The ultimate price for cheating in professional gaming.

cageymaru

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Titan disbands following funding collapse.
http://www.pcgamer.com/titan-disbands-following-funding-collapse/

Official website.
http://titan.pro/news/read/Titan-Bids-Farewell/58

Titan was a professional gaming team with teams in Smite, CS:GO, Quake, DOTA2, etc. One of their CS:GO members was caught cheating and permanently banned by Valve. This tarnished the team's name. They lost all funding from sponsors and thus they had to disband on the 13th of January 2016.

This is a gaming team with:
Top 10 at International 4.
Won Quake Dreamhack twice.
2nd place at the 2015 Smite Championships.
CS:GO Dreamhack winner

All gone because one jackass cheated. No funding = no money to travel = no team funding.

Thought it would be an interesting read for someone who follows the professional scene.
 
All it takes is that one asshole to ruin everything for you.

I don't follow professional gaming, but do they have beat downs for shit like this? Like a gang pissed off at the snitch?

Damn. Hopefully the others can find some redemption and work back into it. The other guy can just eat a bag of dicks.
 
Pssh ultimate price, clearly hes never played Counter-strike in china.
 
I fucking love playing video games but putting videogames and sports in the same sentence just doesn't sit right with me.
 
I fucking love playing video games but putting videogames and sports in the same sentence just doesn't sit right with me.

This again? I don't give a crap about 'eSports' but if chess, snooker/billiards, golf, darts, etc are considered sports then competitive videogames can darn well be considered sports!
 
This again? I don't give a crap about 'eSports' but if chess, snooker/billiards, golf, darts, etc are considered sports then competitive videogames can darn well be considered sports!

Don't forget poker! There isn't even a dexterity component to that game and it gets plenty of TV coverage on sports networks.

I like watching Starcraft 2 matches occasionally. Something about that is enjoyable for me.
 
Don't forget poker! There isn't even a dexterity component to that game and it gets plenty of TV coverage on sports networks.

I like watching Starcraft 2 matches occasionally. Something about that is enjoyable for me.

Watch the keyboard videos. There is one particular player that has the sickest keyboard video, but I can't remember his name to link it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzZW4Iiw59Y
 
I fucking love playing video games but putting videogames and sports in the same sentence just doesn't sit right with me.

Then ignore it. There are a lot of things that don't necessarily fit the definition of whatever. Sports is one of them. PC's apparently don't include Mac Personal Computers. It's only gay if the balls touch.... It's not that big of a deal. I don't care either way. I don't consider them 'sports', but I am not going to bitch about it.
 
When money is envolved there will be cheating. Fuck, not even that, I've hosted LANs with my FRIENDS where I NEVER EVER thought that cheating would be an issue. Got suspicious knowing my blood/alcohol ratio might have something to do with me being instakilled. But we caught the fucker. His excuse? "I wanted to see how long it would take for you morons to figure out I was cheating."
Now, if someone is prepared to fuck his friends over to win a stupid DM that no one is going to care about a day later, well, you bet your ass there will be one that'll do it for money.

OT: Guilt by association. Not cool.
 
Because every team would have to be banned and there would be no more pro football.

If they can't play nice, they shouldn't play at all. And no it wouldn't be over. Because other teams would come up, and if everyone caught cheating would be banned permanently on the spot, they'd figure out that it's not worth it. It's exactly this attitude that prevents the cleanup of pro sports. Professional sports shouldn't equal drugs and cheating.
 
I'm glad this stuff is happening though. There was a case where a bunch of players we're throwing CSGO matches for skins, they all got lifetime bans from any valve sponsored tournament. Lot of top tier NA players that would of at least competed for the $250k.
 
I'm glad this stuff is happening though. There was a case where a bunch of players we're throwing CSGO matches for skins, they all got lifetime bans from any valve sponsored tournament. Lot of top tier NA players that would of at least competed for the $250k.

There has been issues of people paying pro players to log in their account so they can up that other persons ranking. Kinda like power levelling their account.

I never got that though because as soon as the player picks it back up, they are going up against the best of the best and probably getting trashed.
 
