I'm routinely shut down by trolls in every corner of the internet with this theory.

Basically, logic tells me this:

• Money breeds corruption without oversight
• Cheating is inherently a risk/reward decision where consequences are minimum
• There are so many cheating, there's no way you could become "better" than them without using cheats yourself

Yet, I'm supposed to believe all these kids competing in majors for million dollar purses are "legit" and got their without ever installing a cheat on their computer?

I just don't buy it.

It's endemic to every FPS game. I basically quit playing them a few years ago because of it.

It used to be less of an issue in the old server days, if a hacker was on the admins could just boot them. These days with automated matchmaking, you can't do anything about it.

It got worse too when shooters started adding ranked modes or have economies, like Escape from Tarkov.

Here's a video from a few months back highlighting how bad hacking is in Tarkov:

It's just funny isn't it? We all complain about corruption within the government and blah blah blah when we can't even keep a video game clean?

Humans are so susceptible to corruption and greed it's unreal.

My first multiplayer gaming experiences were with JK on the MSN Gaming zone. Already there, late nineties, there were cheaters-only lobbies, and pretty much every other lobby's name included "NH NC". I had a sleepover with a friend at age 11 or so where we coded hacks for JK, it was that easy.

Next big thing was Half-Life and all of its mods. Early 2000s (I remember it was around 9/11 and even years before that) it was common knowledge that at any given moment, the servers I frequented probably had over a third of players cheating. That was in the days of the coder group myg0t. The cheat OGC was widely renowned, but there were scores of other cheats.

To me it's obvious that, in these last two decades, the motivation to cheat has not diminished. In fact, it will likely only have increased, with money involved, stream count, prestige, etc... Nowadays you have to keep up with people playing dedicated aimtrainers 8 hours a day, too.

I don't know if anti-cheating measures have advanced that much that they are much better at keeping cheaters in check than they were back then. Come to think of it, I don't know if account-wide rather than server bans were a thing back then, so maybe things have improved. I saw a video of emerging anti-cheat AI technology that monitored games for inhuman-like behavior, and it flagged about one third of players it had encountered. IMHO that's probably a significant overestimation.

On the other hand: there is now money involved, stream counts, prestige, tournament wins, and players have access to aimtrainers etc... Many gamers now stream and game professionally, which is relatively new, and there are A LOT players who have, as a result, become REALLY unbelievably good at gaming. Often times indistinguishable from aimbots. If you check out aim trainers like Kovaak, there are legions of players who achieve actual godlike aim.

So I think the actual pro players are mostly legit. The skills and dedication it takes to stay on top of actual global playerbases is insane, and they overwhelmingly do it IMHO by putting in vast amounts of work over a long time. But cheating is still a rampant problem and it's not going away anytime soon.

In short, cheating in multiplayer gaming is a big problem, but still git gud