Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio and I love all things tech. And in the last episode on this topic, I talked about the early days of cheating in video games and the two really big subdivisions of cheats in games in the early to mid eras of video games. So, on the one hand, you have cheats that were inserted into games by developers. These were intentionally included, not at first. This was primarily to allow developers to navigate through games quickly during the development process in order to check code and make sure the game is working properly without having to worry about actually being, you know, an expert at the game yourself, Like you want to make sure that stuff was posible, but you might not want to have to manually try and make your way through a game in order to test the specific part you wanted to look at. So developers would often you know, create these codes that would let them cheat, essentially to to bypass a lot of the stuff in the game, and often they would leave these cheats in the finished game rather than go in and clear out all that code, essentially thinking well, who's going to find this anyway, and eventually that information made its way out to the game playing public. This later evolved into cheats that developers would include in order to actually reward players with easter eggs or funny effects. At that point, developers knew that gamers were going to find out about the cheats, and so they experimented a bit to broaden the results of inserting these cheats. Some games even created cheats that would make games harder for people as a way to challenge the most hardcore of players, like not to trick them. Although there were those two I remember, I want to say it was heretic that if you were playing Heretic and you put in a Doom cheat, it would actually make the game harder for you instead of easier, as kind of a uh high, I see what you're doing there. But anyway, in some cases it was more like, hey, your hardcore, let's see how hardcore you could be. Also, I should point out that we're primarily talking about single player experiences here, stuff that was played natively on a single machine, and it was the player versus the computer. The other major type of cheat that I talked about came courtesy of game enhancement devices like the game Genie or the game Shark. These devices took the peak and poke approach to cheating, meaning they would examine the code that was being run in the computer's memory, and they would identify which lines of code were responsible for specific outcomes in the game, and then intercept requests from the machine to the media and inject new code in its place. So, for example, a game system might look to see how many lives a player has at the start of a game, and the device replaces the standard three lives with lives or whatever. Game enhancement devices had their heyday in the nineties, but they had faded significantly by the mid two thousand's. Now, with single player games, cheats usually aren't that big a deal, at least not until things like the achievement systems were introduced by Xbox and the Trophy system from Sony, because the only person affected usually is the cheater themselves, and they might have a good reason to cheat. For example, some games just aren't easily accessible to people who might have disabilities, for example, and cheats could make it possible for those people to actually experience a game that otherwise they would never really be able to experience. That's a good thing. Or maybe you and joy a specific game, but you're only able to get to a certain point before it just becomes too difficult for you to progress any further, and you just want to see how the heart hold thing ends, and cheats can really help out in those cases too. But even if a person is just cheating in order to get a dopamine rush of feeling like, you know, like they're an unstoppable tank, typically the only person affected is the cheater, unless again we're talking about something that relates to things like achievement points or whatever. Uh. Also, if the person is participating in something like a high score competition, that's different too. It's another matter entirely so. One of the most famous instances of alleged cheating, or at the very least misrepresentation is the story of Billy Mitchell, who had set records for high scores in classic arcade games like pac Man and Donkey Kong, and organization called Twin Galaxies maintained leaderboards for high scores for those classic games, but in Twin Galaxies chose to strike Mitchell's score off the list. For Donkey Kong. So what was going on? Well, according to Twin Galaxies, upon investigating the video of Mitchell setting that Donkey Kong high score, they determined that he had not been using a standard Donkey Kong arcade game or an official Donkey Kong printed circuit board or PCB. You gotta remember these old arcade games, they were hard coded onto circuit boards, and so the allegation was that Mitchell was relying upon some sort of emulated version of the game, which therefore would not behave exactly like the classic arcade game. And the organization said that the transitions in the game in the video that Mitchell sent didn't match the official version of Donkey Kong, and therefore Mitchell's record could not count toward that because it wasn't on a standardized version of the arcade game. Mitchell disputed that, and the whole matter is currently wrapped up in a court case between Mitchell and Twin Galaxies. Now, I have no idea if Mitchell