Gaming
Esports
The five most obvious CS:GO hackers ever
Maybe these guys were trying to hide in plain sight? We hope so, anyway.
Cheating in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is nothing new. Pro players have been caught and punished multiple times and everyone has a wealth of options for cheating at their fingertips if they so wish – Valve’s anti-cheat software can’t catch everything. Sometimes cheaters manage to hide the fact that they have an unfair advantage, making it look like they are just making incredible plays – which makes seeing their accounts get banned in the middle of a tournament all the more awkward.
Others though... others don’t use quite the same amount of subtlety and show off their best cheats for all to see. Wall hacks, move speed increases, aimbots and being able to see extra information such as how much health your opponent has are all fairly common hacks and mostly easy to disguise. However some hacks, such as some of the ones seen below are impossible to hide, while others are clearly just examples of people who don’t care if they get banned.
Wall hacks aren’t exactly the most cutting-edge cheat out there, but in a way that’s what makes them so effective still. In its most simple form a wall hack, in CS:GO at least, will show the player an outline of the opponents, regardless of where they are on the map. This allows them to see an enemy’s exact position through a wall and aim accordingly. For this reason also they are relatively easy to hide: providing you don’t look directly at players through walls or try to wall bang them they can be difficult to spot.
However the player, Susanne, in the video above makes no attempt whatsoever to hide the fact he or she is using a wall hack. Their obvious aiming at enemies directly through walls and constant ambushes of those in decent hiding spots give the cheat away instantly. If they were trying to conceal the hack they were laughably bad at it.
This video also proves that just because you have a cheat, that doesn’t instantly make you a Counter-Strike god. The first clip in the video is shockingly poor play for any level of player above total noob and across the video shots that should be taken are missed. The less said about the grenades the better.
This second video sees EnvyUs player Nathan 'NBK' Schmitt come up against a serious cheater while streaming. The cheat that he encounters is seemingly using an aimbot and auto trigger to give him guaranteed headshots whenever an enemy enters the same area as him. The aimbot portion will automatically target the enemy and the auto trigger will shoot the bullet whenever there is a shot that will hit the opponent, sometimes even when they are not visible, resulting in occasional wall bangs. While using a cheat such as this is great for racking up the kills, it is also immediately obvious, and akin to changing your profile name to “PLEASE_BAN_ME”.
Here’s the thing though: there is a small silver lining to being annihilated by an artificial intelligence in CS:GO. NBK himself manages to sum the cheat up quite well by saying “he just walked in, didn’t see anyone, four kills.” However the more interesting discussion comes when he mentions how you can actually learn a few things when playing against cheats, such as discovering new walls that can be shot through.
At first it seems the player called Real in the video above is using some fairly hardcore but not exactly revolutionary cheats. He or she clearly uses an aimbot similar to the previous one, and has treated themselves to a boosted move speed. But at the 2:00 mark Real activates another cheat that constantly changes their profile name. The names that are used are those of the other players in the lobby and the name changes multiple times per second.
The players who are playing against the cheater ask if this will have an effect on Overwatch (the community led anti-cheat system in CS:GO) or their accounts, but decide it won’t. If this is indeed true (as we can best tell, it is) then the sole purpose of this cheat is just to irritate the other players in the game, and it sure does a good job with the constant clicking sounds.
This hacker’s arsenal also appears to feature a fake lag hack that while not instantly obvious to anyone watching, is pointed out by one of the players. Around the 5:30 mark you can see the cheat stopping midair and not taking damage unless shot in the backside, which ultimately leads to his death and the discovery that another account is being boosted thanks to the hacker.
Here we get to see an aimbot hack from the perspective of the hacker and boy does it look impressive. For the aimbot portion of the hack the player doesn’t even have to be looking directly at any of the players: the system just identifies where they are and sends a stream of bullets straight towards their head regardless of what lies in the way. The system also has the ability to target different enemies at what seems like the same time, but it is much more likely that the target will change in a matter of milliseconds, resulting in the entire team dying in moments.
The other key portion of the hack is the teleportation feature that instantly places the hacker near the opposite spawn point once the round starts. This guarantees the hacker all the kills in the round as the enemies don’t have time to run away while those on the hackers team don’t have time to make it anywhere near the opposition before they are all dead. Real classy.
While the previous cheat didn’t look directly at the enemies in order to unleash a shower of bullets over them, they did at least position the camera in a way that looked like one chance wall bang would have been possible. This cheat however clearly finds that too much effort and just stares at the ground for the entire match, apart from when they randomly decide to throw a grenade or two.
The aimbot used here is similar to the previous one, although the use of a pistol highlights what is most likely a fire rate increase. The hacker ends up just bunny hopping across the map while fixated on the ground and meets the enemy team before most of them have a chance to get out of the way. It takes a lot of guts to cheat this blatantly – we hope the player enjoys paying for another copy of Global Offensive after he’s nursed his wounds from being hit with the banhammer.
