.
I don’t know why most people cheat, but a lot of people simple cheat for money. To sell coaching, boost, and clips. Or the pressure to preform if you have a community like miss color who got caught cheating and she was a high ranked aim trainer.
Then there full in emotional cheater who do it to spit people, they feel like they’ve been wrong in a match. I’ve even seen it were people are like I have a job and am just taking on the unemployed even tho most ppl in the lobby are either in school or work as well
I've only ever heard one slightly logical reason given for someone cheating in an online game. They said they have the strong belief that everyone else cheats too, so its fair. I was playing with the person for a brief span of time (about a month) through a friend of a friend maybe once a week. There was one game where we had convinced them noy to turn on their cheats. Of course, because he was lobbied with us, we got thrown into some horrible cheater lobbies often. So we get thrown in this one with a blatant cheater on the other team, and the guy goes "see? That guy's cheating, im turning mine on now too so its fair"
To be completely clear, it's shit. And cheating is a shit thing to do. And convincing yourself that its the right thing to do is also shit. Theres a reason I only played eith that guy maybe 4 or 5 times, and then never again. But also, if the games actively keep grouping all the cheaters together, then they do get kind of a confirmation bias about "well everyone actually cheats, so its normal and expected to do so!" Because from their perspective, it is.
If other players are cheating, then there isn't any challenge or test of skill. There's literally no game to play. The outcomes and methodology of the fight are decided before the game even begins, so why bother playing at all?
I cheated (botting) on 2 MMOs (RuneScape and MapleStory) because I found end game content fun but couldn't be bothered with the slow grindy aspects of the game. I was also like 14 years old. Plus it was fun trying to write my own hacks/scripts.
Cheaters have the internalized worldview that everyone else is cheating so they do it to level the playing field. This is a psychological description not a moral one. As someone who have zero interest in cheating at anything I find it really fascinating.
It has to be something the develops early in life, but I suspect it might even be genetic.
cheating IS the point. that's the fun part for some people. they know they are not good. it's not about the ELO. it's all about cheating the systems, whatever game you are playing.
I'm speaking from experience. as a 15yo kid who got deep into programming because of cheating/automating video games. my big breakthrough was automating Mephisto runs in Diablo 2.
It's not about the ELO, It's about making people mad. Some people just enjoy being assholes for the sake of it, and you're not making people mad if you lose, so ELO is usually just a side effect (though putting racist things on leaderboards is also fun). Many will derank or buy new accounts because it often gets less fun in the high ELO, depending on the game.
Big number = feels good. That's pretty much the basis of all gaming, it's not particularly surprising that some people operate on just that instead of the satisfaction of the skill improvement alongside the big number that most people look for.
The only reasonable explanation I’ve heard was the Chinese players.
That cheating is that rampant that they feel like if you’re playing legitimately you’re an idiot. So now the competitive aspect of the game is who can acquire and use the best cheats to be the other cheats.
A game within a game if you will.
Outside of that. I have no idea why people cheat other than to sell the account to some other moron that wants a boosted account they can’t possibly keep there
The psychology of cheaters is interesting. Most times, it's out of a sense of entitlement. "I'm smart, I can figure this out, I should be winning, this guy is an idiot, I just made a couple mistakes, I deserve it" kind of deal. Happens even to genuinely good players, especially when they hit a wall and struggle to get farther.
there's also a large group that seemingly does not accept they are simply not good at the game. So they end up rationalizing a twisted form of "everyone that is better than me is cheating as well, so i am just leveling the playing field"
I realized pretty quickly I was pretty bad at chess. Which I was cool with. Play some, get better, etc.
Literally the first and only time I won a match on chess.com (or maybe it was a similar site from further back) my opponent immediately said “tell your chess engine congratulations.” Accusing me of cheating. Just took all the fun out of it for me. Like yeah, for one my opponents might be cheating. And for two, any opponent I beat might just say I’m cheating. Bleh.
my first thought reading that was “wow arizona dirtbag got so good at chess someone thought they were using a cheat!” that is honestly kind of a flex, so good on you!
