Cheating means circumventing or downright violating rules, usually while trying to keep such behavior secret. You can cheat on your partner, in games, in business and so forth, however despite cheating seeming like purely immoral behavior at first glance, it may be relatively harmless or even completely moral, for instance in computer graphics we occasionally "cheat" our sense of sight and fake certain visual phenomena which leads to efficient rendering algorithms. In capitalism cheating is demonized and people are brainwashed to partake in cheater witch hunts as a part of new anti-cheating bullshit business (in principle very similar to the "security" business), in fear culture, arbitrary drama feeding the social media fight for attention, trying to monopolize game platforms with bloat monopoly "anti cheat" systems etc. These so called "anti cheat" systems introduce unimaginable bloat and bullshit and provide excuse for things like spying (e.g. monitoring OS processes) and proprietary technology (so that "cheaters can't study the system to trick it") creeping into the world of free software.
Official LRS stance on cheating is the following: Cheating is fine.
The truth is that cheating is only an issue in a shitty society that is driven by competition (even if you disagree). Indeed, in such society there is a huge motivation for cheating (sometimes literally physical survival) as well as potentially disastrous consequences of it. Under the tyranny of capitalism we are led to worship heroes and high achievers and everyone gets pissed when we get fooled. Corporations go "OH NOES our multi billion dollar entertainment industry is going to go bankrupt if consoomers get annoyed by cheaters! People are gonna lose their bullshit jobs! Someone is going to get money he doesn't deserve! Our customers may get butthurt!!!" (as if corporations themselves weren't basically just stealing money and raping people lol). So they start a huge brainwashing propaganda campaign, a cheater witch hunt. States do the same, communities do the same, everyone wants to stone cheaters to death but at the same time the society pressures all of us to compete to death with others or else we'll starve. We reward winners and torture the losers, then bash people who try to win -- and no, many times there is no other choice than to cheat, the top of any competition is littered with cheaters, most just don't get caught, so in about 99% of cases the only way to the top is to cheat and try to not get caught, just to have a shot at winning against others. It is proven time after time, legit looking people in the top leagues of sports, business, science and other areas are constantly being revealed as cheaters, usually by pure accident (i.e. the number of actual cheater is MANY times higher). Take a look for instance at the Trackmania cheating scandal in which after someone invented a replay analysis tool he revealed that a great number or top level players were just cheaters, including possibly the GOAT of Trackmania Riolu (who just ragequit and never showed again lol). Of course famous cases like Neil Armstrong don't even have to be mentioned. { I just randomly found out that in the world of Pokemon tournaments cheating at top level also showed to be a huge issue lol. ~drummyfish } Cheater detection systems are (and always will be) imperfect and try to minimize false positives, so only the cheaters who REPEATEDLY make MANY very OBVIOUS mistakes get caught, the smart cheaters stay and take the top places in the competitive system, just as surely as natural selection leads to the evolution of organisms that best adapt to the environment. Even if perfect cheat-detection systems existed, the problem would just shift from cheating to immoral unsportmanship, i.e. abuse of rules that's technically not cheating but effectively presents the same kind of problems. How to solve this enormously disgusting mess? We simply have to stop desperately holding to the system itself, we have to ditch it.
