this is an Aimbot it lets you automatically aim and fire at others with the simple push of a button it's just one of the many ways people cheat in online multiplayer games but why do they use them and how do they actually work cheating or gaining an unfair advantage over others can mean a lot of things especially since what this unfair Advantage is depends a lot on the objective of the game it can sometimes be achieved through bugs or glitches that cause unintended Behavior without the need of any external tools but nowadays cheating is much
more centered around the use of these external tools that modify the way the game works why someone would use these cheats generally comes down to two factors ego and profit on the ego side you usually find people that lack the skills to be good at the game they then resort to downloading programs off of shady forms on the internet sometimes even paying for them to make themselves feel better than they actually are they basically only do it without any particular reason outside of enjoying themselves and this is where the profit cheaters are slightly different profit
the cheaters can be both the ones that actually make the cheats and the ones that use them for profit looking at games with millions of players on a daily basis if a cheat that people were willing to buy was licensed for like $10 a week that can quickly turn into massive amounts of money for its maker even with a tiny percentage of players using it but the way people that use these cheats make money is a bit different every game has some sort of boring repetitive task to get things like levels in-game currency items skins
and basically anything that can be obtained by playing the game for a long time what these people then do is get these things as efficiently as possible thanks to the cheats they're using to then sell them in online marketplaces marketplaces where millions of dollars worth of virtual goods are sold on a weekly basis the most common ones being accounts and in-game currency let's take League of Legends accounts for example if you give people a choice between playing around 150 hours or paying $10 for a level 30 account most people would choose to pay and since
companies are losing money because of cheaters having better offers it's in their best interest to be as discreet as possible to not get caught and have their methods patched which is why the word cheater probably reminds you of someone flying around the map and not the basement operations full of computers cheating for profit but how do these cheats actually work the programs that people use to cheat basically classify into three categories Bots mod menus and network acts a bot refers to a program that automates something let's say you had a mission where you had to
walk from point A to B and every time you walk back and forth you get points the simplest type of Bot a macro bot repeats a simple set of actions so for example pressing right to move to point B and then left to go back to a which can then be repeated infinitely after being recorded once the problem with this kind of Bot is that it relies on things being simple and never changing if there was a chance that a wall appeared the bot would get stuck since it would keep repeating the same set of
actions over and over again without knowing that the wall exists the same problem can be seen in the game Piano Tiles since it's impossible to predict the order these black tiles will come in so a microbot just wouldn't work and this is where reactive Bots come in a reactive bot is similar to a macro the only difference being that it can react to a condition in the piano tiles example the bot could react to the condition of there being a black tile present on the screen and if the condition matches it can perform an action
like clicking the detected tile the way the bot can tell when things are happening basically comes down to visual recognition memory access and network traffic for example let's take a scenario where you have a health bar and when it reaches 50% you want to use a heal spell with the visual recognition method you would simply check if the color of this pixel right here in the middle is red because if it's not red that means that the health is below 50% so you heal so it's sort of looking for visual elements on the screen like
color as a condition the memory access method consists of finding the number for the health located somewhere in the computer's memory once this number has been found it can be checked maybe once every second and then used as a condition for healing this method is convenient because if the color were to change which would have broken the visual recognition method the value itself will remain the same since it's just a number meaning it would still work similarly the network traffic method also uses a value as a condition as the server and the game are communicating
the server might send a message that looks like you now have 49 Health to the device which can then be read and used as a condition the second type of cheat a mod menu is a program that directly accesses the memory of a game running on your device and changes its values to give you an unfer advantage to explain this let's take a game of tic tac to to while you the player might see a fancy user interface with symbols colors and animations it's important to understand that everything in a computer is representable by numbers
this game board could be represented like this a grid of nine numbers one number per square in the game and these values representing what the numbers could mean what a mod menu then does is find where this grid of numbers is in your computer's memory and then let you modify its values in a way that gives you an advantage like changing an opponent Square to your own to win the game the final category Network hacks means messing with the information between the device and server for example let's say that every time you want to buy
something like a sword your device sends the server a message that looks like I bought one sword what could be done here is a replacement attack which consists of taking this information as it's being sent to the server and then changing your value like sword to gun 1 to 900 before sending it further which could then give you what you asked for another type of attack is a duplication attack so if you for example completed a quest that rewards you with money you capture the I completed the quest packet being sent to the server multiply
it as many times as you want and then send all of the copies to get the same reward multiple times all of these methods are sometimes used together in order to get that unfair Advantage but one massive problem with these two methods in particular is that they often do not work and for that you need to understand that multiplayer games have something called a server which is why you get the popup asking you to connect to the server when trying to open them without an internet connection a server is basically a place that the game
connects to that that receives and sends information it also stores some of this information like levels money and items the most important thing to understand is that the value on the server cannot be directly changed or accessed and whether a cheat works or not will depend on how it's programed to work when the game is opened it needs to know things like how much money you have and since this information is stored on the server a copy is created and sent to your device this means that the information now exists twice the original on the
server and the copy on the device meaning that even if the device's copy was modified the server will still have the original value let's say that you currently have 100 coins and you want to buy a sword that costs 500 both the server and device currently say you have 100 coins if you were to use memory modification to make your device think it has 1,000 coins and then buy the item a I want to buy one sword message would be sent to the server as this message is being received two things can happen in the
first case the server is going to Simply assume that the information coming from the device is always correct this means that it will allow the purchase of the sword in the second case it's going to double check how much money you actually have on the server's database and then see that you don't have enough to buy the sword meaning that it's going to fail this concept of checking whether what the user sent is correct or not is called validation it's the thing that makes sure you write an email with the ad signed and an extension
at the end but as games are becoming larger and larger it becomes increasingly more difficult to make sure that every aspect of the game is properly secured and validated and as long as people are willing to pay someone will eventually figure it out this video is sponsored by brilliant learn more about how computers work with interactive quizzes that have graphical explanations to better help you understand what you're trying to learn by actually doing it they offer hundreds of different courses for maths physics and my personal favorite computer science get 20% off an annual subscription by
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