How to detect a cheater in CS 1.6

Today we're going to talk about something you shouldn't be doing at any game: cheating in Counter-Strike 1.6. More precisely we're going to be talking about how to detect a cheater and to distinguish between a skilled player and a hacker. Normally it isn't hard to do, however, sometimes it isn't as easy. Therefore it is very important to learn how to separate a skillful player from a phony cheating fraud. And these mistakes happen on a regular basis, it isn't rear for a good player to be banned from a server after a series of successful kills. That is due to the fact that some people aren't the best when it comes to identifying a cheater.

To be honest these individuals should not be in an admin position to begin with but there's not much to do about that so let's just move on to how to identify a cheater and to differentiate them from a skillful gamer. First of all there's different types of cheating, some of which include hacking (special software injection that allows to make changes inside the game), some scripts and some forbidden game files like models. But let's start with the most popular ones and such are hacks.
Wallhack — the most famous cheat also known as WH. Like its name suggests, the main purpose of it is to make the walls inside the game transparent, making it easy to understand enemy's location and either shoot and kill through the wall or at least be prepared when they show up to open fire exactly when it's needed. For obvious reasons it isn't very hard to spot this type of cheating especially for an admin using a special plugin called Admin Spectator ESP. It enables admin to look at the gameplay with hacker's eyes and therefore understand if a person is clearly seeing objects through the walls by the way they react and play.

Of course here it's important to take into account such a thing like sound which helps a lot to understand where an enemy is by the sound of their footsteps. Some of the players who play with the headphones on and rely on that a lot often receive a falsely ban for WH. Therefore sometimes it takes time to watch a player closely in order to properly understand whether they are using anything other than the headphones. Still, in most cases this hack is quite easy to spot because most of the time people really try to hide what they're doing. ESP hack is an honorary mention here since it works exactly like WallHack: letting a player see the location of an enemy through walls it is being detected the same way as WH. The next most popular cheat is called AimBot. It is also rather self-explainatory but just to clarify, this cheat is used for auto-aim in order to gain frags. Now, because of how unnatural auto-aiming looks this form of hacking is very easily detectible. Usually the crosshair of an aimer is constantly shaking and kills happen very fast while crosshair jumps from one enemy to another in a matter of milliseconds. However, there's a different version of this hack called just Aim that doesn't actually auto-aim for you, but instead it draws a red square on each enemy which when you aim for and shoot guarantees a kill (normally via headshot).

It is also possible to configure it so that it looks even less suspicious by setting the aim at the chest instead of the head. This type of cheating isn't easy to detect even using special admin plugins. A screenshot however can tell the story more accurately and admins sometimes go for this method by taking a screenshot on the player's side and then asking them to send the result to check if there's anything dubious on the screen. It's also possible to study these players' demos and analyze them with a slower playback speed. The next one up is probably the most impudent and shameless as well as the most obvious cheat called Speed-Hack or SH. It allows for a player to run around the map with 10-20 times the normal moving speed of the game. And while this player is running around they are obviously killing everyone around them with an Aim hack. Needless to say, there's no need for any special plugin to understand when this cheat is being used. Due to severity of it, players usually just quite the server if there's no /voteban option and no admins.

Moving on to No Recoil — a hack that removes recoil from any weapon a player is using. Due to that it's also quite easily detectable since the firing speed usually increases and all bullets are flying straight towards the target. It obviously benefits the cheater making it way easier to use any automatic rifle plus allows to use AWP or Scout the same way as Ak-47. So you can see how effective it is while it is also very visible to any spectator without any additional admin plugins. Now it's time to talk about different kind of cheats: scripts. These aren't using any external software in order to work. Therefore most of them are aimed at rather harmless areas like movement. For example, there's a script for bunnyhopping that allows a player to bunny hop without using the mouse wheel for it. All they need to do is just press a key and the scripts auto bunnyhops for them. Another example is a silent run script. For those who don't know a technique called silent run allows a player to move across the map with a higher speed while simultaneously not making any noise.

While it's a technique that isn't easy to learn, silent run script allows you to do it just by pressing a key. Some servers don't allow neither bunny hop nor silent run all together so even if you're not using a script for it, you can still be kicked or even banned. So if you wish to actually learn any of these techniques, ask about if it's legal on a server before applying it. Of course, there's a whole type of maps called BH_ which is aimed at bunny hopping. Now, on maps like that using a script is considered a serious violation and you will definitely get banned for doing so. Lastly, there are also modified versions of some game files or the deletion of some of them in order to gain an unfair advantage over other players. For example, some players remove the smoke sprite or replace it with an empty one in order to eliminate smoke from the smoke nades. There are also specially created models for sniper rifles such as AWP and Scout that include crosshair right in the center so that a player won't need to use zoon in order to make a kill.

Overall, to sum it up, it is essential for every player to know how to identify a cheater. However, using cheats isn't beneficial for anyone including hackers themselves. Whenever you cheat you do not learn any new skill and if anything it can do for you it is that it will make you lose interest in the game all together. Games are fun because they're competitive and if you take out the competition aspect out of it you lose all of the fun.