When money is envolved there will be cheating. Fuck, not even that, I've hosted LANs with my FRIENDS where I NEVER EVER thought that cheating would be an issue. Got suspicious knowing my blood/alcohol ratio might have something to do with me being instakilled. But we caught the fucker. His excuse? "I wanted to see how long it would take for you morons to figure out I was cheating."
Now, if someone is prepared to fuck his friends over to win a stupid DM that no one is going to care about a day later, well, you bet your ass there will be one that'll do it for money.

OT: Guilt by association. Not cool.

Guilt by association is going to happen, and not just in video games. We're human beings, which means that we're pretty stupid and act unfairly to innocent people.

Cheating is a tough issue though. As you stated, it doesn't just happen where money is involved, though money probably means more cheating. And the cheat hopefully would open up the eyes to people in FPSs who think that any claims are just sour grapes. As stated in the article, the cheat involved wasn't visible on the screen and didn't provide the snaps as found in stereotypical aimbots. It just made you slightly better, as if you had your best game.

An issue though in my opinion is that many people are unqualified to judge these. Are there people who are just upset that better people beat them? Of course. But just because a person doesn't snap to targets like they're having an epileptic seizure, or doesn't follow targets behind walls doesn't mean they're innocent. Not every cheater is an idiot in these regards. Yes, a player can have their best game, but they act like an idiot in a more subtle way. Having your best game, every game. A person with a 90% accuracy or above, every game, is almost certainly cheating. This is where the people on the other side of the upset people can be wrong and just as idiotic as the terrible player.

Sadly, cheating happens more often than what we want to admit, even in video games. But some has to be allowed, because smarter cheaters may still appear worse than legitimate pros. Unfortunately, misplaced trust has consequences.
 
I agree that cheating will run rampant anywhere in which any level of tolerance is allowed.

If every sport just had lifetime bans, where people were literally gambling their livelihood if they cheated, then it would at least make people think twice. This would be even more true if all the sponsorship contracts required them to payback any funds if caught cheating.

Idiots would of course still do it and continue to get caught. But man they would probably be crushed under the weight of their error possibly for the rest of their lives. This'll never happen though. Because clearly people are more concerned about their level of entertainment over the cost to any sport due to cheating.
 
The cheating fiasco was in 2014. It's mostly lack of funding at this point, which of course may have been from dropped sponsors due to the cheating, dunno.
 
Yep. You get it too.

It comes down to money. If pro football was perfectly cleaned up, yes, it would continue. But the game would be incredibly slower and vastly less action packed. Fans complain about cheating when it's the other team, and not theirs. They're more tolerant of it when it is their team. And the sports themselves are totally tolerant when it comes to cheating, and honestly, they try to brush it under the rug, as long as revenues are protected.

Take MLB for example. Did anyone care about the steroids when McGwire and Sosa were going after the single season home run record? Bonds is a different story, because nobody liked him outside of San Francisco. MLB is an easy target for steroids because it's numbers are down, now as the third most popular sport in the USA (behind the NBA now, and both are behind the NFL).

And while the Patriots are hated, so they're an easy target for cheating scandels, ESPN and other sports stations barely cover any steroid scandels or other cheating scandels for other teams. Quite a few NFL players are easily juicing, just by looking at them. Like pro-wrestling and pro-bodybuilding, they might not fail drug tests, but to say they're just a freak of nature is just as naïve as someone who believes a person with a 90%+ accuracy, all of which are headshots, and places first with a 10+kdr, is just a good FPS player.
 
What does annoy me is Titan won a pot of 680k last year at smite. Yet they dissolved the team. I would think that part of the money could easily be used for expenses. But I don't know the internal spending, just the fact they did make a shit ton of money in one game.
 
Been there, done that. Was on a BF2 comp team where a handful of guys brought everything crashing down.

Still bitter.
 
What happened to Mathematician's posts? They didn't seem ban/delete worthy from the quotes.
 
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I still find it hard to swallow that "Professional Gamers" get paid, period.

If sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, high on adderall is a sport.... We'll, that's for brokers. Even then, it's definitely not a sport, it's a job.

*steps down from soapbox
 
I still find it hard to swallow that "Professional Gamers" get paid, period.

If sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, high on adderall is a sport.... We'll, that's for brokers. Even then, it's definitely not a sport, it's a job.

*steps down from soapbox

Well gaming is a huge market for geeks. As long as people are interested there will always be sponsors and as a result, big paychecks. I'm fine with it being called a sport as long as these gamers don't start calling themselves athletic (most aren't).
 
I still find it hard to swallow that "Professional Gamers" get paid, period.

If sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, high on adderall is a sport.... We'll, that's for brokers. Even then, it's definitely not a sport, it's a job.

*steps down from soapbox

Apparently you dont play anything very competitive. Dota 2 right now and (League of wannabes) are the biggest games in the competitive scene right now.

Dota 2 literally every single moment can win or lose a match. Every single item choice, one player being out of position, the team captain missing a call etc.
 
Not a big deal. A bigger problem is that because people bet on SMITE tournament winners, the average Joe is DDOSing particular people in particular teams.
 
So how did the cheat help the dude's aim exactly? None of the articles really describe it very well.
 
So how did the cheat help the dude's aim exactly? None of the articles really describe it very well.

He was using aim or wall hacks on his main account in his free time. Wasn't during a tournament.
 
He was using aim or wall hacks on his main account in his free time. Wasn't during a tournament.

The problem is, he only stated he didn't use it during a tournament, and people became suspicious that he may be lying, which he could very well be. He could also be telling the truth, but the problem is that in the end, the paranoia wasn't good.

illram said:
So how did the cheat help the dude's aim exactly? None of the articles really describe it very well.

I don't know the exact cheat, because, well, I don't cheat and thus am unfamiliar with them. But as the article stated, it was an aim enhancer which didn't display anything on your screen. A lot of people tend to think archaically when it comes to cheats like aimbots and wallhacks. They're only cheating if the target snaps, or if the person is blatantly following you through a wall. But those are cheats of yesteryear. They've gotten far more advanced to look more realistic.

For example, a post on reddit a couple years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1u4dcm/can_you_spot_the_aimbot/?

From the follow up the person made, the votes were split on which video had the aimbot and which was legitimate.

But while bots have gotten better, there are still tells. Unfortunately, you go into game forums, and you'll get people defending blatant cheaters because they look for snaps and refuse to believe cheats have improved that they can smoothly transition to targets, don't always target the same part of the body, etc. There are cheats which just get you close to a target, or if you're near a target, will then get you on a target. It makes you look like a good player having a good game to most players. It doesn't give you that 100-3 score, but the point of not being retarded is to not be blatant about it which would get you banned.
 
So how did the cheat help the dude's aim exactly? None of the articles really describe it very well.
Cheating is rampant in competitive Source Engine-based gaming. TF2 and CS:GO have thriving cheating scenes. Scenes that have grown exponentially ever since Valve decided to heavily monetize their games via micro transactions.

There are free cheat packages that are simple external applications that get you banned within minutes or hours (Valve doesn't delay bans for known cheats anymore), and more advanced, paid cheats that, as I understand it, run as kernel mode drivers, making them difficult to detect.

To answer your question, he probably was using one or a combination of the three most popular Source Engine cheats; trigger bot, wall hacks and silent aim. The first one is pretty self-explanatory. It simply clicks left mouse for you when you place your crosshairs over a target. The second one allows you to see through solid objects. In CS:GO, shooting through walls is a long established game mechanic, so wall hacks can be very valuable. The last one acts as a traditional aimbot, but masks it's presence by changing the way spectators and demo recording tools perceive your crosshairs.

My money is on the latter. Valve has been aggressively patching silent aim exploits out of Source Engine since last summer. And by "aggressively" I mean it took them seven years. You know, Valve Time and such? The hit scan silent aim hacks in CS:GO are all non-functional now (so I'm told) while projectile weapons in TF2 can still utilize them.
 
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Interesting. One of the articles has a quote from one of the guys caught earlier claiming 40% of the pro scene cheats. Obviously he has an incentive to say that but if the number is anywhere close to that then that is nuts.
 