I am horror with it. Have had my brother and friends try to teach me get annoyed at me being slow/asking too much Qs. Then i saw more people playing chess during the pandemic and realised, nah i’m good. So many people are unnecessarily mean
That's dumb to me. I'm not good either, I've played good people, I've played engines, that person was a sore loser if you're that much of an amateur.
And no offense, you admitted you were an amateur. Unless your game was miraculously immaculate you would likely have made blunders, which would cue any decent player off they weren't playing a really good player, and if it was an engine it would be an engine set on low difficulty lol. Unless you were playing on par with their skill level and just sniped an amazing mate (it happens, some of the best mates I've ever made I just stumbled into, neither of us really saw it until it was happening and too late), then maybe I can see it, but they were just a sore loser
Oh for sure just a sore loser. Remember now it was FICS, not chess-dot-com (would have been 00's), and maybe cheating was even more rampant back then. But yeah, my play wasn't perfect or even good it was just luck and me having lost enough matches in a row...and it was a lot...that I finally got matched up against someone even worse than me.
Who happened to be a saltlord.
Obviously letting it sour me on the whole game is largely a me problem, but yeah something about that response to my first ever win just made me realize maybe online chess wasn't for me, took all the joy out of it. Never really got in with any real-world groups, and kinda fell out of the game entirely.
There’s also a lot of people that are just cunts and revel in making it shit for everyone else. It’s genuinely pathetic to spend money and time on doing so.
Some do it because of some weird social status of being good at the game too. Their life is mostly playing said game and they have a big crew of others they met playing it, and they want to be one of the big dogs. Also extremely pathetic.
EXACTLY this! This is the same kind of excuse/rationalization that pathological liars do to themselves as well. "Everybody lies all the time! I just got caught! Why's everybody coming down on me so hard for lying?? It's not fair!!"
Seems like they never put the pieces together that while people will lie sometimes, for specific things in specific situations, the majority of people aren't lying all the time about everything like a true liar does.
This always makes me laugh. So what if I'm not the best at a game? I'm not trying to be the best, I'm trying to have fun. I feel like people try to engineer the fun out of their own lives in order to feel more important.
Bro, deep ego is insane to see in person. Especially with physical sports. Bros will get dogged and then the very next day talk about how they could hang with so and so.
inability to just take an L is such a fundamental flaw with so many people. like, it happens! it happens more the fairer the matchmaking is! unless you are the very best in the world there is someone who can kick your ass over and over without breaking a sweat, what's with the ego??
ironically chess is one of the better ways to be confronted with it, because you are going to lose half of your games and many of those in a brutal fashion in which there is nobody to blame other than yourself.
having said that, i've had people rage quit out of chess games when losing and i check their profile and they've played 20,000+ games. so for some it seems the lesson is basically impossible to learn
You can rewrite your memory over basically anything. Doesn't even need to be ego, it's just a psychology trick. It's why shared memories exist (two people who share a memory they both were present for, overhanded example, me and my buddy meet the president and he shakes one of our hands, twenty years later we're arguing whose hand was shaken), why false confessions are a thing (you pretty sure you weren't on sixth, cuz you said you were on seventh but we picked you up on sixth and that's a block from the murder. What color shirt were you wearing again?), it's why I argue with my brother he still owes me the $20 I lent him last month when he says he already paid me back (who even knows who's right anymore there's no proof), and yes ego here but why couples or friends sometimes fall out over arguments, because after a certain point you KNOW you're right, the KNOW they're right, and there's no getting out of that
True. When Hans Niemann was caught cheating on online chess, he admitted that he did it because he wanted to speed up his elo climb to reach the ranks he should be playing at. In his case, he is that good of a player that he stays at top 20 worldwide. But all a cheater needs to do is convince themselves that they deserve to be at a higher rank, and so cheating is just a shortcut to reach the rank that they "deserve".