circumvented the rules of the competition. I do know that Twin Galaxies was careful not to actually refer to Mitchell as a cheater. Instead, they alleged that Mitchell failed to follow the official rules, and therefore a score doesn't count. I also find it somewhat amusing that this whole thing is going through the legal system, and that there have already been lawsuits and countersuits related to this matter. I guess my point is that there are folks who take these things very, very seriously, and I can understand why. I mean, if it turns out you're the best in the world, it's something it would probably chease you off if someone else topped your performance, but it turned out they had done so by breaking the rules in some way, or that your score was invalidated because someone was claiming that you it do it correctly. But for someone to go on and get credit for something without having put in the actual work to develop those skills, that would be really upsetting. If if that were the case now, I could confidently say I will never experience that, because I am at best mediocre at pretty much everything. I should also add that Twin Galaxies itself has something of a tarnished reputation among some gamers, who alleged that the organization has failed to apply any sort of rigor into investigating high score claims. There's another series of scores that were posted by a guy named Todd Rogers, the self proclaimed first professional gamer, and some of those scores were later disputed by other folks. For example, there was an incredible score for an old Atari game called Dragster. Uh. Dragster, as the name suggests, is a game in which the player controls a drag racing car. So there's this really quick countdown, and then the player has to ans hitting the accelerate button and switching gears against the cars tendency to have its engine blowout or to pop a wheelie and slow down. So your goal is to get to the finish line and as little time as possible. Way back in, Rogers posted an insane time of just five point five one seconds, which was a record that stood in Twin Galaxies books until two thousand eighteen. Now, the reason why I said it was an insane time is because, at least according to people who tried to look into this, the theoretical perfect score, if you were absolutely timed perfectly right, would be five point five second seven seconds, so five point five seven, whereas Rogers posted five point five one. They said, there's just no way to get a score that's better than five point five seven, and twin galaxies would subsequently strike Rogers posted score from their records and they banned him. And Rogers also held records that were likewise purged, including some that showed him scoring truly ludicrous high scores above like the second best showing like millions more in some cases, like there was one I want to say where his score was somewhere around fifteen million and second place was in the tens of thousands, which does seem to say something he is going on here if there's that big gap between second place and first place. But I don't know what the realities are here, whether Rogers cheated or not. Again, I don't know. But his story is another in the world of high score scandals, and there are other scandals in single player games. Let's switch gears a little bit to the world of speed runs, which you know kind of relates back to Dragster actually, now, in case you've never heard of that term, a speed run is when someone makes an attempt to complete a game at a record time, and you could argue that the Dragster case was kind of an early speed run in many ways, but these days we typically think of it as a way to post the fastest time to complete longer games. Usually, so like you, you look at a game like maybe Super Mario Brothers, and you say, well, what's the least amount of time it would take for me to complete this game. So speed runs all have their own subclassifications, and we'll go through a few of those really quickly. So there's something called a glitchless run. This means the player is completing the game as quickly as they can without relying upon glitches in that game. So a glitch in this case is something in the game that lets a player, you know, bypass stuff in a way that developers didn't intend. A common example is that you might discover in a map in a game world, if you stand in a particular spot and you do a particular action, you can pass through that part of the map and then navigate quickly to some other part of the map without having to travel that physical distance, and that this can save you huge amounts of time. That's one version of a glitch or exploit. Now, glitch less runs ideally avoid those kinds of exploits, although sometimes some types of exploits are allowed and others aren't. It gets a bit subjective then you've got any percent games that's any percent run it's typically a n Y and then the percent sign that means that you get to the conclusion of the game, but you don't necessarily complete the whole game, like you don't have to do say, all the side quests or whatever, all the optional you know, content, you can bypass that. You're just interested in going from the very beginning of the game and getting to the very end of the game as quickly as you possibly can. So this style of speed run can also rely heavily on exploits and glitches. Now you can do in any percent glitchless run, which means that you don't really rely on the glitches. You're still just trying to get to the end as fast as you possibly can. And if you watch