Public Opinion: The Staff from CSCentral

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One of the most popular Counter-Strike news sites is CSCentral∞. Four of the staff members were kind enough to spare some of their time to answer our few questions. We really hope you enjoy their responses, we did.

Sebastian Head Guru

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1) What is your basic gaming background For yourself?
I started out with an Amiga 500. After it went broke I got a SNS (or was it before the Amiga, can't really remember). Super Mario Kart and Street Fighter 2 Turbo, those were the days. I regretted selling it a lot so I recently bid for a new one on Ebay and I now I am, again, proud owner of a SNES ;) In '98 I got my first real pc and started surfing on the web and playing games. I finally could play Dungeon Keeper on my own pc rather than watching my friend play it.

2) Do you thinking cheating is out of hand in Counter-Strike? Why?
I don't think it is out of hand. Valve has it covered with VAC in my opinion. Or should I say they could have it covered, if it would be updated on a regular basis? When new cheats are released and they bypass VAC and it is not being updated it is not very useful. Though the worst cheats are being blocked by VAC and HLGuard so it is a lot better than it used to be.

3) Do you think VALVe Anti-Cheat is working well, or could be better? Why?
As I said above it could be better if it would be updated more often. I can't say anything about the program code since I am a webmaster, not game coder ;) I think though that what Valve has done nice job and we should thank them for fighting the cheaters and not releasing the game source code to the public like some other game companies do ;)

4) What's your opinion on Cheating groups whose sole purpose is to cheat, or use cheats to accomplish other goals?
I don't know what's going on in their mind. What is the sense of playing a game with no challenge or just to ruin other people's experience. Get a life jesus.

5) What do you think is the future of on-line gaming and cheating on on-line games?
Cheaters will always be there, but I think only for the popular games since those cheaters want to reach as many people as possible. I hope and think that game developers will learn from the past though and keep the cheaters in mind while creating a game and build in more powerful tools to protect the game from cheaters.

6) Any remarks would you like to add?
Oh yeah, I am glad more and more cheaters move away to other games though I am sure those will be pretty cheat proof soon as well. Give it up guys, you will always loose in the long run, the game companies got more money and people to back it up! Well, thanks for this nice Q&A session, hope I didn't make a fool out of myself ;)

Ryo-Ohki Author of Heart of an AWPer

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1) What is your basic gaming background For yourself?
I play a wide variety of Half Life mods, including CS, Natural Selection and Team Fortress Classic. I also enjoy turn based stratagy such as Sid Meyrs' excellent Civilisation series and in addition I play most of the major Blizzard titles, Starcraft, Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3.

2) Do you thinking cheating is out of hand in Counter-Strike? Why?
Without a doubt. I've played CS since the early days, observing the game from the outset and playing on my own machine since around 5.1. Cheating only really became an issue once CS was commericalised and thrown out to the public, and with this came a drastic increase in the numbers of new players. Not suprisingly, a lot of these new players found the learning curve very high, since they were pitting themselves against gamers who had played CS since it's birth. Some turned to cheating, and with Half Life itself seeming to have security holes like Swiss cheese there were plenty of hacks and cheats ready to be used. Thanks to small numbers of cheaters though, the game quickly got out of hand. I recall one of the post 1.0 patches promised to eliminate cheating entirely, and yet within 2 days people were blatently cheating again on servers. I really focus on other games now simply for this reason. I don't mind being killled by someone of superior skill, but when I'm heatshoted across the map with a TMP five times in a row theres only so much I'll take. Cheating is a huge problem that so far the CS community and the makers have been unable to solve. this is a pity because deep down CS is an excellent game, if nowdays a little too commericailised.

3) Do you think VALVe Anti-Cheat is working well, or could be better? Why?
Anti-cheating measures in CS are good, but not good enough. In the same way as tank manufacturing companies strive to create new armour that cannot be peirced by shells, as soon as the armour is finished new shells have been invented that can penetrate the new armour. No CS patch or anti-cheating measure apart from havng admins on servers 24-7 actively watching all the players have stopped cheats. I do hope that foolproof anti-cheat software will be introduced one day, but I'm not holding my breath.

