Exploiting and hacking

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I’m going to school to major in cyber security, and one relevant topic that I just do not understand and probably wont learn for another few years is the idea of exploiting and hacking online games. When I read about how people make aimbots for games and how people adjust their online ranks to be able to play against people much lower rank than them and win everytime, it just confuses me. How are people able to change their online rank to be able to do that. And how do people go about doing that in general?

In: Technology

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, losing rank is easy. It’s called throwing. No aim-bots or wall hacks necessary. Basically, you intentionally make bad choices and sabatoge your game. That tricks the game’s matchmaker into thinking you’re worse than you actually are. Alternatively, you can have a smurf account; ie a secondary account that has never seen you play at your best, and therefore doesnt know how good you actually are.

In the opposite direction, artificially gaining rank requires that you somehow play better than you actually are. That’s done via aim-bots, seeing through walls, or having someone else play for you. This tricks the matchmaker into thinking you are better than you actually are.

For my overwatch games, it works like this. I have a Skill Rating (SR) of 2000. When I play ranked, the matchmaker will place me with other people who have similar SR’s. When I lose a game, I will lose 25SR. I can throw by intentionally not pulling my weight, and my team will probably lose, and I will lose that 25 SR. Repeated 20 times, and I’ll be facing people that are at 1500SR and truly be able to dominate.

Increasing my SR is much more difficult because it requires that I either have better information, better aim, or stop making mistakes. External programs can help with the first two. But aimbot looks very distinctive when the game shows you your killer’s view, and if you’re able to know where someone is when you had no fair way of knowing can also be obvious. That’s why Blizzard has report functions in addition to scanning for potentially unfair programs. Obviously, getting a better player to play for me would raise my SR. Either of those would boost my SR higher than I could fairly maintain by myself at my current level of play.

Both would probably be easier than actually hacking into the game’s system and manually changing the values for my SR, so hacking a game generally refers to aimbots, wall hacks, or other data collection programs.

As for why….people are dumb sometimes. They want easy games, or a higher rank, even if it’s not real.

Anonymous 0 Comments

So let’s take Overwatch as an example for this, because it has a lot of its rankings in the open.

It has two scores for every player: A hidden score (MMR) and a public score (SSR).

The MMR is how it will match you with similar players in a non-competitive game. For Overwatch, it tracks how you perform for each character.

For an Attack character, it will track our aim percentage, kill/death ratio, damage dealt and time doing the objective.

The Tank will be ranked similarly, but more for blockind and absoring damage than dealing damage.

The Support characters are ranked more for assists and healing their teammates.

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So what people will do, without cheating or any other devices, is lose on purpose. They die a lot without doing much of anything. This will cause their MMR values to go down, placing them with other players who also have low values.

Now they’ve dropped down and are paired with other players who have low scores. These people have low scores for two reasons:

1. They are new to the game and are still learning.

2. They are just bad and won’t learn.

[](/sp)

Now this player who purposely dropped down can have free reign to do almost whatever they want in a lower rank, even though they should be in a higher one, but played the system to force him to drop.

Commonly known as *Griefing* or *Throwing*, these people ruin the game for their teammates.

People will also buy separate accounts to play on, making the game place them in lower ranked games as the account is new. These people are called *Smurfs* as they purposely play in a lower rank than they should be.