these on YouTube, you might end up seeing a game that looks very different from a normal run through, right, Like, if there's any percent glitch run, uh, it can be that the game starts, you're like, yeah, I recognize this, and then immediately you're like, wait, what what happened? What did they do? And it could be pretty incredible. Then you have completion, which is what it sounds like a player has to try and complete every aspect of a game within the shortest amount of time possible. So for some games like Elder Scrolls five Skyrim, that would involve a ton of stock just because there's so much content in that game, and a speed run could still require several hours of play in order to actually complete everything. There are lots of other subcategories as well, including ones that are restricted to specific games. For example, in the Hitman series, you play as a hit Man who must eliminate specific targets, and these games are fairly open ended. They allow the player to don different disguises, come from different directions, use all sorts of various methods in order to eliminate targets. But maybe you're doing a specific type of speed run where you want to do suit only silent assassin. That means you never change disguise and you have to do it in a way where no one ever discovers any of the kills you make before you escape the level. Uh. It adds another level of challenge to it, and you're also doing it in the least amount of time you possibly can now. For years, speed runs were a niche within a niche within a niche, you might break a record, and you might end up submitting it and having it posted in a hard print magazine that no one other than other speed runners would ever pay attention to. But over the last several years, the speed run community has grown thanks to stuff like YouTube and twitch, gamers can post attempts at setting a speed run, either to beat their own personal best or maybe even to establish a new world record. And while speed runs don't typically have big rewards associated with them, at least not directly, someone who's known for speed running can end up accumulating a really large community of fans and they might be able to monetize through that. So there are speed runners who have Patreon pages, or they have YouTube channels or twitch a channels, or a combination of all three, and they can make money from their work. Well, the speed run community is incredibly competitive. There's always people looking to see if they can shave even a fraction of a second off a run, and there are no shortage of scandals in the speed run community, surrounding players who have used various tricks outside of the accepted ones in order to post speed run scores. And that kind of sounds a little bit of weird, right Like within speed running. It could be okay to leverage an exploit that allows you to get an unintended advantage in a game, as long as that exploit really already existed within the game, like if the developers had accidentally left something there, that would be okay. But it would be against the rules to say, alter a games code in some way to give you an advantage, to hack the game to change the game. That would be against the rules. So you can sort of cheat under certain circumstances, but you can't cheat in other's I guess let's talk about an example of a speed run cheat. A Minecraft player who uses the handled Dream, one of the most popular Minecraft streamers out there, completed a speed run and Minecraft in that broke records, And you might wonder how the heck you speed run a game like Minecraft if you're only kind of familiar with Minecraft. I mean, most people think of that as a crafting game that really doesn't have an end to it. Well, there is a quote unquote end to Minecraft, which involves confronting a monster called the nether Dragon and defeating it. But in order to even do that, you first have to craft some special items, and you do that using some really rare raw materials, and so speed runs hinge on how quickly you can accumulate those raw materials so that you can journey to the nether Dragon and then hopefully defeat it. Now, those rare items, their appearance depends upon r n G or random number generation. That is, there's a a certain percentage chance for those items to appear under certain circumstances, but it's not a guarantee. It's just a chance, and a random number generator, which is essentially the equivalent of rolling dice, determines if the item drops or not. So one of the items that Dream needed to complete the speed run had just a four point seven percent chance to drop under a specific set of circumstances. I'm not going to go into all the details. They're not important. Dream, however, was incredibly lucky, like unbelievably lucky, because ultimately Dreams you know, results were more like a fift drop return instead of four point seven. Now, that raised concerns that Dream was playing Minecraft on an altered or customized game that boosted the drop rate of those specific items, and that conclusion seemed pretty certain because the drop frequency was just way too high to be up to chance. It would be like winning the lottery three times in a row. But Dreams said that he wasn't aware that there was any sort of modified game, and that actually could be true. You see, Dream was playing on a shared server. Now, in Minecraft, there are two different ways you could play a game. You can play a local game which runs on your machine, like your PC, and this is a client side style of gaming. Everything's running on the client, that