Why is cheating such a big deal now when it didn't used to be so? One reason: commercialization, i.e. capitalism. Cheating is never an issue in small, noncommercial communities. Cheating doesn't hurt the game, it hurts commercial industries that try to own the game -- only multibillion dollar corporations whose success depends on hoarding thousands and thousands of casual customers to whom they have to guarantee a "fun experience" have to become serious about cheating. Take a small chess club or park with chess tables, or maybe a mailing list where people know each other, play without any financial rewards and only participate for the pure joy of the game -- those who don't play for pure statistics, those made of people whose income doesn't depend on their rating and who rather play for the fun moments, for time spent together with others. Will anyone give a single shit about a tryhard who sweats to win every game? No, there is no reason to, the guy will probably just build a reputation of a childish tryhard, no one will take his wins seriously, people will laugh at him or refuse to play him at worst and even if he cheats his way to a victory in a local tournament, so what? Will anyone commit sudoku over it? It's just a fucking game, only children cry when they get beaten. Good, honest players will be known. In such a community will there be such paranoia and demonization of cheating as we see in big commercial industry? Absolutely not. Hence the situation turns around: cheating HELPS the game by destroying commercial industries, it helps society keep the small, sincere, noncommercial communities that aren't owned by anyone. And so the question of whether you really are against cheating is the question of whether you want your game commercialized. The correct answer is of course: no, commercialization is always evil, it destroys everything -- for proof take a look at literally anything that a corporation ever took hold of, there is no need to even discuss this. Is a small community less fun than a worldwide commercialized CocaCola-style police state owning your favorite game? No, on the contrary! Is it less fun to see the two champions of your village face each other in a park tournament than it is watching two world class champions face each other on the other side of the planet through the Internet? No, it's probably MORE fun.
Anticheating is a totalitarian cancer and has to be ended. Anticheating goes strictly against freedom and anarchist ideas because it requires an authority, a kind of police, surveillance, punishment mechanisms and so on. Technically speaking anticheating can be implemented in two main ways, both of which are highly harmful. First one is the antivirus/DRM way and requires invading the player's computer with spyware that checks he is not running any cheating programs -- this of course comes with ensuring the player is rid of control over his own machine so that he's not able to prevent the anticheating program to do its job, so this is absolutely unacceptable for anyone supporting free software. The other way is mathematical, based on just observing the games and statistically deciding whether the player cheats or not -- this is better in not having to take away the user's freedom over his own machine, however it takes away the freedom to behave however one desires and it dictates you always have to play the same way (and, naturally, is imperfect and comes with false positives etc.). For example a great indicator of cheating in chess is that someone takes the same time to think about every move, it's unnatural and not how normal humans plays, so if someone plays like it he is labeled a cheater. But what if someone WANTS to play like it? What if someone makes it a self imposed challenge to make every move in exactly three seconds? Anticheater cults says you mustn't do it and you have to conform to how everyone else plays, that if you're just an amateur trying to have fun in unconventional ways you're unimportant and must try to approach the game how professionals approach it: the game suddenly becomes a tyranny of the people who are serious about it, fun and creativity disappears. Similarly they say that it is, for example, statistically impossible for a 1500 rated player to suddenly play ten moves in a row like a 2500 rated player so if this occurs, you're again labeled a cheater and banned. But what if someone is 2500 rated and has been purposefully playing like a 1500 until now to keep a moment of surprise for a difficult opponent? Then we observe the same thing under completely legit circumstances. Now the anticheating cult will even go aggressive on you and they will attack you for breaking their badly designed system (which is designed to abuse you in the first place), they will ban you for trolling and advise you to kill yourself. No fun or diversity of play is allowed in anticheating world, only normality is allowed, otherwise statistics won't work. But people who accept anticheating measures are much more likely to later on accept the same measures implemented in other parts of their life as well (see also slowly boiling the frog).
In a good society, such as LRS, cheating is not an issue at all, there's no incentive for it (people don't have to prove their worth by their skills, there are no money, people don't worship heroes, ...) and there are no negative consequences of cheating worse than someone ragequitting an online game -- which really isn't an issue of cheating anyway but simply a consequence of unskilled player facing a skilled one (whether the pro's skill is natural or artificial doesn't play a role, the nub will ragequit anyway). In a good society cheating can become a mild annoyance at worst, and it can really be a positive thing, it can be fun -- seeing for example a skilled pro face and potentially even beat a cheater is a very interesting thing. If someone wants to win by cheating, why not let him? Valid answers to this can only be given in the context of a shit society that creates cults of personality out of winners etc. In a good society choosing to cheat in a game is as if someone chooses to fly to the top of a mountain by helicopter rather than climbing it -- the choice is everyone's to make.
