ELI5: Why is cheating in online games seemingly so prevelant?

I’m surprised no one has mentioned this: it’s a numbers game. It only takes a small number of cheaters to reach a critical mass where everyone is encountering them all the time. If only 1% of all players are cheaters and you play games against 10 people in one day, your chance of playing against at least one cheater is about 9.6% on that day. Play 10 players per day for a month (30 days) and your chance of meeting at least one cheater goes up to 95%.

Now consider the effects that cheaters have on the rest of the population: if people get frustrated by cheaters often enough they’re more likely to quit the game. Over time, this can cause the number of non-cheaters to go down, increasing the chances of everyone playing against cheaters. If cheaters are now up to 2% of the population then your chances of meeting at least one in a day (assuming 10 opponents again) rise to 18%.

Conclusion: Over a long enough time span the population of cheaters rises to 100%.

Short answer: Because their motivation is to win!

I read something about this in the Book "Introduction to Game Design, Prototyping, and Development: From Concept to Playable Game With Unity and C#" by Jeremy Gibson a while ago, maybe that can explain this a bit.

Basically, every Player has some Intention or the "Player Intent" which is described by the Personality Types of Richard Bartle. For example, you have:

• The Achiever who seeks to get the highest score in the game and wants to dominate it
• The Explorer who seeks to find all the hidden places in the game and wants to understand the game
• The Socializer wants to play the game with friends and wants to understand other players
• The Killer who wants to provoke other players and wants to dominate them

And then you have two others that you will be encountering:

• The Cheater who only cares about winning and does not care about the integrity of the Game and they will bend or break the rules to win
• The Spoilsport who doesn't care about winning or about the game but rather will break the game to ruin the other player's experience

So, the motivation to "cheat" could either be that this player doesn't really care about the game, is able to get away with cheating and just wants to beat the game. According to Jeremy Gibson, a cheater might not cheat if they can win legitimately but I would argue that cheaters are usually not great players in the first place so the bar would be pretty low for them to "win legitimately".

As for the spoilsport, this is extremely hard to work against or prevent because the motivation isn't about the game anymore but other players, to make their experience miserable so that the spoilsport can gain satisfaction from it. Hence also the use of "don't feed the trolls".

With that being said, when you ask why someone would cheat, the question would rather be "What is their motivation" and the answer to that is "to win the game, at all costs". And, most of the time, they will get away with this because they apparently cannot be caught as quickly as they can still continue doing it, if there is any action against them at all.

Well, in some cultures, if you're not cheating to get ahead you're considered a sucker.

I did this when I was young. Sometimes annoying little assholes just wanna feel powerful

I’d imagine it’s mostly because of how many players there are. If only 1% of players cheat, and you run into 100 players in a typical session, you’ll likely see a cheater, and if 1,000,000 players are playing, then 10,000 cheaters are playing.

They get to feel like they're the best at something. They know they're cheating, but they lack enough self-awareness for that to be an issue for them. Alternatively, some people just want the technical challenge of figuring out how to cheat, and getting away with it.

Sportsmanship is dead, also some people who don't have much else going on in their lives base what little self esteem they have on being good at video games and are desperate to maintain the idea they have of themselves as winners.

Oooh! I was just talking about this with my wife, who I met gaming online. We've had the conversation with each other, and other people a lot, including cheaters.

So, most of the cheaters I've known tend to look at it as entertainment rather than competing. It isn't that they want to beat other people, and think cheats are an acceptable way to do that. It's usually that, regardless of their skill, they get bored with the slower pace of play, but still want to play.

I'm not saying it makes sense, or is acceptable, but that's the most common explanation I've heard.

The next most common is the jerks. They do it either to mess with people, or to "troll" people that the cheaters think are too serious, or too invested or too "tryhard", or whatever the excuse is. That kind of cheater does indeed wnat to ruin things for other people.

The next one that I've run into enough is the nerds that are just looking for ways to cheat as a hobby. They're the ones that end up developing cheat tools, whether or not they let others use them. It's about figuring out the game, its code, and how to manipulate it. Those players tend to stop using cheats once they've done what they wanted.

The other significant grouping I've run into are the ones that only cheat on PTW games, where they'll say that if you can pay your way to winning, the game is already a cheat. I actually agree with them, but I just refuse to play those games, even if they're otherwise very good. In theory, I would maybe cheat in those games if I knew for a fact everyone playing was cheating too.

I've actually done that once, but on a private server where nobody could play without an invite. It was actually kinda fun running an over powered character by virtue of a ton of free "pots" that would buff you in both pvp and pve play. Everyone was juiced up and one-hitting each other. Wouldn't be fun all the time, but the free pots were only on weekends, and outright unavailable any other time.

And, I will sometimes run cheats in single player games for the same reason; it gives a different play experience that's fun as long as you can turn it on and off.

But you'd be surprised how many people in all of those groupings will cheat if they think there's other cheaters, no matter if there's proof or not.

