Understanding Cheating in Counterstrike

Introduction

Ever since Counterstrike catapulted to being the most widely played First-Person Shooter online, it has been plagued repeatedly by crackers who maliciously modified the game or introduced scripts to allow for cheating to take place. This has not only dampened the spirit of multiplayer gaming across the Internet, it has also resulted in a multitude of complaints by gamers who kept hounding Valve to develop patches to counter these cheats.

In this article, we will explore the concepts of cheating by delving into an explanation of how Counterstrike functions on the Internet, the types of cheating involved, and how our graphics cards render scenes on the monitor to you, the gamer. We'll thus be able to explain why it's practically impossible to eliminate cheating completely, and also possess some fundamental knowledge on how these games we play work on the Internet and on our computers.

I'll try to explain these concepts in terms that a common non-nerd Counter-Strike gamer would be familiar with, since what we're dealing with here is not a technical discourse on what these crackers actually do to the game code itself or which parts of code they exploit.