Let’s make the Formula One of cheats

titanfall respawn entertainment ea

Respawn may have been joking when they created “the Wimbledon of aimbot contests” but I’d like to see someone actually turn cheating into a contest. I think we’ve the potential for a new (albeit niche) eSport here.

Cheaters ruin multiplayer. Players using aimbots and other hacks rule the top of a match’s leaderboards through no skill of their own but as a result of plugging in code that lets them see through walls, fire instant headshots automatically, and dodge incoming bullets. It’s not just that cheaters ruin a specific game but they create paranoia amongst a community that any skilled player could be hacking the game.

I see that, I do. I also see something amazing in that; or, rather, the potential for something amazing. A lone cheat on a server of normal players is a massacre. Two hackers is a contest. A whole server might well be an entirely new competition. Who has the more efficient aimbot? Who among the enhanced super players will win? Think of it as the Formula One of cheats.

In Formula One the drivers are only a part of what makes a successful team. It’s the engineers who design and build the most efficient machine. The engineers push the mechanical possibilities afforded by the rules laid down by the race authority. Each season they have to make a vehicle that works better within the restrictions of the sport than their competitors’.

Titanfall cheat coders have to create an aimbot that works within the constraints of Titanfall. And, if they were encouraged to do so within a cheat league, the coders would have to come up with more ingenious methods to make something that would beat their competitors.

On the PCGamesN podcast we suggested ghettoising players, shuttling those with low spec machines off to their own server to create living space for those of us with better machines. That’s not what Respawn have done, they’ve created a haven from which we can start an Olympics of cheaters. And it wouldn’t be just any Olympics, either. Respawn have made the equivalent of an Olympics for the athletes pumped to the gills with steroids and doped blood, those athletes who, through a mixture of drug cocktails, have become living supermen.

We can do something similar. And we won’t even need to poke ourselves with needles.