At the end of the day, I see cheats as essentially just mods for games. A cheat enables you to do something with the software that you couldn't before. If everyone has equal access to the mods and agrees at the outset, then who cares? But if you're the only one in the lobby cheating then you're probably a jerk who puts their enjoyment ahead of others'.

If you're playing by yourself, hack away. Enjoy yourself. You should be allowed to have the maximum amount of fun with your toy.

If you're playing with other people, especially against other people, it's super unsporting. Everyone should have a level playing field.

Gamers with disabilities opens up sort of a morally gray area. Like, if you only have one hand you'll have a hard time aiming and shooting at the same time. I could see why someone would be tempted to use an aimbot.

As far as why cheating seems so prevalent, I place the blame largely with the F2P model. Now, I'm not saying that people aren't cheating in other games. But if the consequences of getting banned for cheating is that you just have to make a new free account, then you could argue that there aren't really significant consequences to getting caught. There's money to be made by cheat vendors on massively popular games, so the free ones make sense to target because the costs are low.

Worth mentioning: just because you think someone is cheating doesn't necessarily mean they are. I've never cheated in a competitive game but I've been called a hacker by poor losers. If you're looking for a cheater, you'll likely confirm your biases and find one - whether or not someone was actually cheating.

People don't have the skill or don't want to put in the effort to do or get something so they cheat instead

Sometimes other people are cheating so they rage hack in response

And some people just like to make other people mad to laugh at them

Because they're online? Not everyone is playing the same game. There's the same cheating in offline games too, but that's not as visible.

I suppose nobody wants to be a loser but some people are pathological with it. I would imagine a typical scenario is some young guy has reached the limit of what he can achieve in a game and is still losing. They implement cheats for a while and then quit the game entirely because it still doesn't scratch the itch and now it's also become boring. Everyone loses.

Manipulating the game can be a lot of fun, more than the game itself. In a way, it kind of becomes like a higher level kind of game. When done appropriately and not ruining other people's fun, that is. I've had good fun on friend's private servers and giving their shit code a good stress test.

I have zero respect for those that just download cheats and use them to pass off as skilled and ruin the fun for others. It's like ethical hacking: do it with permission or at least be transparent about it.

There's game servers out there to play against other cheaters, and it can truly be hilariously broken and entertaining. I've also been quite fascinated by Minecraft servers like 2b2t where cheating is basically necessary to survive at all. The exploit content and drama that have come out of this server is bonkers. But everyone knows they're playing against cheaters, the fun is seeing how you can outcheat your opponents.

There's also the whole speedrunning community, the ways people have broken games wide open. Fascinating and very entertaining stuff. The skills you need to perform a lot of those glitches are insane and extremely challenging. Hours of grinding to get frame perfect glitches work, several times during a run. It's a whole new puzzle, with so many more variables.

Why would someone cheat on games like CS2, Apex, Valorant and the likes, that I don't know. Some people are really just kind of losers I guess. I personally don't see the appeal, I'd want to be famous for the cheats and not even compete with non-cheaters because that's just plain unethical and unfun. There's also a big difference between finding dupes in Minecraft vs an aimbot in a competitive shooter.

Yeah I don't get. I mean even single player games. As a kid I learned my lesson with wizmaker. Ruins the game. Ive used some since but it was like after a doom level before I hit the switch I would use the thing to show the whole map to get 100% complete. That was worth it but like infinite ammo or invulnerability would just make the game pointless.

I'd imagine it's easier to cheat at something if you're online. Makes things less personal and takes away any sort of direct confrontation.

Is it that prevalent? Seems like anti cheat works, at least I don't see much of it in the games I play. Are y'all seeing cheaters frequently? What games?

Most people being called out for cheaters are not cheaters.

Yeah, like the other person also mentioned Counter Strike has had a major cheating problem for two decades and it's still pretty bad today. Valorant is a very similar type of game: twitch shooter that needs fine motor skills and reaction time where one player can dominate an entire match. Valorant has a more intrusive anti-cheat and a lower ratio of cheaters but both game still have cheaters and cheats. People will pay large monthly fees for access to premium, not-yet-detected cheats to compete in competitive circuits.

What's distinct about twitch shooters is that the core gameplay is very simple (just click on everyone's head) but it can take thousands of hours to become really competitive at them. People who are not at the same level as their opponent may think they are cheating if they outskill them enough which leads to a feedback loop where new players feel like they need to cheat to be on equal footing because the other person HAS to be doing it too.

Players with a lot of hours can usually tell if someone is cheating with relatively high accuracy (except at very high skill levels where the cheaters are also incredibly good at the game) but newer players tend to consistently call cheats on players that are just better at the game. Competitive drive, lack of trust in other players playing fair and high skill ceilings all create the demand for cheats which in turn creates lucrative opportunities for cheat developers.

Ruining other people's fun is also another popular reason like you said but I would say most cheaters justify it to themselves in some way.

I hate cheating in general, however I do have a personal carve out…

Some single player games, like (yes I’m old) doom — I almost always play with a full load out IDDFA No one should be dropping a Space Marine with out full weapons and ammunition and armor.

But that’s it.

Anything else, the point is to learn and find all the stuff the designers want to to discover