Exploiters are a scourge on the modern server. For every awesome exploitgineer intent on investigating every inch of these amazing virtual worlds and wowing us with YouTubed stunts on private servers, there are a hundred scumbags hiding under the floor and shooting people in the spawn. Screeching “It’s a legitimate strategy!” in a voice that would make a chat window go wash its hair the whole time.
1. Cracks in Reality
Some exploits are based in imperfections in map physics - even the tiniest flaw will be found by the round-the-clock team of ten thousand players. Some
Team Fortress 2 servers were stuffed with super-surprised BLU corpses when exploiters worked out how to wedge a weapon through a crack beside the left approach gate on Dustbowl stage 1. And by “weapon”, we mean “The Heavy’s minigun”, making shooting fish in a barrel look like Olympic sharpshooting.
That isn't a new grey carpet, that's an unkillable underground sentry location. And a terrible quality shot.
An even worse exploit had Engineers appearing underneath the ground at Gravelpit Point C, unkillable sentry guns shredding anyone who left the spawn. This tells you everything you need to know about exploiters: they’re about as interested in fair play as a boxer with a gun. Such “not quite airtight” exploits are a common FPS issue, but the nature of online gaming means they’re quickly discovered and even before a Steam update wallpapers over the lethal gap admins kick hackers so hard they find bootprints in their motherboards.
2. Exploiting Improvements
Videogames have to upgrade reality in all sorts of ways. Some are obvious: coming back from the dead, jumping your own bodyheight, not going to jail having fun with a chainsaw. Some aren’t: the walking to turning speed ratio in every first person shooter since ever is massively skewed to reward good mouse aim, and avoid every round of Counter-Strike from becoming first-person Pacman.
This leads to the most effective and ambience-exploding exploit ever: the bunnyhop. Not the panicked leaps of someone who believes that jumping up and down, and becoming more visible, makes you harder to hit. That’s just funny. This is the micro-millisecond pattern of mouse-movements (either by practice or script) which lets
Counter-Strike players zigzag at incredible speeds. Think “snaking” from Mario Kart, and if you play Mario Kart please clean the floor you just spat on in disgust. Maybe in hours of humorless training and or unfair equipment (scripts) should give you an advantage in reality - but if we’re talking reality, the average bunnyhopping hack couldn’t lift a SAW without straining their unused groins.
3. AI Abuse
Less of a problem than the others because until now gamers were about as likely to co-operate as drunken grizzly bears with knives for fingers. The fact is, all Bots are retarded but with the advent of co-operative games we need some enemies to unify against. The first major setback for such was with the Witch on
Left4Dead servers.
Aww, how could you cheat against such a sweet dear?
The poor dear does looks a little bit upset (in the same way a Jerry Springer “Sumo Edition” guest would be a bit overweight), but she really doesn’t want a hug. Gamers with great investigation skills, keen tactical insight and absolutely no respect for the actual “fun” of the game discovered that you could hide between the Witch’s shoulderblades and demolish her in zero seconds flat. (They’re the ones who put the quotation marks around “fun,” because theyclearly don’t understand the concept.)
4. Unintended Interactions
In the early days programmers had control of every single thing you could do in their game, because there only were about three things. With the incredibly rich modern environments unexpected interactions can crop up all the time, and they can be awesome. Even rocketjumping was once a contentious crop-up, with Quakers crushing all comers from tiny ledges ten meters straight up. Whether a side-effect is legal or not depends entirely on the players.
It doesn't look like much but this was the Counter-Strike equivalent of Barry Bonds' syringe.
One-such physics freakishness constituted an actual “professional foul”, with cyber-sports organisation
CEVO investigating an exploits in an official games. A player prevented a door from opening with a smoke grenade, gaining an advantage, and you can read a full review of the incident here. In fact you can even watch a full multi-angle replay of the incident, meaning that some people have spent longer discussing this than you have your own existence.
The moral? Until computers start keeping us in cages exploits will always be around (and even then, according to Keanu). Just remember what Wil Wheaton says: Don’t be a dick.
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Counter-Strike: Source News, Left4Dead News, Team Fortress 2 News.
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