Or you are the cheater. Asshole.

By now, all Tarkovians have been informed of the wiggle. Horrible. Escape From Tarkov is a notoriously difficult FPS survival game. Lots of the enjoyment comes from the realistic gunfire and brutally unforgiving gameplay. It requires a different type of skill to get good at EFT than, say, a game from the Call Of Duty Series. Screenshots can probably look similar at times, but if you’ve played them both then you know: Escape From Tarkov is hard. The learning curve is nasty. It’s apparently possible to completely sabotage yourself and have to go into raids with next to nothing. I’ve never done this, because I’m not the most confrontational person in Tarkov. I like to kill a few people here and there, but mostly I like to survive. Only one clone down there.

Escape From Tarkov Cheating

As difficult as Escape From Tarkov unappologetically is, it’s pretty messed up when you find out that cheating is so rampant. While no one ever explicitly promised me that there were no cheaters in Tarkov, I believed, for some reason, that there weren’t any. I’ve died to invisible silence while hiding and making no noise, but always assumed it was someone with consummate knowledge of the map and luck. Surely, some of the time I was right about this.

But knowing what we now know, it’s obvious that there were times that I was very wrong about this. Escape From Tarkov cheating is so bad that the situation has forced many previously avid players to re-evaluate their relationship with the revolutionary shooter.

The new attempt at a boxing game, Undisputed, is also suffering from an infestation of cheaters.

And let’s not forget the EVE Online equivalent of ‘cheating;’ a developer spawning rare items into the game for his alliance buddies. That not only gave crazy advantages in the wars that often exceeded hundreds of thousands of dollars in real lost value; it permanently destroyed faith in the otherwise pristinely viewed player-run economy of EVE Online.

The EVE Online Economy

Almost everything in EVE Online is player ‘made;’ of course, there’s code that’s created by the developers, but for the sake of explanation, pretty much everything else is player made. Star bases deep in space housing thousands of players and their respective equipment are player created. The components also have to be assembled, as do the pieces of those components.

Production reaches all the way back to the harvesting of ore from asteroid belts in orbit around beautifully rendered celestial bodies. Different areas in space tend to hold different types of ore, with different levels of different types of minerals within each. Control over resource rich skies can create the baseline for a successful interstellar war economy, and the most successful alliances EVE Online are well aware of this fact.

Such tedium might seem boring to some, but to many capsuleers the devil cuddles cozily in the details next to them. Each layer of intricacy creates not only a layer of detail to master, but also a front on which to engage in all the forms of warfare against anyone else. So you can imagine the fully torqued kick in the collective balls when we found out that all that labor could be shortcutted by an unscrupulous developer.

In response to accusations, CCP Games deleted the developer characters who had their in-game identities revealed, but conspicuously never stated whether any additional actions were taken to rectify the destructon of the economy.

After that, those that had dedicated significant time and effort to the wars among the stars lost all faith in their reasoning. If it took literally years of thoughtful effort to achieve something for one capsuleer, it was awfully jarring to learn that another was just inputting lines of code and spawning them. By the time the information was publicly available, this could’ve been going on for any conceivable amount of time. It could’ve been a perk of the job from the very beginning of EVE Online in 2003. We’ll never know.

People still play EVE Online, but after the cheating scandal interest in the oldest space mmo has never been the same. CCP Games hopes to change this in the future with the inclusion of blockchain technology.

ESBC Undisputed Cheating

The latest attempt at a boxing video game, Steel City Interactive’s Undisputed (previously known as ESports Boxing Club) has also suffered it’s share of negative press over rampant exploits. While some of the complaints of the unfinished game have to do with an apparently broken set of core mechanics, and others with the strange application of statistical ratings of fighters, there is a legitimate community of cheaters emerging.

With the ability of anyone with a web browser to easily find a foolproof, free cheat mod for Undisputed, it’s difficult to imagine a world in which Steel City Interactive’s tiny team of boxing game enthusiasts can stem the growing tide of cheaters. The unlimited endurance and strength hacks make for some hilarious matchups, with cheaters going afk midfight after getting pieced up, only to return with godlike invincibility. It’s funny to watch, but I wouldn’t exactly call it entertaining.

SCI has already spent a lot of resources obtaining impressive high-resolution scans of some very popular fighters. Although the still images of these scans are absolutely stunning at times, the gameplay itself looks disturbingly odd; Undisputed still has work to do in order to accurately render motion. For a small indie project though, it’s impressive and interesting what they’ve managed to achieve, although lately the quality of experience of players appears to have waned.

SCI has been updating their project regularly, but the obvious changes that would drastically improve the appearance of the action in the ring are ignored. The punches still look lifeless and empty compared to other boxing games that came out over a decade ago. Damage to each fighter looks like a copy/pasted rendering that appears completely identical to every other cut on every other fighter. Connectivity issues still plague the match selection experience and the mechanics of the game seem to actively incentivize spamming.

Fighting Fire With Fire

Even with absolutely perfect punch mechanics, which Undisputed does not have, unlimited stamina/endurance cheats would still completely negate any semblance of competition. The only way to beat these cheaters is to download the cheats yourself, and when they turn on their cheats, you turn on yours.

So now, you’re just standing in front of each other, winging the most stale, limpwristed haymakers you can imagine at each other, and landing flush, over and over again. Eventually, someone would fall; but you’re both cheating. Now it’s a battle of will, and if you’ve got a controller with a macro setting, you just might pull off the upset.

Maybe we should take this to its logical concluson; download the cheats for Undisputed to outcheat the boxing video game cheaters. Download the Tarkov cheats. Find the EVE cheaters and join up them.

It’s the only way to ensure that you’ll never have an unfair disadvantage; you seize the advantage and make it unfair for everyone else.

But that’s not what I paid for.