The gaming community often looks down on people who use cheating software to gain unfair advantage beyond their actual skills but how much do players understand people who do it and people who create the tools?
It was almost Christmas in 2020. Emi, a 19-year-old student from Hong Kong, just sat down in front of his desk after finishing his last day of lectures before winter break.
Emi booted up his computer and prepared himself to discuss strategies with his friends for their upcoming match on Discord. He had been playing an online music game called osu! for six years.
“The first unusual thing I noticed on that day was it took forever for me to log into the game,” he says, “I initially thought the servers went down but my friends all said they could play just fine.
“I saw an email on my phone and I was left speechless. An official staff says my account has engaged in cheating behaviour and has been restricted permanently.”
osu! draws inspiration from popular rhythm game titles such as Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, Taiko no Tatsujin and Beatmania. To get the maximum Performance Points, players need to hit the circles on their screen with high accuracy and without missing combo.
Although osu! is primarily a single-player game as players submit their scores after completing a song on their own, there has always been a sizable competitive community in which people can compete with each other in lobbies in real time.
The game not only has an annual official world competition with a US$10,000 cash prize pool, but also numerous community tournaments organised by players.
After participating in more than 40 community tournaments, sometimes as a player and sometimes as staff, Emi joined five other players to compete in a regional tournament and reached semifinals.
“I spent a while thinking about what went wrong and it hit me. I wasn’t totally honest two years ago.”
In 2018, a friend told Emi of a replay editor which allows users to modify their scores and submit them to the game. He downloaded the file out of curiosity to see what he could do with it but did not use the tool to set a score.
That changed soon later when Emi found himself struggling in a song in which difficulty spiked in the middle and he often broke his combo. Frustrated, he decided to modify the movement of his best play to appear he did not miss and played flawlessly instead. He says: “It was a decision made out of impulse.
Initially, I was happy to see my global rank go up. I was very goal-minded at the time and I wanted to achieve the score I was chasing after no matter what.
“But then I began to feel complicated and empty. I knew it wasn’t a responsible action and I achieved it with an external tool so the score didn’t represent my true skills in the game.”
The developing team behind osu! started to crack down on cheaters after updating the anti-cheat system in August 2020. Emi was caught in one of the banning sprees later that year.
“People use cheats to play on a different playing field,” JustM3, a former cheats developer from Belgium says, “They have more control over other players in a way. For example, if you are playing with wallhack, you know exactly where everybody is.
“But some people use cheating tools because they believe they deserve a higher rank in the game. They are like ‘oh, actually, I’m better than how I appear to perform. I’ve been trying to beat this song for a long time. I’ll just cheat to get it done more quickly’.
“Others however know they aren’t supposed to cheat but think it’s fun to try. There are a bunch of reasons I think people would do it.”
JustM3 has been programming in C# and Rust for 11 years and he made cheats for osu! as he realised breaking the system to do unexpected things would be an interesting process.
“I don’t develop cheats to spite the developers or to make them angry. I don’t earn money from my cheats either as it can make coding tedious and boring.
“I just want to learn and improve my programming skills. There’s no malicious intent and in some senses, developing cheats is similar to cybersecurity when you try to find the weak spots of the software.”
Cheating in video games has long been a common phenomenon many players engage in, regardless of how experienced they are.
In 2021, professional Trackmania veteran Burim “riolu” Fejza was accused of running the game in slow motion during speedrunning attempts for nine years to make precise movement, placing himself top of the world record leaderboard.
After the controversy broke out, other top players also came forward to admit cheating to keep up with others and stay competitive.
Similar incident also happened in osu! in 2022. Fia, a player known for their unique playstyle and a member of Team China in the official World Cup tournament, was proven to have manipulated their scores submitted during matches in a lengthy, 44-page analysis.
Consequently, everyone on the same national team was disqualified after eliminating strong teams including the United Kingdom, Italy, Romania and Russia.
Emi says: “It’s really disappointing to see top players cheating and risking their reputations instead of showing off their actual talents. They despise the community and players who spend thousands of hours to reach the same level.
“I still feel guilty of cheating when I was young and naive. That also broke my friendship with one of the teammates who was rightfully angry as we all ended up disqualified from the regional tournament.
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“Nowadays I’m more alert and mindful of what I do. Since then I apologised to the staff and my account was unbanned. I appreciate being given a second chance.”
Azuki, a German programmer behind commercial osu! cheating software Maple, says: “There have been very few incidents where cheating scandals during tournaments have actively mattered, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s obviously frowned upon and we’re no different. Our team doesn’t want to risk the integrity of big events like the osu! World Cup.
“The entire Fia situation left a mark but we don’t know if they used Maple or not. We still wanted to make sure it doesn’t happen again in future global tournaments.”
JustM3 says he is also disheartened to see scandal in competitive scenes, saying: “I don’t like the situation obviously. As much as I like cheat development, I also see why competitive integrity is important.
“It’s sad when you play against somebody or when you look at some very high level players, you don’t have 100% confidence they are playing legitimately.”
Emi was also concerned people who repeatedly use cheats in games will exhibit the same conduct in real life scenarios.
He says: “They’ve allowed themselves to indulge into cheating and it can soon become their second nature.
“Everyone on the Internet is protected by anonymity so if they cheat in video games, the worst thing happening to them is the account being banned. They can easily create another profile to do the same thing again even when osu! actually prohibits having multiple accounts.
“That doesn’t work in workplaces. I could have taken somebody else’s replay and pretend to be mine and that’s the equivalent to stealing others’ work, which can warrant immediate disciplinary action in a company.”
JustM3 says: “I think not everybody who cheats once is a bad person but to do it repeatedly, you need to be a specific type of person who is open to lying to others on a regular basis.
“There are also rage cheaters whose purpose is to actively harm others and ruin their games. They’re probably bullies in real life as well.
“There are also those who cheat to appear better but I don’t know how much impact that has on their actual personality.”
Still, as long as there are new games and there is a demand to cheat in games, people will continue to create software to bend the rules.
JustM3 stopped making osu! cheats after coding a bot which can finish a song entirely on its own while mimicking human input to make the replay look realistic.
“I ran out of ideas and got bored,” he says, “I moved on to make cheating programs for other games instead to stay feeling interesting.”
Azuki, on the other hand, continues his development of Maple as he is interested in figuring out how to keep his software undetected while the anti-cheat system gets better in detection. It is a cat and mouse game he enjoys playing with the game developing team.
“I can understand the anger towards cheat developers,” he says, “I can’t tell you how profitable Maple is but it’s less than what people think.
“It’s just a bit of pocket money we can spend on the side, very far from being enough so that you can live solely based on the income of the software.
“But even if we decide to close down Maple, another cheating service will take our place. Knowledge of the anti-cheat can only be kept a trade secret for so long and at some point another smart reverse engineer will step up to the task.
“Cheating is an indefinite problem. It won’t go away quickly.”
