SpawnPoint

I joined the UK Officefest server to check out a player who had got a high score quickly.  Sure enough he was cheating, so I started recording a demo.  He got killed before I'd got enough on demo so I was watching the player who killed him.  And he was cheating too.

So now I need another demo of the first player I was speccing and some demo of the second cheat.  Easy enough I thought, only the next round he died early on, so I stopped the demo and went to record the second cheat.  He got killed too, so again I was watching the player who killed him and would you believe it he was cheating too.

Ok, three cheats, all killing each other, that makes it a bit more complicated but still ok.  A few rounds pass and I'm happy that I've got enough on two of them.

If there are more than one cheat on server, I make sure I get demos of them all before I start banning as I don't want any getting away.

Only trouble is a few more players have now joined and two of them are cheating too!.  That's 5 all together.

It took me over half an hour to get demos of them all because they kept killing each other before I got enough proof.  I missed My Name Is Earl as a result, not happy.

The really fun bit was when it finally got to ban time, I opened my ban menu and oh joy, they are all next to each other in the list of players.  This means I just had to hit 6 five times to ban them all.

I really should have got a screenshot of that.

People often ask me how I manage to catch so many hackers. Ok, maybe no one has ever asked me so far, but I'm fairly sure a few people have at least wondered. So here is how I do it.

First you need a few things, spare time and HLSW (http://wiki.hlsw.net/index.php/Main_Page). HLSW is useful because you can quickly cycle through all of the servers you want to check for cheats, you can use your steam favourites in a similar way but it is more time consuming.

All I do is check through SpawnPoints servers every now and then looking for players with high scores or hacker type names. There is more to it than that, it's easier to get a high score quickly on deathmatch or gungame than it is on assault, so you need to take into account the map and game type. So it can be useful to look for players that are outscoring everyone else. Once you have identified a suxxxxious score, go and spectate them and see if they are cheating.

This is not a perfect method as it only leads to the more blatant cheats and there are also legit players who can get high scores quickly.

It is a bit dull, but it doesn't take long to cycle through the servers and I catch enough cheats this way to make it worthwhile. I really don't like cheats.

I've been in the Anti-Cheat Team (ACT) for 7 months now, having been invited by Hitman about six hours before I was going to volunteer. Always nicer to be invited though.

It's been a learning experience so far, I taught myself to spot cheats just by watching players and then watching the demos before sending them in. Now I know a few more tricks to help make a decision, like demoui and r_drawothermodels 2. Not only that but I also get to see a whole range of legitimate tactics and techniques that can look like cheats on server.

The actual work on the ACT is mostly copy and paste, data entry and keeping things in order. Here is what I will typically do with one demo:

• Download demo and save to cstrike folder.

• Watch demo, with demoui and r_drawothermodels.

• Watch the demo again if it is not an obvious one

• Repeat until I am certain that the player is cheating or not. Ask for second opinion if I can't be sure.

• Copy and paste SteamID and name of the player in question to Notepad.

• Reply to the person who sent in the email, copy and paste response then SteamID and name of suspect player from Notepad.

• Copy and paste details into the ban list, if applicable.

• Make a note of who sent in the demo for the "who got the most cheats banned" list.

• If sb_status was used and the demo was conclusive use winrar on the demo and submit to Steambans.com.

• Delete the demo from my cstrike folder. I had 1000 demos in there a few months ago taking up 1.5Gb, not fun going through all those.

• Move the email and my response to done folder.

• Next!

I've got organised now, so all the things I need are all open and I can do all of the above quickly now.

We can get up to 10 demos a day, we got about 70 in the last week, not including the demos we receive for other things. So as you can see it's important to be as efficient as possible when dealing with demo submissions.

Fortunately I hate cheats so I don't mind the dull parts of the job and I take great pride in the fact that we quickly and fairly deal with the demos we receive.