4) What's your opinion on Cheating groups whose sole purpose is to cheat, or use cheats to accomplish other goals?
These guys are scum, pure and simple. To undertake such measures as cheating is degrading to the game itself and to the whole community. The "satisfaction" in being able to type "HAHAHAHAHA OWNZORED YOU ALL!!!!!" after cheat-killing a whole team is hollow at best, yet people still do it, perhaps because they don't see a problem with doing it. Camping or sniping is part of the game, cheating is not, and whilst using the first two may get you abuse, they are nonetheless designed to be used in CS. Cheating should result in an immediate and total ban from any server that catches a player doing it. Cheating groups should be singled out and forcably removed from servers before the wreak any more havok.

5) What do you think is the future of on-line gaming and cheating on on-line games?
Cheating is, and always has been, the relm of the few. Games such as Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and Counter-Strike, 3 of the biggest online games of all time, have all been rent by cheating, and still are today, yet they survive. Many have left because of cheating, but others remain, confident that the makers will find ways to thwart cheats. The sheer level of gameplay that these games offer ensures that they will be around for a long time yet, but if cheating is not adressed quickly and delt with, the numbers of people playing these games will dwindle. There is an air of disenchantment within the CS community today, where vast numbers of fans want to compete in a cheat free environment, but so far have been denied this simple pleasure. If cheats are allowed to continue their moraleless campaigns however, online gaming itself may slowly start to fade. It is already happening to CS, which has been openly proclaimed as "dead". My hope is for secure anti-cheating software in the very near future, and if this happens, the future of CS and online gaming will be assured.

6) Any remarks would you like to add?
Stop cheating. You know who you are.

Disk2 Creator of HLamp, HLirc and HLSS

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1) What is your basic gaming background For yourself?
I have been playing computer games since as long ago as I can remember. I started on a top-of-the-line Commodore 64 and worked my way up to a nice 2.0Ghz Pentium 4 from Dell. As far as my Half-Life gaming history goes, I have been playing for a good three years now. Originally, I started playing Team Fortress Classic (TFC) with friends in a computer lab after school. Keep in mind the computers in the lab were 266Mhz Pentium 2s with 64MB of RAM, 8MB integrated video cards, integrated soundcards, and no speakers, which defeated the whole purpose of a soundcard. Once I realized that those computers blew goat chunks for fun every night of the week, I bought Half-Life and started playing at home on my kick-ass 333Mhz AMD K6-2 with 128MB of RAM. At that point I was still playing TFC, which I got quite good at. I could rocket jump and nade spam with the best of them.

After playing TFC for months I was introduced to Counter-Strike by a friend at school, who had just recently found out about it. When I first loaded Counter-Strike I said to myself, "What the hell? Where are the ammo packs and health kits? What do you mean I can't rocket jump? This sucks!" I didn't start playing it until I read the manual and learned what the purpose and concept of the game was. Yes, I was a complete n00b.

My Counter-Strike "life" really began up when I came across the website for Counter-Strike Radio (http://csradio.counter-strike.net)∞. I listened to a couple of the archived shows and loved it. I got to know a bunch of great people there, and was eventually asked to write a program to play sound clips over the newly introduced voice communication system. I wrote a program called Half-Life Sound Selector (HLSS) and although it was annoying as hell, many people liked it. After writing HLSS I moved on to a program called HLirc, which allowed players to chat in IRC from within Half-Life and its modifications. I released HLirc and, lo and behold, a VALVe Anti-Cheat (VAC) update that saw HLirc as a cheat was released two weeks later. That sort of ended that project, although I am working on a new version of it.

The program I am probably most known for is HLamp (http://www.cscentral.com/disk2/hlamp)∞, which allows players of Half-Life and its modifications to listen to and control Winamp from
within Half-Life. I've gotten some great feedback from users of HLamp. I have also become a news poster for CS Central (http://www.cscentral.com)∞, which has allowed me to plant subliminal messages in the minds of thousands of people.

That was by no means "basic gaming background", but it was thorough, no?

2) Do you thinking cheating is out of hand in Counter-Strike? Why?
No, I don't think cheating is out of control in Counter-Strike. In the days since Punkbuster's makers decided to be unreasonable (in my humble opinion) and stop development, there have been many effective tools released to prevent cheating. One of the first I can remember was a nice little Admin Mod script that checked players' CVARs for known cheats. They have helped a lot in the battle against cheating. The VAC is obviously a welcomed tool in that battle.

Cheating is not out of control because of those programs. The vast majority of players don't cheat, and in my opinion, VALVe and third-party developers are doing enough to counter the latest cheats.