being your machine. If you install mods on your client based Minecraft game, well then the mods you install they will affect your client based gaming sessions. However, let's say you log into a shared Minecraft world, one that other people can log into as well. This is on a server, not on your client, not on your PC. So your client based mods would never apply to a server based game. Uh. You know, you could have modified your game all you want when you play privately on your computer, but when you play on the server, you're playing by the server rules. The only mods that could apply to the server would be server side modifications. So what Dream was saying was that the people who set up the game server that he played on had boosted the drop rates and he didn't know about it at the time, so it was still kind of an instance of cheating, but not necessarily intentional cheating. Well, when we come back, we'll talk about a few more famous instances of cheating in video games, but first, let's take this quick break. All right, let's talk about online games and cheating. You can pretty much bet that if a game games pop pularity, and if there's any sort of competition in that game, hackers will try to create tools that will change that game in some way, including ways that can give players certain advantages. UH. There are a lot of common examples of this. Uh, for example, in the first person or a third person shooter genres. There are some very common ones like aim bot and wall hacks and recoil elimination. So aim bot cheats are pretty self explanatory. These are cheats that assist players in locking onto an opponent to aim at someone. Some aim bots are less obvious than others, but if you've ever watched gameplay that showed someone just instantly locking onto opponents heads, even if those opponents are obscured by stuff like smoke or cover, or they're so far away that you can't even really see them on the screen, there's a good chance that an aim bot played a part in that. Now this does get a little muddy because we are now in the era of cross platform play, and this changes things. See, if you have a really skilled player who uses a keyboard and mouse to play first person shooters, they might refine their skills and be able to hit headshots way more frequently than your average player can, and they could just be relying on legit skills. They're they're just that good. It doesn't mean they've got to hit every single shot. But their precision that they have with a mouse, particularly when they've dialed in the mouse sensitivity to their preference, they can zero in on targets really accurately and quickly. But contrast that with someone who's playing the same video game but on a console, not on a PC, and they're using a game pad of some sort. Game pads typically are far less precise. Some games allow players to change controller sensitivity, but you're still left with the fact that you're using a pair of thumbsticks or maybe a thumbstick in a direction pad or whatever. It's just not going to give the player the same level of responsiveness and precision as a mouse would. And if the game supports cross platform play, in which console players and PC players can be matched up in the same match. That creates a skilled gap. You might have someone who's really good at console gaming and they're having trouble against you know, moderately skilled PC gamers. But it's not because the PC gamers are necessarily better at the game. It might be because their control scheme just natively gives them a slight advantage, and that's all it takes. To that end, a lot of console games include an aim assist feature, so it's kind of like driver assist with cars. The aim assist doesn't totally take over for players the way an aim bot program could. Instead, it helps dial in aim a little bit. So if you were direct your sites toward an opponent, the game assist might do the last five or ten percent to help you lock on for your shot, because otherwise your control mechanism of the game pad would put you at a disadvantage against people who are playing with mouse and keyboard. Now, I've actually followed some pro gamers who use controllers with certain FPS titles like Call of Duty war Zone, and I've seen some of those players get banned, and they weren't banned for well, they were banned for cheating, but it turned out they weren't cheating, and after an investigation, they had their accounts restored because it turned out, you know, they weren't relying on aim bots. Instead, they were just really skilled players, and their style of play also incorporated a little bit of aim assist because they were using a game pad, so they weren't cheating. They were pairing game systems with their skill level at to play at the top of their capability, and they were just really darn good. But there are cases in which it's no question that a player is using an aim bot, and this extends even to professional e sports level. In famous instance of this happened in two thousand eighteen in a counter Strike tournament. Counter Strike is a multiplayer shooter game in which you've got two teams of players competing against each other. It has its own fascinating history. I may have to do episodes about counter Strike at some point. It started off as a mod for Half Life way back in two thousand and people still compete in counter Strike tournaments to this day now. In one two thousand eighteen tournament, there was a player who used the handle Forsaken. He was performing at a level that was truly astounding. He was