Tuesday 31 January 2012

OPINION: Cheating means nothing anymore

It seems getting caught using hacks or even owning them means very little these days. More and more players get caught by UAC but clans do little about it. Only on very rare occasions have clans actually taken action when one of their members gets listed as a cheater, and you get the feeling people don't take it serious anymore.

I was playing online on a ViP server today and a player called Jameen was on the suspects team. For anyone who doesn't know him, he was caught by UAC a month back - and the following screenshot shows you why:

Yet this same guy is now strolling around other servers, using tag {Elite}Jameen<Pro>, and admins are oblivious to his history.  Someone like him should be banned permanently from all servers, but he hasn't really been punished. Does this give a good message out to all those people who are tempted to use hacks in the future? Not really, especially if they know the consequences aren't too damaging.  

Another incident more recently occurred in a B4E SuR fun war, where {B4E}GLaDOS was caught by UAC. Now you can understand accepting a mistake when it wasn't totally clear he owned hacks, but when I saw the actual screenshots, I was shocked. This is a guy who has developed a banlist mod - he clearly knows the basics of a computer - so you're telling me he didn't know he had cheats in a folder named "SWAT 4 Hacks", on his bleeding desktop!?


Our team lodged a sponsorship appeal to most v1.0 english clans - but to be honest in the light of this, I think we should revoke our offer to {B4E}. It's funny because Dida, somebody who I get on with well, told me "if you get banned by GLaDOS, you must've been cheating!". It's all been a classic example of 'high power and reputation' ruling above all else. They have some nice players who are respected, but as a clan their reputation is in the red. Cheating, it seems, means nothing anymore.

~Observer