If you have spent a few dozen ho?ur??s playing competitive games online, chances are you've had one of your matches ruined by opponents wielding the equivalent of a lightsaber on a medieval game.

Cheaters suck because they remove the uncertainty that should always accompany video games. You just know you're going to lose, likely in a humiliating manner. Luckily, game developers and players sometimes fight back and come up with hilarious anti-cheati?ng mechanisms. Let's look at some of the best.

Call Of Duty giving non-cheaters awesome perks to fight off cheaters

One of the most deservedly loathed cheat?s in gaming is the wallhack. It allows cheaters to see all matter of important stuff, be it drops or enemies, even when they should be safel??y hiding behind walls.

The makers of Call Of Duty brilliantly reversed this by coming up with an anti-cheat countermeasure that rendered all regular players completely invisible in the eyes of cheaters. Talk about t?he literal Predator becoming the prey, huh?

Call Of Duty also has cheaters shooting blanks

The other classic cheater that any honest player who's ever indulged in some online gameplay is the aimbot. Even if you have the weakest weapon in the game, never missing a headshot will likely grant you a serious advantage against any well-equipp?ed player.

Call Of Duty solved that by making every bullet shot out of a caught cheater's gun dealing exactly 0 damage. This resulted in various YouTube videos of cheaters complaining that their weapons weren't working even though they weren'??t missing a single shot. How the turns have tabled.

Deadlock turns cheaters into frogs

Deadlock somehow already has a cheater issue, but this time Valve was ready for the war. It's anti-cheating system will detect and ask non-cheaters if they want the cheaters to be banned right away, or turned into frogs for the remainder of the match - then banned. It's a hilarious form of justice, and not even a new one. Turns out it began life as a mechanism that would've turned cheaters into chickens in Counter-Strike but it ended up?? never seeing the light of day. I'm guessing that all the years of ch?eater abuse in Valve games finally made the company go full on evil wizard.

Runescape’s botany bay

Similarly to Deadlock's frog-ification, Runescape also allows players to judge cheaters. Unlike Deadlock, however, Runescape's penalties are a bit?? harsher than just being turned into a cute lil ??green critter.

To allow players to arrive at the best-possible comeuppance, the makers of Runescape created Botany Bay. T??his is a very ??"special" place where players can judge and �more importantly �execute cheaters in the most gruesome of ways.

Tomb Raider 2’s trap code

Not all cheaters thrive in the online landscape. Back in the early days of the Tomb Raider series, the rumor that you could totally get Lara Croft to take off their clothes in the original game took the relatively tiny Internet by storm. By the release of Tomb Raider 2, many saw the surfacing of a cheat code tha?t promised players could get the now even more detailed Lara Croft model naked. You could not.

performing the? moves that would supposedly allow you to play "Nude Raider" would actually culminate in Lara exploding an?d sending dozens of body parts (still with their clothes on) flying across the screen.

Be warned that it still works in the remasters.

Fall Guys' cheater island

Honestly, I believe justice should always be rehabilitative, not punitive. The good people at Mediatonic seems to agree as they developed not a bunch of contraptions even viler than those seen in a regular match of Fall Guys, but a resort just to accommodate cheaters.

On the cheater island, you could learn that cheating is wrong as you're pitted against dozens of other cheaters, many of which who will possibly sport ??cheats capable of making yours feel puny.

Cheats that are too good to be true

Sometimes you just get to take matters into your own hands. That's what Reddit user receiven did as he marketed a hot and revolutionary new Counter-??Strike multi-cheat and got a lot of people to try it out.

This cheat, however, wasn't just useless but even made users play worse as it got their POV stuck a??t a crooked angle. Cheaters wouldn't have to worry much about this, though, as Steam wouldn't take long to detect this software as something that could've only resulted from meddling with the code, and thus got thousand?s of would-be cheaters banned.

Rigged parachutes

Few things are more thrilling than coming to a game after having learned a new skill that no-one could anticipate. I'm assuming cheaters in Battle Royale games get one hell of a thrill as they witness their character descending from the plane into whatever BR island they're about to ma??ke unfun for everyone else.