zeroing in on opponents, particularly with headshots, with an almost inhuman like precision. In fact, not not almost. The tournament admins stopped the play fairly early on in order to investigate Forsaken's PC because they thought something hinky was going on, and they found he was running an aim bought hack program that gave him the uncanny ability to lock onto opponents and wipe them out. Forsaken had named the files word e x E in his cheap folder kind of as a way to throw people off the scent of what he was doing. It did not work. He was caught anyway, and later the whole work e XC thing became a meme. You would hear streamers say stuff like, I guess I should have turned on work e x C after getting eliminated to that kind of thing. Anyway, four seconds team was disqualified as a result of that. Wall hacks are a little bit different. A wall hack is any sort of cheat that allows a player to see opponents, uh or maybe just other players, not just opponents, even if those players are otherwise obscured behind something that you would not be able to see through. So imagine that you're able to see if someone is on the other side of a wall, or on the other side of a hill, or right around a corner or whatever. Obviously that would give you a huge advantage. One of the giveaways that someone is using wall hacks is when they start doing what's called pre firing. That is, they start airing their weapon towards you before you're even in view, So they're firing at where you're going to be, but at least theoretically, there's no way they would have known that that's where you are going to be. So if someone starts firing down the hallway before you even come around the corner, that could be a case of them using wall hacks. Now, this is also not always clear cut. A lot of games incorporate stuff like three D audio, So if your opponent is just really observant and they have a really good pair of headphones, they might be able to hear that someone is coming down the hall and they anticipate you coming around the corner and they just start firing, and you know, it can look like they're cheating, but in reality, they're just relying upon information within the game. But a lot of these games also include the ability for players who have been eliminated to view a cam of their opponent, which is really useful. I mean, you might just use it in order to get you know, a better at a game, Like you can see what you did wrong because you're looking at it from your opponent's point of view. But you can also sometimes tell if someone is cheating. So let's say you're watching a deathcam after you've been eliminated, and you notice that the player was tracking you before they could even possibly see you, Like their radical is right where you were the whole time before you come around the corner. That pretty much tells you that that person is probably using a wall hack. And there's been some pretty notable cases in which players were seen to have relied on these kinds of hacks and they gave themselves away. Sometimes this pops up and streaming and again, streaming like e sports, can be a way to potentially make money by playing video games, so obviously there is something valuable at stake here. It's not just you know, bragging rights. Artificially boosting your bragging rights at a game. There can be real money involved. So there are streamers who gain a following because they seem to be amazing at certain games, and sometimes these streamers get exposed for using hacks, and sometimes they do it to themselves. In fact, this is true for all sorts of hack. Typically, the process for using hacks is, you know, whatever game you're playing, you go searching to see what kind of hack engines are available for that particular build of the game. There's some hack engines that cover multiple titles, and you would download that and install it on your machine. Sometimes they're freely distributed. Sometimes you actually have to pay to use those hacks. Sometimes it's a subscription service. So you install the hack on your machine and you run the hack at the same time as you're running your game, and the hack typically has a window that has a menu in it and allows you to choose which features you turn on and which ones you don't. The more you turn on, the more likely your activities are going to come across as hacking. Right Like if you if you said everything to on, it's gonna be pretty obvious that you are not playing in a normal way. So a lot of hackers are a lot of cheaters. Rather will only select certain ones under certain conditions in order to kind of screw below the radar and not get detected for for cheating and UH. The other important part is you want to make sure that you're only if you're streaming, you're only sending out the game view of what's going on, because you don't want to show people that you've got a hack engine running. But several times streamers have accidentally revealed that they were using hacks as they were playing. For example, if the streamers using wall hacks and they forget to send out the version of their stream that doesn't show the wall hack exposed players, that's dead giveaway. Viewers will see that indicators that should not be there are up in view and they'll know right away that that person is cheating. For that reason, most wall hacks include options that allow streamers to send out a feed there's a different view for audiences so that they don't see the outlined opponents. But you gotta remember to select that stuff first, and not everyone does UH. In other cases, streamers