I’m going to school to major in cyber security, and one relevant topic that I just do not understand and probably wont learn for another few years is the idea of exploiting and hacking online games. When I read about how people make aimbots for games and how people adjust their online ranks to be able to play against people much lower rank than them and win everytime, it just confuses me. How are people able to change their online rank to be able to do that. And how do people go about doing that in general?
In: Technology
Well, losing rank is easy. It’s called throwing. No aim-bots or wall hacks necessary. Basically, you intentionally make bad choices and sabatoge your game. That tricks the game’s matchmaker into thinking you’re worse than you actually are. Alternatively, you can have a smurf account; ie a secondary account that has never seen you play at your best, and therefore doesnt know how good you actually are.
In the opposite direction, artificially gaining rank requires that you somehow play better than you actually are. That’s done via aim-bots, seeing through walls, or having someone else play for you. This tricks the matchmaker into thinking you are better than you actually are.
For my overwatch games, it works like this. I have a Skill Rating (SR) of 2000. When I play ranked, the matchmaker will place me with other people who have similar SR’s. When I lose a game, I will lose 25SR. I can throw by intentionally not pulling my weight, and my team will probably lose, and I will lose that 25 SR. Repeated 20 times, and I’ll be facing people that are at 1500SR and truly be able to dominate.
Increasing my SR is much more difficult because it requires that I either have better information, better aim, or stop making mistakes. External programs can help with the first two. But aimbot looks very distinctive when the game shows you your killer’s view, and if you’re able to know where someone is when you had no fair way of knowing can also be obvious. That’s why Blizzard has report functions in addition to scanning for potentially unfair programs. Obviously, getting a better player to play for me would raise my SR. Either of those would boost my SR higher than I could fairly maintain by myself at my current level of play.
Both would probably be easier than actually hacking into the game’s system and manually changing the values for my SR, so hacking a game generally refers to aimbots, wall hacks, or other data collection programs.
As for why….people are dumb sometimes. They want easy games, or a higher rank, even if it’s not real.
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