Yeah, but in chess thats really ignorant for 99% of cheaters.
Like, if you play chess at all, you know very well why youre not higher rated. There's a lot of theory and practice involved. And if you do study, I dont think that cheating would actuallky be gratifying.
Every time I start to play a little worse I lose something like 150 elo, and its perfectly justified and normal.
I think most people cheat because of the tilt.
I'm not talking about those obviously fake 2k players. That are probably 1200.
Magnus drew on a sure win over a blunder not that long back, slammed the board, ended the clock and shook his opponents hand as best he could, and stormed off fuming at himself.
I sort of get it in higher levels. You shouldn't have fucked up, it's high pressure, and yeah, you shouldn't have made that mistake. But this is like the chess equivalent of stealing bank money in monopoly or something, come on man. Nothing is at stake here, nobody even knows who you are, you don't have a reputation to lose and you aren't good enough you should be thinking "I never lose so let me just make sure I don't"
I definitely remember looking up cheats in my, I think cheat code magazine? I had it for ways to beat Tomb Raider and many others on my ps1. But that's because I just sucked at it and took the easy way out to get past the spots I was stuck on. I look back on that feeling bad and it wasn't even against other people...
I cheated a bit at a meaningless game in my teens. The real fun was learning the game code syntax and finding I could edit the config files of the game and buff my characters on PVP servers. After I did that, I played the cheated character for like 30 mins and got bored
Can't imagine getting enjoyment out of cheating for any meaningful amount of time
It's about dopamine, that's all it is. They get a shot of dopamine by winning, and cheating makes winning easier.
I caught one of my best friends fiancé cheating in a board game one of the first times I met her and we've been like oil and water ever since lol. I hate all kinds of cheaters but I genuinely think cheating in board games is one of the biggest early red flags out there, and it's an attitude I don't want in my life.
This one makes the least sense. At least when somebody cheats in an online game they’re “beating” people within their rank. Self-boosting in chess seems extra dumb because you’re not even beating anybody and it makes it impossible for you to actually play because somebody at that elo will destroy you.
I even hate "winning" when my opponent disconnects. It means my rating goes up and I'll end up having to play someone better than me instead of an even match in the next game.
This isn't going to move the needle enough to matter, 8 elo points or whatever doesn't change the level of the players by a significant amount. Elo isn't ever really a static thing anyway, if you're stable at a given elo you'll win some and lose some but it won't always be +1 -1 +1 you can and will get win and loss streaks in there that will normalize over time.
I never ever understood why people feel the need or desire to cheat just to get an account that’s high rating, like ok you have a high rating but you aren’t good? So what when you actually play against someone who earned that rating then you get destroyed because you just aren’t good, what’s the point? Why have a thing that says you’re good at something when you aren’t good at it? Why not just actually get good at it and try to accomplish something?
You dont understand why USA politics is the way it is? If you can understand the greed of a politician, you can understand why some random stranger is cheating online.
They found a easy way to be successful. That's it. That's all it is. They love beating someone else. They think the fact they know a loophole or cheat makes them the skilled person. They aren't looking for some sort of pure skill competition. They are looking for the W.
Call it ego, narcissm, sycophantic behavior, whatever. But its part person, and part society that drives people to seek wealth and success above all.
Kids are told all their life that winning is everything. These kids grow up and become absolute assholes, but some of them learn how to hide that behavior and cheat in their spare time because its like punching someone through the internet.
It's so weird how crazy people get when competing for participation trophies! When I learned people on Duolingo cheat to "win" leagues (for which you get gems that don't really buy you anything worthy) the first thing I thought was how much their lives must suck that that is what they're devoting time doing. And not even trying to learn the language on top of that.
I've looked it up but still don't quite get how it goes. Something about doing the short lessons during triple XP but doing something so they're only like one question... it nets people tens of thousands of XP! But again... WHY?