have acts the screen shared a screen that had their hack menu up. Some hacks for games include multiple options, like maybe you don't want to have aimbot on, but you do want to reduce the recoil for your guns so that you know once you walk onto someone and you start firing, you can keep your gun trained on them without worrying about the gun recoiling out of the way. Now, skilled gamers, they learn how each weapon in a game will handle. They will learn that recoil pattern so that they can counteract it with their own skill. So like if a machine gun tends to recoil so that moves up into the left, they will automatically control the gun and and move it sort of down into the right to counteract that tendency. Or you know, you could just install hacks and use a cheat code to do it for you. Well, there's been a few cases where players have done this and they've forgotten to hide it. For example, a streamer who used the handle Mr Gold's got caught when he was playing a first person shooter. It was it was Call of Duty war Zone, and he was running hacks at the time. He forgot to hide the hacks window before he started streaming, and soon his audience was clipping that stream and then sharing those clips on social media, and Mr Gold's ultimately received a ban from Twitch as a result. And that's a big deal when you're a pro gamer. I mean, that's where your money is coming. From and it's not like you're likely to land a sponsorship deal if your rep happens to be associated with cheating. Another example was with a streamer who used the handle miss q Jemini. She had been playing in a game of Counterstrike and revealed accidentally that she was using cheats. She activated the cheats in the middle of the stream. She was unaware that her stream could actually see it, and she tried to cover it up and explain it away, saying like, oh, this is why you don't give people access to your PC, but you know, she still had her channel banned as a result. Now, to counteract hacks, companies have created software designed to detect the presence of stuff like aim bots and that kind of thing, and some of them are client based, meaning that the software runs on your computer locally. Uh. The anti cheat software is usually bundled with the game itself, and it's kind of like anti virus software. It's typically looking for examples of well known identified cheat hacks and it blocks them from working or just doesn't allow you to even play the game and launch it at all. But there are also server side anti cheap programs. Fair Fight is an example of this, and as the name says. Server side anti cheap programs sit on the server you log into for online multiplayer games, so it's not on your PC, it's on the server that is hosting the game. So every gamer who logs into that server has the same anti cheat software that's scanning for examples of hacks. Both client and server side anti cheap programs are not perfect. Hackers are always looking for new ways to exploit a game and create advantages, and it's not like anti cheat software has some sort of magic way to stay up to date and know what's going on. Some games like war Zone, which you know, as I said, was as a variant of Call of Duty. It's a free to play version of it, they go through cycles in which cheaters will start to flood servers. It will just be rampant cheating in various ways, and then you'll see a big purge where thousands of accounts get banned and new anti cheat methods are put into place, and then the whole cycle slowly repeats itself. Now, clearly playing against cheaters is frustrating. It can lead to people quitting a game, so companies have a vested interest in cutting back on cheating, but sometimes that's just easier said than done. And of course there are other types of cheating that don't involve direct hacking either. We'll talk about those a bit more when we come back. Before the break I talked about there are types of cheating that don't involve hacking. Uh. This is just simple stuff. I'm talking about stuff like streams sniping. Uh. This is when you've got someone who's streaming their gameplay of a multiplayer game. Maybe it's a pro gamer, you know, and the fact that they're streaming live means other people can see what game they're playing, what server they're on, and where they might be within the game. So that means they could potentially jump into a game with that player and target them because they have more information about the streamer than the streamer has about them. So in a game like pub G, which begins with everyone deciding where on this massive game map they're going to start, this could be a really harmful tool for at least harmful to the streamer, because if people are watching the streamer and they know where the streamer is headed at the beginning of a match, they can try and head there too and potentially take the streamer out before they can get any momentum going, so that's stream sniping. But another common type of cheating is when cheaters are collaborating or teaming up in games that are meant for solo play. So this is particularly bad in games like pub G where you might be playing in solo mode, which is an everyone for themselves mode, so it's solo Battle Royale. You start off with like a hundred players and it comes down to the last surviving player. You're supposed to treat it like it's you against everybody else, But sometimes players will collude with one another and they'll work together to help eliminate opponents and thus reduce the risk of themselves losing until they get down to the