Call Of Duty made sure the thrill ends in an absolute anti climax, as the cheaters detected by Warzone would have their parachutes intentionally rigged to have them crater and die upon landing.

The Witcher 3's biblically accurate cow angel

Witchers work for coin. Their code doesn't much care for cruelty, but The Witcher 3's game code sure does. Chances are you've played Witcher 3 without ever noticing this, and that's great.

??If you're evil, however, and even if you haven't used any sort of cheating software, you may already know what I'm talking about. Upon committing random - but certainly serious - high number of crimes against cows, the game will sp?awn the toughest monster in existence, a god-like cow protector capable and willing toy obliterate anyone trying to abuse the game's economy via cow-murder.

Animal Crossing's Resetti or "Mr Reset"

Savescumming isn't even cheating software, but the practice of reloading until you have the desired outcome is frowned upon by many, including the people at Nintendo behind Animal Crossing.

Abusing the game's save functionali?ty by resetting too often will unleash the ire of Resetti, who will not kill you, nor rig your parachute, not summon a huge cow demon, but do the worst thing imaginable: continuously berate players for their behavior.

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Even after ten years, GTA 5 is still one of the biggest releases in modern gaming. With almost 160,000 people logged into the game on PC in the past 24 hours, it's no wonder it's one of the most played releases on Steam. But there's been one ??thing missing all ??this time, until now.

As noted in a recent report from Insider Gaming's Tom Henderson, it looks as though Rockstar has finally added anti-cheat software to GTA 5. More than nine years after releasing (bearing in mind the console versions came out in 2013), the hit Grand Theft Auto in??stallment comes packed with BattlEye, at l?east on the PC version.

Screenshots from X user Tez2 �who's pretty noteworthy when it comes to tracking all things related to GTA �initially showed the software listed in the patch notes over on SteamDB. Rockstar has since updated its patch notes thread, dropping in its official notice that GTA 5 now comes with a Battleye install.

Is this the end of GTA 5 silliness?

Over the years, studios and publishing houses have taken strides to protect intellectual properties, especially when it comes to guarding against online cheaters. This is basically wha??t BattlEye is all about, but the report from Henderson points to a few concerns.

For one, will having anti-cheat software in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto 5 have any effect on modding? It can't be said?? at this stage what the resul??t will be, but no doubt the community will let us know post-haste.

In general, it seems fans are quite pleased with BattlEye finally making its way to the game, about a decade after it came out. But given how long it's taking for GTA 6 to arrive, we already kn?ow that Rockstar can be a bit slow on the uptake at times.

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Recently, it was revealed that the upcoming Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster will ship with the Denuvo digital rights m?anagem?ent software. The video games industry has many controversial problems, whether it's the shuttering of many, many, studios or increasing toxic backlash from a highly strung yet vocal minority. Denuvo is just one more contentious topic to add to the pile.

But what is it that makes it controversial among a lot of gamers? In this modern era, there's an argument that if you're a developer or publisher of games, ?you'd like t?o invest some of your funds into methods that protect your intellectual property.

Denuvo: what is it?

With the rise of digital gaming, companie????s have taken strides to ensure their titles are protected from potential piracy. That's essentially what digital rights management is. Those who recall the days of CDs—particularly in the late 90s and early 2000s—will remember DRM as a modern way for record companies to stop music lovers from copying albums and distributing them without having to hand over more money.

In a nutshell, that's wh??at the Austrian-formed Denuvo Sof?tware Solutions is all about, but for video games. It's been on the market for ten years, and it's been used in many releases to crack down on piracy while also preventing anyone from tampering with the product.

Studios can licen??se the software for their �usually PC �games. There was a time when anyone could "crack" a game disc, so it became possible to make multiple (and illegal) copies for free, but DRM makes it more difficult, especially today. Denuvo Anti-Cheat was also developed for the Nintendo Switch to protect against unlicensed emulation.

Why is Denuvo so controversial, then?

Aside from any possible rebellious cries ??against capitalism, Denuvo?? does appear to incite its fair share of anger from PC gamers outside the usual torrent of games being unleashed to the world in clearly unfinished states.

