Cheating in Online Games ‘Spreads Like Infections’

Do you cheat in your online games? Do you have friends that cheat? According to a recent study conducted with the help of a few million players on Steam, chances are that if you answer “yes” to one of those questions, you’ll answer “yes” to the other one as well. It seems that cheaters like to stick together, and if you don’t cheat, you’re more likely to start when you have friends who do.

It’s impossible today to play an online game without spotting a cheater, which for legit players is unfortunate. It’s a problem that’s not going away however, which is all too obvious. While developers might implement code to thwart cheaters for a time, inevitably new hacks will get released that remedy that. Where there’s a will, there’s most certainly a way.

But just how prevalent is cheating? 1% of players? 5%? According to this study which analyzed a social network on Steam consisting of 12 million players, 700,000 of them were labeled as cheaters (according to VAC, presumably). That’s just about 6% – a rather staggering number.

Worse still, it was found that if you associate with a cheater but don’t actually cheat yourself, you could still be labeled as one. Further, there were trends where once a friend was labeled as a cheater, they’d be defriended fast and sometimes even blocked from viewing the person’s profile at all.

I’ve played a lot of Call of Duty in my day, and I know many people who refuse to buy any title from the series simply because there are so many cheaters online. After all, if you automatically have a disadvantage because you are legit, why would you want to subject yourself to cheaters? In some games, avoiding cheaters is easier than others, but once you are in a match with a blatant cheater, it can really put a damper on things.

But, this is something that will have to be put up with. As unfortunate as it is, cheating is going nowhere.