Exploiting and hacking

Question

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

Answer 1

So let’s take Overwatch as an example for this, because it has a lot of its rankings in the open.

It has two scores for every player: A hidden score (MMR) and a public score (SSR).

The MMR is how it will match you with similar players in a non-competitive game. For Overwatch, it tracks how you perform for each character.

For an Attack character, it will track our aim percentage, kill/death ratio, damage dealt and time doing the objective.

The Tank will be ranked similarly, but more for blockind and absoring damage than dealing damage.

The Support characters are ranked more for assists and healing their teammates.

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So what people will do, without cheating or any other devices, is lose on purpose. They die a lot without doing much of anything. This will cause their MMR values to go down, placing them with other players who also have low values.

Now they’ve dropped down and are paired with other players who have low scores. These people have low scores for two reasons:

1. They are new to the game and are still learning.

2. They are just bad and won’t learn.

[](/sp)

Now this player who purposely dropped down can have free reign to do almost whatever they want in a lower rank, even though they should be in a higher one, but played the system to force him to drop.

Commonly known as *Griefing* or *Throwing*, these people ruin the game for their teammates.

People will also buy separate accounts to play on, making the game place them in lower ranked games as the account is new. These people are called *Smurfs* as they purposely play in a lower rank than they should be.