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Author: Nogame
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Bot Accusations
One of the most cherished past-times of a strong player is to go into a public free-for-all server and get accused of botting. It happens quite often, and while most good players say nothing, it doesn’t help the community when the accusations fly. It’s always been a fun topic in-game however when people make bot accusations they don’t really know what they’re talking about. I always figured someone had to educate these fools, so here’s my chance!
Bot accusations are a common occurrence on public servers because people just aren’t used to having someone come in and beat them by such a large margin. People have a hard time understanding how someone that played the same game they do, could get so much better then they have. If this were just the case, they’d normally leave the server but a few years ago bots were introduced and this changed everything.
Basically the way I see bots among the general public (ie: public free for all players), is like a virus. Not the bots themselves, but the concept of what a bot is. It’s like a virus in the fact that it spreads so rapidly throughout servers though instead of sex or needles this virus gets spread by ignorance. Though there are truckloads of bot accusations I’d say maybe 1 percent of these accusations are accurate.
The First Time I Saw a Bot
I remember hearing my first story about bots. Someone said they had a quake 2 demo from someone’s perspective that was cheating. Obviously I was extremely skeptical because being a professional gamer, I knew that people were always quick to point fingers at things they couldn’t explain. The main thing I remember was the phrase ‘an impossible rail’. I simply thought ‘well if someone got railed, it had to have been possible or it wouldn’t have happened.’ Then I loaded up the demo.
This player soon became immortalized for using a bot. The unfortunate thing is that the player was good, and may have just been testing out the bot to see what it was capable of, but he ruined his reputation forever and in the process pretty much banned himself from any competitive gameplay. His team had to live with this stigma for a very long time. That player’s name was Desys.
The demo basically showcased Desys playing his personal friend Symbolic in a 1 v 1, while a spectator recorded a demo from Desys’ perspective. It was extremely obvious that the vertical sensitivity was insanely high and that it would stay focused on the other player very consistently. The horizontal sensitivity seemed to be normal and didn’t differ too much from what I used at the time.
After not really understanding why his vertical sensitivity was so high, the demo went on and he eventually jumped over a large drop and then I saw the impossible rail. While he was in mid air simply jumping over a ravine the crosshair immediately aimed straight down, railed his opponent and immediately adjusted straight forward again. This happened at such an unbelievably fast pace I would have missed it if I wouldn’t have been focused on the screen. Ironically enough, I don’t think Desys realized what happened either.
I watched the demo a few more times just because it was the only thing I had seen like it. I also wanted to understand how it worked so that if I came along a bot on a server, I could effectively call it out while not looking like an idiot.
Since then and now I’ve been accused of being a bot probably over 200 times. This is nothing special since most people in my circles go through the same thing whenever they go on a public server. Every once in a while I’m pulled into a discussion about it and I try to de-credit their points of why they think I am a bot. After realizing that it isn’t possible to reason with an irrational person I usually stop.
Also, in 10 years of my professional gaming career (keep in mind I did not play counterstrike) I’ve ran across less than 10 bots.
To this day however, I have never used a bot, neither out of curiosity or to cheat. To my knowledge, none of my teammates ever have either. A lot of the reason was after the Desys’ ordeal, I never wanted to have my name associated with botting especially when I was competing so heavily.
How to Spot a Bot
Now that I’ve gone through a very lengthy background on my history with botting I’ll go into what a bot actually does and how you can determine whether that really good player on the server is botting or kicking ass.
The irony about bots is they usually don’t win games. Bot users are usually the people who don’t know how to play at all, so they get these bots and just figure it’ll help out. The problem with this is those players have no understanding on what areas to focus on, when to use what weapons and how to really do anything. So these players generally want to get that 1 weapon, be it railgun, shock rifle or lightning gun. As they run from their spawn to these guns, they usually get killed very quickly because they don’t know how to dodge or move, and sometimes the only thing they know about the map is where to find the hitscan weapons.
Another funny thing about players who use bots, they usually have no clue how to move around. They don’t use a lot of fancy dodging or strafe jumping. They just aim really well. So if you are moving around like a bat out of hell and this guy never misses a shot, though he gets hit by every thing you throw at em, he could be a bot. While you learn to play, your aim increases more or less at the same rate your movement abilities increase. If someone’s aim is amazing, yet their movement is horrible, there is an obvious imbalance. This is not an exact science because I know people who have horrible aim, but can dodge extremely well.
What a bot actually is, is a third-party program that runs at the same time as your game. This program can see other players while you play your game. You can adjust how much of an fov the bot has (field of vision), which means that if your bot has an fov of 0, then he wont be helping you aim, but if he has an fov of 30, he’ll find any players that are within 30 degrees of your crosshair (this can be set for vertically or horizontally). Now if the bot has his fov set on 360 degrees, his crosshair will lock onto any player that is visible no matter where he is in location the player (even front). The higher fov the easier it is to notice that the guy is a bot, just because he tends to spin around in circles a lot when he shoots. The reason why a bot’s sensitivity may look higher then normal, is because his crosshair has to instantly lock on to the opponent. The reason why it appears that the sensitivity is higher then normal is the bot has to instantly put the crosshair on the opponent, and if that opponent is far away from the crosshair, the mouse sensitivity appears to increase as the crosshair locks on to the player.
Some game types have kills and deaths visible on the scoreboard. Since bots only do one thing very well, which is aim, they usually never really get a great ratio on the scoreboards. They may get a great deal of kills, but they’ll die plenty of times because they really don’t know what they’re doing as far as defense. So when a player wins a game and gets an outstanding ratio such as 50-3, that player probably isn’t a bot, because bots are good for offense, not defense. With 50-3 that player had to have timed power-ups and hoarded armor to finish the game in such a manner.
As for the very talented players who play competitively… I haven’t seen a bot in that crowd for years. Simply because anti-cheat software has gotten much better, game companies are making their games a little more air-tight and for the simple fact that the competitive gaming community has grown very tightly knit. Everyone knows what everyone else is capable of doing, so using a bot is pretty obvious.
The Ultimate Bot Accusation
Maybe it’s partly because I’m a programmer, but when I beat someone up on a server and they promptly say ‘You are a Hacker!’ I have to regain composure from disbelief and usually get killed in the process. Not only is that player ignorant of bots and playing the game, but also just plain stupid for pulling out the h4x0r card.
Yes, those pesky hackers who bypass the world’s toughest security systems to get into private areas and often deface and vandalize property have banded together to make a mighty Unreal bot! That’s right, they’re time finding leaks in security systems wasn’t valuable so they thought it was better spent coding a bot.
Programmers make bots! Hacker’s are too intelligent to waste their time with such insignificant things! Hackers have a negative connotation and so do bots, so I suppose that’s the connection between the two. However, this by far, is the single most ignorant type of bot accusation on the planet.
In Summary
When a player cries ‘bot’, usually all that player is doing is showing his ignorance. While there is a valid chance that someone could be botting, the chances of this happening nowadays are very slim (perhaps minus counter strike). Even if his speculation is completely correct, you do nothing more than make the bot user happier with your ranting. If the bot user wanted anything more out of you than anger and angst, he wouldn’t be botting in the first place. Your reaction just fuels him to stay on the server that much longer.
So as the world turns and ignorant players flatter the better players with bot accusations, I bid thee farewell.
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