Cheats for Counter-Strike (and every game for that matter) will always exist, but as long as it is risky and troublesome enough to use them I am happy with the work being done.

3) Do you think VALVe Anti-Cheat is working well, or could be better? Why?
Both. I think it is working well, and it could be better. From what I have seen it is detecting or blocking the most rampant cheats, and the new wallhack block has proven fairly effective, although that could be better. True, some aimbots and other cheats still work, but the VAC has certainly been an overall success in my opinion.

It could also definitely be better. It won't be perfect until every single cheat is detected and/or blocked, and as I mentioned earlier, that will never happen. I'm confident that VALVe is addressing the problem of cheating very well after years of not doing much about it. At the very least it has restored many people's trust in VALVe.

4) What's your opinion on Cheating groups whose sole purpose is to cheat, or use cheats to accomplish other goals?
I think they're great! They are so cool! What with names like myg0t and members that include lonely, pre-pubescent teenage boys with handles like [myg0t]ben.d0ver, how can they not be cool?!

Please take a moment to fully absorb the sarcasm. Thanks. What did you expect me to say? They suck. They are simply a group of young boys filled with "r4g3" because they are dissatisfied with their pitiful lives, lives which most likely include being white suburban teens with fast computers, a need to rebel against stupid, trivial things and |-|4><0r translation tools. They also have "r4g3" because they suck too much at the game to actually play fair.

In short: they blow goat chunks for fun every night of the week, while wishing for an additional day in the week so they could blow goat chunks that evening as well.

5) What do you think is the future of on-line gaming and cheating on on-line games?
Unfortunately, I see less of a focus on gameplay and more of a focus on graphics in the future of on-line gaming. That's just a trend I see. A few companies can do both very well. Blizzard Entertainment is the first example that comes to mind.

Cheating in on-line games will never be eradicated completely; however, there will also always be developers like VALVe, United Admins, and others, as well as websites like Counter Hack, to combat cheating. Hopefully the anti-cheaters will prevail :)

6) Any remarks would you like to add?
Nope.

Simon Article Writer

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1) What is your basic gaming background For yourself?
I started gaming in 1984 with standalone games. My first multiplayer game was in 1999 and then CS in May 2001. I have played other games but CS still has a majority of my interest. I currently offer tech support to players on CSCentral and the forumplanet CS forums.

2) Do you thinking cheating is out of hand in Counter-Strike? Why?
Yes, Anytime you have professional looking multifunctional cheats marketed to a wide audience along with "how to" guides on getting unbanned, I would say things have gone way to far.

3) Do you think VALVe Anti-Cheat is working well, or could be better? Why?
Yes, I feel that VAC may have cost us some bandwidth that I would love to see dedicated to the speeding up of the game, but I would pay that price in speed for the security that VAC offers. The improvements that can occur with VAC are what we are told will occur. The blocking of aimbot ability will be a devastating blow to some of the society of cheaters.

4) What's your opinion on Cheating groups whose sole purpose is to cheat, or use cheats to accomplish other goals?
You are talking about the saddest form of life. A person who cheats, damages a part of their soul that they are unaware even exists. A person who helps others cheats though Sportsmanship, integrity, honor and loyalty are for the most part absent in their lives. I hope as they grow up, they find a better path to follow.

5) What do you think is the future of on-line gaming and cheating on on-line games?
I think online gaming will grow and advance in technology. I also think we will always have cheats of one kind or another.

6) Any remarks would you like to add?
The future of any online game is tied to the constant influx of new blood. In Counter Strike (and many other games) those who have graduated from the freshman to sophomore ranks often punish the new freshman with sophomoric attitude and negativity equal or greater than what they got themselves. I feel that a large number of the cheaters out there are probably persecuted individuals who didn't like being picked on by those that they felt had to be cheating. It is often a "fight fire with fire" world and the new freshmen may be succumbing to the lure of the dark side. I find the new VAC and also the unilateral banning of WON IDs to be the best thing for the game. I wish at the same time though that we could all learn to be a little nicer to those around us. Keep the new blood as pure from cheats as you can AND also help them along. Tolerate the n00b questions. Help when you can help and above all, be nice. CS is a violent game but most people play it for fun and enjoyment of meeting new and interesting people and shooting at them ;)

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