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There are several statistics which say that thousands of players are looking for game cheats. In the world of First Person Shooter games cheating basically means improving your performance using external software like wallhacks and aimbots. Other things that are generally considered cheating is using exploits (i.e. bugs in the game) or changing some user settings (e.g. cvars in Wolfenstein or other Quake engines).

This is a Punkbuster screenshot of a wallhack cheater caught!

Why would someone cheat? For the obvious reason of winning a game but….what would this mean for the cheater? Basically cheaters are players who want to boost their egos by winning (or fragging) all the time. They take the game so seriously that they go into the trouble of even paying money to get a cheat. To accomplish what? “Owning” some other random player on a server or getting getting yourself in an l33t clan? Maybe….dunno…..
If you play the game for fun then you don’t need a cheat. If you are curious about what cheats are and how they work then I suggest you research the matter as much as you want but do not get one. It will get you banned sooner or later.

Catching cheaters
There are a few things that you can do to catch cheaters. First of all, if you suspect someone is cheating, don’t accuse him in public (i.e. in global chat). Spec him and make a 5 minute demo (or more). Then provide this demo to one of the admins of the server or to some experienced users for review.

Even better, if you are a server admin then subscribe your server to PBBANS. This is a free service provided by a community of gamers which helps server admins to catch cheaters and ban them on all subscribed servers. I’ve caught tens of cheaters with PBBANS.

If you want more details on PBBANS or on how to catch cheaters just post a comment here.