last couple. That sort of thing is looked down upon. Usually it requires a moderator to look into it to actually see that that's what's going on, but it can result in moderators banning players if they find it. But let's talk about a few instances of how various people have dealt with cheaters in the past. One game that has a hefty online presence is Grand Theft Auto five, or g t A five as it is otherwise known. G T A five has been a real money maker for rock Star Games. The single player version pub in two thousand thirteen, but eight years later people are still pouring money into playing the online version, so they're using real world money to buy in game currency and then use that to purchase stuff within the game, arranging from real estate to submarines, to aircraft and all sorts of stuff. Well back in two thousand fifteen, a gamer with a handle plucks Are uploaded a video showing how he dealt with a particularly obnoxious hacker. The hacker, who was using the handle Zamma Rath, had turned on god mode, had a hack that was making this this character immune to damage. You could not kill this character. However, g T A five has rag doll physics, and as that name suggests, these physics make characters go limp or like a rag doll under certain conditions, which typically revolves around getting knocked down or you know, getting killed, So they flop around and players lose all control of the characters until that animation stops. So Plucks are heard about. This hacker got into an armored vehicle and tracked down the hacker who was blasting other players with a rocket launcher and then essentially just kept on running into the player and using explosives to activate rag Doll over and over again, so they he wasn't doing any damage to Zama Wrath. Because of that god mode, Zama Wrath was unhurt, but every single time an explosion or collision happened, it would make Zama Wath go into Doll mode rag Doll mode. So plucks Are just kept on doing that and trolled Zama Wrath over and over and over again until the hacker finally quit the game. What that kind of vigilante justice has its own sort of element of satisfaction, but obviously it's not a real solution to hackers. It just means that a troll kind of gets a little taste of their own medicine on occasion. Another example, and I've actually seen versions of this happen in person, is when a group of players will take it upon themselves to punish a cheap or even if it means they lose the game in the process. So there's a game that had a really big popular boost in twenty called Fall Guys. In this game, if you're not familiar with it, players assume the role of these cute little jellybean looking critters and they compete in a series of games as a Battle Royal Finish. So you start with a large number of players and each round that number gets whittled down until you have one winner. So the goal is to reach the end of the series of competitions and be the soul winner. And while the game isn't exactly a cutthroat style competition, you you still see cheaters on there on occasion. These are folks who have downloaded hacks to let them do stuff like float over a map. And since a lot of the competitions involved navigating obstacle courses, that means the characters have kind of a shortcut to the finish line. Well, some of the competitions and fall guys actually divide players up into temporary teams. So it one case, and this was a version that was captured on a stream by a player with a handle h so so S Game or TIOS game, who, by the way, was not the cheater, he was just capturing this The players had collectively decided that they had had enough of this hacker who had been just coasting through the earlier rounds. So after the cheater had blatantly been breaking the rules, it came down to a team based game in which the remaining players divided up into three teams, and the cheater was on the Red team, and the goal of this particular mini game was to collect eggs on a level and throw them into your team's collection point. Meanwhile other teams are trying to steal your eggs and protect their own eggs. Well, the other players in the Red team didn't want to see the cheater get any further in the game, so they worked against their own self interest and they helped the other two teams. They ended up grabbing their own eggs out of their collection point and chucking them out, And I meant everyone on the Red team got eliminated, but that also meant the hacker would not be able to go any further in that game. It was essentially a collective message of hey, stop trying to ruin this for other people to that hacker. Another famous example of a hacker getting pooned was someone who was going by the unlikely handle of Okay Savings Bank. They were playing the fighting game Teken, in which players can select from a roster of fighters and they compete against each other. So Tekens kind of in the same category of games as Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter. Okay Savings Bank was clearly up to no good because the fighter they were using was called double Kazumi. And here's the thing that that character was not a selectable character for multiplayer. You had to cheat to be able to use this character and multiplayer, so something was hanky. Anyway, Double Kazumi is a particularly powerful character, and so this this player was just breezing through the competition until by random chance, they paired against a guy named Jay men By, better known as the his pro gamer handle Knee. Knee is an incredibly skilled the Teken player like