There are lots and lots of cheats available within a single "cheat program" nowadays. Not going to link to any but ethical players deserve to know what's going on out there

aimbot. Aimbot has a FOV(field of view) that you can set between 0(off) and 360 (infinite) At 360* if there is an enemy within the player's sightlines, left clicking will attack that person, even if you are not looking at the enemy. Yep. You can configure most aimbots to
-aim at whoever is closest in distance
-aim at whoever has the least damage
-aim at whoever has the most damage
-aim at whoever is closest to crosshair (most legit)
-aim only at head
-aim only at body


There is/was perfect silent, but that's gone in TF2/CSGO now. For a long time crappy aimbots were ultra-jerky and obvious, snapping like one might expect an aimbot to function. Good ones had "perfect silent" meaning in function it worked the exact same way, but managed to smooth out the movement visually so that you and spectators would look much more natural. It's very important to know that with pSilent, even if you were physically standing behind someone aimbotting, or watching a demo, or spectating, it would look very good, especially paired with a low FOV. pSilent was VERY powerful.

Aimbotting is still possible, but not looking like an obvious hacking idiot is much harder.

Triggerbot- as said before, crosshair over target = autofire. Easiest way to find a triggerbot is looking for someone absolutely throwing his mouse/crosshair around a target but still hitting with 100% accuracy. Triggerbotting is also pretty obvious with pistol as you'll never see someone unload half a clip quickly.

Walls - everyone knows what this is. Can also put up info like enemy health, username, class/loadout

Nospread - patched. Super powerful when paired with trigger or aimbot. All bullets shoot in a straight line, for stuff like shotgun this is crazy lethal, especially at range.

Toggles - this is far and away the most powerful thing about these cheats, they can be turned off in the blink of an eye. Press tab to turn ^^all that crap^^ on, someone goes spec, calls you out, walks by, you do something suspect? Press tab again and you're 100% legit. Because of this, it is virtually impossible to tell if someone is hacking, because if they only toggle it on say... once a match for a few seconds, like when they're in a major jam, or whatever.

Secondary screen - Yep. Good cheats nowadays function with zero onscreen info, but configuring the cheat will still bring the menu up. The best ones are fully capable of drawing this exclusively to a second display... no matter how small that display may be. You can also have wallhacks drawn to a mirrored second screen now, so even a Twitch streamer could be a hacker now. I haven't seen anyone I suspect of this but I don't watch Twitch. I'd look for the user's eyes to go in the same direction every time before an important frag.

Radar - Like walls but a lot less obvious, small box in corner showing all teammates and enemies, or just enemies.

There are also game-specific hacks. Again not tapped in to CSGO comp scene but for TF2 there was permanent crits (patched) pyro perfect-reflect, reflect everything perfectly 100% of the time, weird spy backstab stuff, uh I forget what else.

The real issue, imo, is that we as users shouldn't have to learn all this crap. I'm no programmer but there's seriously NO WAY that they can't eliminate this stuff? There's absolutely no way to determine if .05% or 70% of all top-level players are cheaters.

I never learned what cheat program this CSGO guy used but the two big ones afaik still have zero VAC bans. *shrug* Unacceptable
 
One of the articles has a quote from one of the guys caught earlier claiming 40% of the pro scene cheats.
As you said, he has an incentive to say this, but I would say he is in the ballpark, roughly speaking.

The incentive to cheat is amplified by another incentive - the financial one. With large prize pools, twitch.tv revenue, valuable in-game items and even gambling sites, CS:GO's ecosystem presents many opportunities and justifications for shady activity.
 
Apparently you dont play anything very competitive. Dota 2 right now and (League of wannabes) are the biggest games in the competitive scene right now.

Dota 2 literally every single moment can win or lose a match. Every single item choice, one player being out of position, the team captain missing a call etc.

Champion Chess players make how much again?
 
Chess is a board game that has been around for more than 1,400 years. The professional video game competitive scene has been around 15 or so years. If you want to look at that single criteria I'm sure we can list a lot of other unrelated money making competitions.
 
Chess is a board game that has been around for more than 1,400 years. The professional video game competitive scene has been around 15 or so years. If you want to look at that single criteria I'm sure we can list a lot of other unrelated money making competitions.

I didn't compare years or monies.... Don't be so confrontational

I was merely pointing out the obvious similarities between chess and MOBAs
 
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