Cheater
From AssaultCube
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A cheater is someone who modifies the game in a way that alters, disrupts, or prevents normal gameplay, usually with the intent of giving himself or herself an advantage over other players. Someone who uses bugs, glitches, or exploits to their advantage are called exploiters or glitchers, although these are still considered by some players to be a form of cheating.
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How cheating works
There are currently two main techniques known to manipulate the game: modifying the source code and modifying memory. Modifying the source code and recompiling allows the cheater to implement their cheats directly into the game. There is at least one member of the community known to be running a modified server that gives the owner unfair advantages over other players.
The other way, memory modification, is accomplished by using an external tool to alter values in the computer's memory. Using such tools, the cheater is able to find out the memory position of some in-game variables (such as the score or health status of the player character) and is able to manipulate them.
The following are some common cheats used in AssaultCube:
- Invulnerability (also known as "god mode" or "invincibility")
- The cheater has frozen the memory state of his health points so his player character is invulnerable to damage. As of 1.0, this cheat is not possible.
- Extra health
- The health point state is set to an extremely high value (e.g. 30000). In this case, the player character can still be damaged but it's quite unlikely that he or she will die. Some cheaters modify their health enough only to give an advantage but to still allow them to be killed in order to avoid being caught cheating by other players. As of 1.0, this cheat is not possible.
- No clip
- The cheater has disabled the collision detection so his player character can pass through walls and objects. Therewith he can easily shoot people down or carry a flag undetected.
- Infinite ammo
- The cheater's ammunition is unlimited, also making reloading unnecessary. A harder-to-spot variation of this is just adding more ammunition to the total, or changing the magazine's capacity for less frequent reloads. As of 1.0, this cheat is not possible.
- Use of a weapon the game mode doesn't allow
- In some game modes - like one shot, one kill - the player character is limited in his weapons selection (here: sniper rifle and knife). So if there is someone suddenly using grenades then he has manipulated the weapons available for him to use.
- Speed cheat (also known as a "speed hack")
- The cheater's movement speed is increased or decreased by some amount.
- Score cheat
- The cheater changes the values of frags or captured flags. These are usually easy to spot because the cheater usually sets these to some absurd values that could never be achieved legitimately. The amount of deaths can also be changed.
Some other cheats are being able to change your weapon without respawning, always having the akimbo powerup or getting it at will, getting grenades at any time, or getting more of an item from its pickup (e.g. getting three grenades instead of two).
Cheat-look-alike game effects
New players might be confronted with some game (side) effects which look similar like a cheat. It's necessary to learn the difference to prevent a false accusation.
- Someone runs through a wall or on air
- This player has forgotten to use the getmap command and is not on the correct map. If everyone else is doing this, you're probably the one on the incorrect map. However, there is a cheat that allows players to swim through the air even when on the correct and unmodified map.
- One player can't damage other players but can still die
- This happens typically on a custom map in conjunction with a troubled getmap. Normally a reconnection to the server solves the problem.
- Someone is warping for a short moment
- The player has a connection problem or lags so the game data is not distributed to all clients and back at the same time.
- An already-killed player is still alive, killing his own killer and dies afterward
- The reason for this is identical to the warping problem discussed above.
Effects on the community
Due to the easy nature of cheating in AssaultCube, more and more server owners and clans are using modified servers with logging and blacklist functionality. There is also a blacklist thread in the official forum in which people can inform the community about a cheating player and request to ban him.
Some cheaters are using dynamic IP addresses which makes the ban of single IP addresses ineffective. Therefore, some clans like Tear you Down! have begun to block whole IP address ranges and ISPs, accepting the fact that some innocent players are also banned. Such decisions are sometimes misunderstood as a discriminatory or hostile act (see Brazilian ban incident).
Other effects are that some clans (or single members) accuse other clans of cheating (1, 2) on the forum.