championship level tech in player, and it took a little bit of time for him to get his groove against you know, the hacker. But Knee totally schooled Okay Savings Bank to the point that the cheater actually quit midway through the match because it was clear that even with their unfair advantage, they just could not put up a fight against a truly skilled player. And uh, while we're talking about cheaters and hackers, we should also talk about scammers and thieves, because sometimes a cheater's worst enemy is a bad guy who is, you know, even badder than a cheater is so back in, some malware designers created a piece of malware called Balder b a L d R and one of the groups they were specifically targeting were video game cheaters. So the malware could all information from users and clading stuff like credit card info and passwords and that kind of stuff. So the designers paired this malware with a cheat engine, which was supposed to give you know, cheaters an edge in the game. Apex legends it included stuff like an aim bot and wall hacks and speed hacks and more. But the cheaters who downloaded and installed the cheat engine, we're also unknowingly installing the Balder malware on their computers and potentially losing their information and their money. Also, the the hacks software was a subscription based software, so they were paying to get robbed. So the malware designers had hit on a classic tactic. You target a population that's most likely to fall victim to your scheme. Now, typically I talk about this in terms of malware designers attacking really vulnerable populations, such as people who are looking to get a job. In fact, I got a phishing attempt an email that used this approach this morning. I'm not looking for a job, but all the blue I got an email directed to me saying, Hey, we found this perfect job for you. We just need you to fill out all these forms that will give us all your personal information. Um, it was a total scam. Well, people who are looking for a job are really eager to jump on an opportunity, and sometimes they might even do that if the opportunity seems to come out of nowhere and it's too good to be true. And that's a pretty nasty thing to see, right, It's it's mean to see malware designers go after people who are already presumably in a pretty rough position. However, when it comes to them targeting cheaters, it becomes a little harder to feel sympathy towards cheaters, right. Balder also popped up in other types of downloads, most notably in pirated copies of games, So in that case, the malware designers weren't targeting cheaters, they were targeting thieves, though of course the hackers themselves were also thieves. Also, I guess it's a good target to go for because it's far less likely that someone who is cheating or stealing is going to complain when they themselves get targeted by hackers because if you come forward, it means you also have to admit that you were engaged in questionable behavior yourself. So it's like blackmailing someone who's really doing something terrible. They're not likely to call you out on blackmailing because it would mean having to admit that they were doing the terrible thing in the first place. Same sort of thing, and you know, cheaters typically really hate coming forward even when they're caught out. It's pretty common to see cheaters deny or deflect or even attack in response to folks pointing out when something hinky is going on. And as we wrap up, I want to say something else. Do not cheat in multiplayer games. It just doesn't end well. You're more likely to get banned than anything else. Even if you're able to succeed in the short term. Over the long term, it's not likely to work out well for you. And moreover, if you're playing against me in anything, don't eat because you don't have to. Because I'm telling you, I love video games, but I am not good at them. I've had cheaters take me out in games. I think I mentioned pub G in the last episode because that was undeniably cheating. But seriously, that's just a waste of time for you. I mean, you could probably take me out on your own without much trouble. I've made it to the final two in pub G maybe three times. Every single time. It was not because I was wrecking shop. It was because I would play an entire match and I wouldn't run into anyone until the end, and then I would just, you know, fold over. When I finally came across somebody and I was like, oh wow, I made it all the way the second place, and I never saw anyone, including the last player who was clearly skilled. So just give me a fighting chance and then you can riddle me with bullets. All right. That wraps up these episodes about cheating in video games. Obviously it goes well beyond that. They're some other notable examples that I didn't really touch on, Like there was a FIFA uh crime ring that that was active last year. That was kind of an interesting story, but we'll save that for some other episode. I hope you enjoyed this. For those of you in the United States, I hope you have a great Thanksgiving break. Remember tomorrow's episode is a rerun about how cyber Monday got started. So if you're curious about that, make sure you tune in and we'll be back next week with all new episodes. And remember, if you want to send me anything to you know, talk about, maybe there's a company or technology or trend in tech that you'd really like an episode about, send me a message on Twitter. The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs W, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M