Denuvo has been a point of contention due to how it affects overall performance, as it hogs a lot of CPU power. You don't have to look far to find stories of tit?les being review bombed or having a negative critical response from fans due to how it performs on PC, especially when it comes to ??framerates.

For example, Tekken 7 launched and was immediately the subject of DRM controversy. The game's director, Katsuhiro Harada, spok??e out on Twitter/X about notable frame drops but made it clear that the??y weren't related to a system's GPU or CPU.

A further post from Harada mentioned " anti-tamper third-party middleware" as the culprit. While Denuvo wasn?'t mentioned, we do know that Tekken 7 came loaded with it, so the director was almost certainly talking about it specifically. Denuvo was eventually removed from Tekken 7, though criticisms over games eventually taking it out are another discussion.

Arkane Studios was also forced to investigate stuttering problems after it became apparent that Deathloop was experiencing poor performance on PC. A few years back, one of the game's community managers posted on Reddit, saying the team was—at the time—prioritizing "inves??tigating the issue right now." Again, Denuvo was not mentioned at an official level, but comments underneath certainly knew where to place the blame.

The removal of Denuvo

According to this Wiki list, 247 games use Denuvo DRM anti-tamper software as of July 4, 2024. These aren't obscure titles, either. Many of them are AAA releases, including the remake of Resident Evil 4, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and even stuff that's not yet been released, like the 20th-anniversary edition of Beyond Good & Evil.

Over the years, things have gotten to the point where gamers decided to take matters into their own hands. I'm referring, of course, to when a modder actually went ahead and removed Denuvo themselves from Resident Evil Village. While you could see this as an angry, knee-jerk reaction to the controversial software's implementation, benchmark tests �such as this one from Digital Foundry �discovered that per?formance improved notably on PC.

Since then, Capcom has not only issued a patch to address issues gamers were facing but eventually removed the offending DRM from RE: Village entirely. Other games to follow suit include Ghostwire: Tokyo, Doom Eternal, and Lies of P, whi??ch had only been out for a few months when Denuvo was removed.

The fact that so many studios and publishers ??do go ahead and remove it after the fact speaks volumes. A piece of software meant to protect a product that instead becomes known for how it affects game perform?ance almost smacks of anti-consumer tactics, not that I think Irdeto �the current owner of the Denuvo company �is doing this intentionally.

To close out this piece, check out the curated list of Steam games that have removed the software post-release. I can't vouch entirely for its accurac?y, but it's hard not to conclude that Denuvo is perhaps the constant. Best case scenario: it's an unpopular method of protecting intellectual property. Worse case: it's disruptive, at least from a gaming perspective.

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 releases at midnight, and with it comes a new Multiplayer and an updated Warzone. Call of Duty is no stranger to having a cheater problem, but MW3 is looking to hopefully remedy some of those issues. In a post on the COD blog, Activision has revealed how they plan to use machine learning to combat chea??ters.

#TeamRICOCHET

The team dedicated to combatting cheating in Call of Duty, Team Ricochet, has developed the Ricochet: Anti-Cheat over the past two years with the existing Call of Duty titles. With both client and server-side systems?? utilizing Machine Learning, the post claims the speed and?? accuracy of prevention and detection systems have been improved.

According to the blog post, Mac??hine Learning works alongside the actual human team to provide inf??ormation. However, the Machine Learning systems do not issue any bans automatically.

Splat

Another system implemented in MW3, specifically in Warzone, is Splat. With Splat, if a player is discovered to be cheating, Splat will swiftly end their match by simply killing them. In the examples given, a cheater detected right away may find their parachute disabled, causing them to...well...Splat. In another example, a cheater discovered after deployment may find their gravity altered and a simple bunny hop will have the velocity of a 10,000-foot drop. Also Sp?lat.

Even though this is a fun way to annoy cheaters?, Activision says the real? goal is to prevent the cheater from impacting a match.

It's great to see Activision investing a lot into Anti-Cheat. I loved the original Call of Duty: Warzone...in fact, at one point I was playing it pretty non-stop. But then the number of cheaters increased so much that it felt like there were more cheaters in the lobby than actual genuine players. In the end, I quit playing be?cause of it, and have not been back yet. Maybe this is enough reason to jump back in!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 releases across all platforms on November 10.

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