5 Disgusting Ways Cheaters Ruined Games For Everyone

5 New World Players Take Every Chance To Steal Land

New World is the huge multiplayer game from Amazon, with a sky-high player base and an even higher number of absurd game-breaking bugs. Like the title indicates, the game is all about ravaging and conquering the new world ... sorry, we mean "settling" the new world. And this opened the game to the most thematic of exploits. 

Right before a turf war, players will file reports complaining about their opponents. Thanks to these reports, Amazon bans the opponents, preventing them for participating in the battle. The land they owned? It's now ripe for the taking. 

Many players have complained about inexplicable bans, to which the company replied that the victims were probably getting removed for a fair reason. Hey, Amazon, you know who else said that? Every colonizing power in history, you MONSTERS. 

Bans are actually a great tool for empowering cheaters. Here's another example of that: 

4 Players Use Bots To Ban Innocent CS:GO Players

Remember when hackers just made use of evil programs to win games? There was a time when cheats allowed naughty players to never miss a headshot, see through walls, or simply have hilariously long-reaching arms. Nowadays, cheaters are not only bypassing anti-cheat systems, but straight-up turning them against 'roidless players. 

Valve came up a system for players to review matches, to retroactively catch cheaters and remove them from ranked play. This system is called Overwatch (not to be confused with the video game of the same name, the one that spawns all that porn). It worked pretty well with Valve's automated anti-cheating software, VAC. But it was still flawed, and skilled cheaters could bypass the system due to benefit-of-the-doubtitis.

Sometimes, though, Valve receives a whole lot of reports about a player, too many to ignore, and so they ban them. Problem is, maybe those reports are coming from cheaters themselves, who've unleashed an army of robots to mass-report the innocent player. They wait till their opponent does something perfectly innocent that might be misinterpreted as questionable (like stepping away from the keyboard for a minute), then send a massive number of complaints against them. 

For a while there, no one was safe, from random players to prolific ones. Luckily, Valve states those days are over. Well, that's relief. Now we just have to wait for the next massive security flaw to screw things up for everyone. 

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3 Making Up A Disability Ban In Path Of Exile

Even when not getting exploited by vile players, automated bans can fail catastrophically and hit the wrong people. There may be perfectly reasonable explanations behind those unusual playstyles that an algorithm flags as problematic. For example, maybe the player's not cheating—maybe they're disabled. 

This past April, a user calling himself "Poe Legal" told the world he'd got banned from Path Of Exile. His offense? He'd been using macros to simulate keystrokes. But he wasn't doing that so he could hit keys faster than the game normally allows. He did it because he was physically unable to hit keys the regular way. Thanks to a workplace accident, he'd lost all the fingers on one hand, and a few other fingers on the other. 

Wow, that's a really sad story. It's also not true. Turned out the forum user in question was neither disabled nor banned. 

What a dick. Probably, he wanted to stir up extra anger toward the Path of Exile crew for unknown reasons, but the video game company isn't the one who'll take the biggest hit from this. It'll be the next person who complains about getting wrongly banned, only to have everyone say, "Haha, likely story. You're probably not really disabled at all!"

2 A Hacker Ruins A Glorious Pokémon Record 

Remember 2016? It's the year we used to call “the crazy one” before all the consecutively worse ones we've had since? That distant year blessed us with a short period that might very well have been the last breath of happiness in the history of Western civilization. We call it the time of Pokémon Go. A dumb and fun little app got many people out of their homes so they could catch Pokémon and have fun. Yes, we'd really like to believe people used to do this and that these aren't just memory implants.

Since not long after the release of Pokémon Go, and up until recently, a player named BootsMade4Walking had held a Pokémon gym for the absolute record time of 1,331 days. Such a totally arbitrary number of days naturally called for a celebration, which got Mr. Boots to announce it online. That was a mistake—his last one as a gym leader—because as soon as he got to start the celebration, his gym's location became known to the internet, and it took no longer than a few minutes for a cheater to pull the rug from underneath his feet and steal the gym for himself.

What makes it even sadder is that Boots deliberately chose a gym in an impressively remote location, but that didn't matter. Cheaters are literally omnipresent, meaning that they can gain access to any gym from the comfort of their Dorito-stained couch.

Rainbow 6 Siege has various different characters, One of the best-designed is “Doc," who plays the traditional role of a healer in the made-for-the-game profession of “medical doctor." Doc's abilities include shooting bullets at teammates that cure them from other bullets. This powerful healer was even more powerful at some point when he featured such a powerhouse of a glitch that nearly broke the game. 

This glitch let medics constantly churn out medic juice, which let teams constantly regenerate their health. The sweet sweet doc juice was so game-changing that it had entire teams pressuring players to pick the Doc, then bullying their Docs to abuse the glitch. Docs who didn't abandon their Hippocratic oath would get euthanized by their own teammates.

This glitch created an unintentionally great social experiment, one that revealed an ugly truth about the game's community. Usually, most players hate cheaters—even those who are on their teams. But this was different. Whether it was because the ones bullying the Docs didn't see it as “breaking the game," or because real-life doctors are pretty overpowered as well, this glitch was enough to reveal that most players care more about easily achieving a higher rank than they care about playing better. Team spirit is a suit sewn using very cheap fabric. Or something to that effect.