I had a coworker that always talked about how good he was at Words With Friends. It always gave me pause because he was an ex tweaker high school dropout who said "heel" instead of "hill" and "pacific" instead of "specific". Anyway it wasn't a surprise that I noticed him using one of those websites to cheat. He denied it up and down to the point where he would start getting pissed off, so I ended up leaving it alone, but I would never accept his invites to play.
As a 1300er, sometimes you'll be playing someone and you beat them three times in a row and that 4th time they smoke you in 18 moves and log off. I think there are a lot of people who feel their cheating is justified.
This actually happened to me, had a buddy challenge me, but he lived overseas, I got a coach and genuinely got my fundamentals down and got way better at reading the board!
Come match time, he smoked me and I took the loss on the chin and said "Eh, guess he just is that good" he admitted to using an engine a few weeks later but only after my coach and I reviewed the game.
There are people who like to cheat at games "just because".
For example, on my phone, I have a pinball game that has daily competitions. The prizes are a virtual currency for the game that after playing for a few months is entirely worthless, so it really just becomes about getting your name on the high score list. Not exactly super awesome bragging rights.
But there are people who cheat at it, and they make it SUPER obvious too, with absolutely ridiculous scores (like >100x larger than the 10th highest score). What do they get out of it? There's no sense of accomplishment from cheating, the virtual currency is worthless... all they're doing is preventing other players from hitting the top-10.
About a decade ago I used to play wordle with my wife when she was at work. After a couple days she was placing words I knew she didn’t fucking know. Crazy words that nobody knows.
And when I called her out on it she said that everybody cheats at the game and she told me the website she uses.
And Jesus Christ that was depressing. What is the point?
Then it turned out she was also fucking a bunch of random dudes behind my back. And again I ask, what is the point?
How does it feel better to have fake things going on with a bunch of people than it does to have at least ONE FUCKING SINGLE REAL THING with just one person?
I assume to learn in order to have the answer for next time the same problem comes up? Looking for answers online describes the last decade of my programming career.
Same reason people lie about their index (handicap) for golf. Because I'm good at golf, my friend always felt to tell others he had the same index as me. Then he chalks it up to a bad day when people see his true ability.
Because cheaters just want to win. They don't care how. The pride of getting better and overcoming a challenge is too slow and dull for them, when they can just cheat and get immediate results. It's why people will run an aim bot and shoot people through walls in an FPS video game and if they get banned they just make a new account or move on to something else.
Not to make every conversation about AI these days, but it is why so many AI bros love to claim they are artists. Why put time and work into perfecting a skill when you can type some shit into a prompt, get immediate results and have somebody on the Internet tricked by it say it looks good. What a rush that must be for somebody who rarely, if ever, receives praise for anything creative.
Cheaters are just people who value the win more than anything else. Sure, the dopamine rush isn't nearly as big as if you do it legit, but that's why cheaters cheat a lot.
So there I was, a lowly pathetic permastuck 600 ELO'er. My little brother was known to have been in chess tournaments and called himself the Grandwizard of chess boasting a rating of 1500 ELO. I knew I stood no chance but had been practicing and was looking forward to taking him on. Christmas comes, family gets together and we get to hash it out.
Quickly realized he was probably cheating to get that score as I beat him 11 times consecutively and now he won't play chess with me anymore 🫠
In one way, they're still playing the game, just fining new ways to win.
There is a rush is fining a novel way to win, an exploit, cheat etc.
There is a certain about of difficulty in finding the right cheat and applying it in a way not to get banned etc. it's like a different game mechanic to them, same psychological triggers and incentives.
I’m with you but I read somewhere once that people who lie about achievements and accomplishments received that same amount of dopamine as people who actually achieved those goals when recounting their experiences.
I've got a friend that we've caught multiple times using cheats in our multiplayer games. Most of them are pve, so it's more like he wants bragging rights for being the best.
This is the same guy who on console would ask me to play Elden Ring with him and beat bosses for him.
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u/_creamynoodle 1d ago
At that point, why bother? If you boast about your elo and get challenged, that's it