Cheating in Esports Is Starting to Receive the Attention It Deserves
Cheating in sports has been prevalent since sports were created many years ago. There have been scandals in every sport from the Olympics to Esports. No matter what the sport, people find a way to cheat.
As described in an article by Bleacher Report, there are many examples of cheating in sports history. Examples include the famous MLB betting scandals of Pete Rose and the Black Sox, Spygate, Deflategate and any case of Performance Enhancing Drugs (PEDs).
Each of these cases was different in its own way, but the end result was that a game was altered in some way because someone cheated. There is also always controversy when handing out punishments for these cases because some people do not always agree with how much or how little athletes are punished for their actions.
Esports also has a history of cheating, but its forms of cheating are different from cheating mentioned for other sports. An article by Engadet.com goes through the history of cheating in Esports.
The article details how cheating in video games started in 1985 when the Konami Code was established for the game Gradius. Since then cheating began to become more popular. Examples mentioned by the article include cheat codes in Mortal Kombat and Sonic the Hedgehog.
The article goes on to describe how Nintendo began to sell “Tips and Tricks” for their games in 1995. Then it mentioned how cheating began a bad issue later on when people started to play video games online against each other. These cheats created an unfair playing ground when playing online.
There are many examples of modern day cheating including aimbots, hacks, glitches and more. As mentioned in Engadget’s article, many gaming companies have created software that focuses on detecting any form of cheating. That software is able to detect any type of cheating quickly and kick those users out of the game.
The article also described how cheating has occurred in professional esports games and tournaments. Teams and specific players have been removed from high profile tournaments because they have been caught cheating in different ways. Being caught cheating has cost those players and teams a lot of money and popularity in the esports world.
An example of this described in Engadget’s article is when a player on OpTic, a CS:GO 2018 team was caught cheating in a tournament with one hundred thousand dollars on the line.
Recently, cheating has made its way into the Fortnite community as according to this article from Polygon.com This past April, Epic games banned around 1200 accounts from participating in the World Cup because they had been caught using various cheating tactics.
Here at NOVOS, we do not condone cheating, we understand how it has become a negative part of gaming. We focus on promoting a great environment where we focus on improvement through being honest and helping each other. We believe anyone can take their game to the next level if they work hard enough.
It is important as a gamer to look out for anyone cheating and to stay away from them. We hope that Esports is able to rid itself of all cheaters so it can stay an honest game that everyone can enjoy!