The fact that cheating isn't after all such an issue is supported by the hilariously vastly different double standards applied e.g. by chess platforms in this matter, on one hand they state in their TOS they have absolutely 0% tolerance of any kind of cheating/assistance and will lifeban players for the slightest suspicion of cheating yelling "WE HAVE TO FIGHT CHEATING", on the other hand they allow streamers literally cheat on a daily basis on live stream where everyone is seeing it, of course because streamers bring them money -- ALL top chess streamers (chessbrah, Nakamura, ...), including the world champion Magnus Carlsen himself, have videos of themselves getting advice on moves from the chat or even from high level players present during the stream, Magnus Carlsen is filmed taking over his friend's low rated account and winning a game which is the same as if the friend literally just used an engine to win the game, and Magnus is also filmed getting an advice from a top grandmaster on a critical move in a tournament that won him the game and granted him a FINANCIAL PRIZE. World chess champion is literally filmed winning money by cheating and no one cares because it was done as part of a highly lucrative stream "in a fun/friendly mood". Chessbrah streams ordinarily consist of many viewers in the room just giving advice on moves to the one who is currently playing, of course they censor all comments that try to bring up the fact that this is 100% cheating directly violating the platform's TOS. People literally have no brains, they only freak out about cheating when they're told to by the industry, when cheating is good for business people are told to shut up because it's okay and indeed they just shut up and keep consuming.
It's impossible to prevent cheating, contrary to what capitalists want you to believe. Even the people who specialize in "catching cheaters", such as the YouTuber Karl Jobst, admit there are always ways of cheating in undetectable ways if one is smart, which could potentially only be addressed by taking absolute control of the player's computer (removing freedom) and implementing absolute surveillance (remote surveillance over cameras is NOT sufficient) -- he even made a video about Minecraft cheaters who admitted to their cheating and revealed their methods which have shown that while they made one fatal mistake that gave them away, they were also using many methods that simply went undetected because they were undetectable, such as slight probability manipulations, and they weren't detected even when their cheated speedruns were already known to be faked and were put under a microscope, i.e. the methods were revealed ONLY because the cheater revealed them. As always a capitalist will want to sell you the idea that anything can be achieved by investing enough money, that if they pay 100 experts on cheating and 100 experts on programming, they will create a miraculous algorithm that will catch any cheater. This is just theatre like any other business, we must realize that some things simply cannot be done. Even if you pay 100 experts on mathematics, you won't be able to solve something that's mathematically impossible -- but for the same amount of money you can convince people that you can. Let's continue with chess -- to prevent cheating, two players would have to be seated naked in an electromagnetically isolated soundproof box with no view outside, only with the chessboard. We know we can't do this, maybe we can come close during world championship, a match between two physically present humans, but not so much in over the board tournaments with hundreds of people around, players and spectators, who can freely walk around, go to the toilet, privacy has to be respected, people can communicate with undetectable visual signals, security and arbiters make errors, they're tired, under stress, lazy and negligent, can be bribed (or you may simply bribe a poor cleaning lady to smuggle you a phone to the toilet) and so on. However that's still nothing compared to online chess -- to think cheating can be prevented there is absolute madness and stupidity. All that can be done is to show exemplary punishments of a few blatant cheaters to create the illusion that cheating is eliminated. Cheating can't be prevented, you can only make people not notice them too much by eliminating those whose cheating is too obvious. There can exist no algorithm that will reliably detect a cheater from play alone (or even from a huge set of games), it's mathematically impossible -- like Daniil Dubov said: "the algorithms only detect idiots" and likewise it can be said that the existence of such algorithms only comforts idiots. A smart cheater won't be caught, only the stupidest that copy paste every single move from the latest stockfish will be spotted and publicly executed to assure the audience that "cheaters will get caught", but the smart ones won't be, those that will use the engine only sometimes, in critical situations, who will combine different engines and their older versions so that the moves will never match an output of any single one. There is no way to tell if a player is simply good because he sees the moves with his brain or because he sees them with an aid of a computer. Not even multi angle cameras all around watching the player would prevented cheating, there are thousands of ways to cheat this (feed false video, feed false audio while listening to advice, buy a miniature earbud, anal bead, use Morse code tapping on the floor, let someone wave you signals through the window from the camera's blind spot, let someone communicate you advice through a single pixel on your screen that will get lost in video compression, ...). Of course the capitalist won't let you see the algorithms or his data, he'll say "trust us, we have a good algorithm and we are reducing cheating to minimum", he'll say the details can't be made public so that cheaters won't exploit the knowledge (security through obscurity), but the real reason is simply that revealing the details would show their system doesn't really work. As always, they're only selling you an illusion.
Back in the day of early Internet there were practically no anticheating measures in online games and everything worked -- yes, cheaters did appear, but we must realize that it's not like EVERYONE will start to cheat immediately if there are no anticheat mechanisms. If you swim in a pool, you may sometimes drink someone's piss and if you play online games, you may sometimes meet a cheater -- unless you're a mentally unstable pussy, you can take it no problem. The existence of anticheat mechanisms may itself incite cheating even more by the effect of forbidden fruit, it becomes a challenge (and to some even business) to beat the system. If top 100 places in the ladder are all obvious cheaters, will anyone see any more fun joining them? No. If you have the need to compare yourself to others, just form a group of friends who you know don't cheat and compare your score or ratings among each other, ignore the anonymous cheaters. "B-but I want a whole multibillion dollar capitalist industry existing around my gayme else I can't enjoy it properly" -- well, then fuck you, you're broken and beyond saving, you are why everything sucks nowadays.
Anticheating also doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to ban cheating? Usually you'll get these answers:
{ Because I advocate acceptance of cheating people may perhaps think I like to cheat myself and may be asking if I ever cheated in online games or similar competition. The answer is: 100% NO, I don't see a slightest point in cheating -- I would cheat if I enjoyed it but there is completely zero value in doing it for me personally, so I never did and never even thought about it, I never even helped myself with a little cheat in legit playthroughs of singleplayer games, I think that's only for pussies and women and it would absolutely kill my joy of finishing the game, I usually even refuse to play games on non-hard difficulty. If I ever played online games, I did it for enjoyment of the play itself and many times for testing how good I can get, cheating would help me with neither. I only ever used cheats in "sandbox" plays of offline games like GTA, when I simply want to become god and rain havoc on the world, but this is absolutely standard and accepted even by normies, so not much point in even mentioning this. Think about the motivation behind cheating: online cheating is NEVER done for satisfying a need of accomplishment, the cheater himself KNOWS he didn't legitimately achieve the victory, i.e. cheating is done for other reasons -- sometimes lighthearted trolling and fun (which actually is probably a cool reason), but most often the reason is following: ATTENTION. Online cheater cheats not to feel accomplishment but to gain attention, fame, followers, to masturbate his egoism and/or to mine some money, power and other advantages from the online attention capital. It's basically pure capitalism: he sees an opportunity for profit, it's like business, and so he simply grabs it -- it doesn't even matter what the business in question is, it's more of seeing a hole in the market, potential for abuse, a place to be filled, like seeing money on the ground: he simply can't leave it lying there, for him there is no ethics or shame, just a "stupidity of not taking an opportunity". Hopefully it's clear I'm not in a slightest interested in behaving like a cretin capitalist monkey, and that I find it quite filthy, retarded, unethical and good only for Americans maybe, hence it should be pretty clear why I am not interested in cheating. However I still think the option to cheat should be open, so that people can decide themselves whether to cheat or not. ~drummyfish }
WORK IN PROGRESS
Here will be a general advice on how to cheat in online games and similar kinds of competition.
NOTE: obviously a lot of this advice revolves around competition, a concept that's itself mostly unethical, so naturally a lot of the advice given here is likewise not embraced by LRS, but it's simply how you cheat well in current society. In a good society that accepts cheating things would actually get much better, it would get easier to cheat and would no longer for example require lying, you'd just declare you're cheating and be fine.
Powered by nothing. All content available under CC0 1.0 (public domain). Send comments and corrections to drummyfish at disroot dot org.