Cheating has plagued video games since their inception, but with the rise of eSports, it's more important than ever to keep it under control. Individual players and carefully organized teams are competing for money rather than egos now, and no recent incident better illustrates the legal troubles with stamping it out in official competitions quite like the campaign against a player accused of cheating in the Pro Leagues for Ubisoft's multiplayer shooter Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege.
The current scandal centers on WVS team member Philip Lough, better known by his in-game handle "Clever." After a month of community protests against him, there's been no action against Clever from either Ubisoft or the Electronic Sports League, the German eSports organization that runs Rainbow Six Siege's multiplayer matches.
This isn't just a case of getting rid of an annoying player in a forgettable casual match, as Clever and his team were taking part in Rainbow Six Siege's weekly and monthly Go4R6 competitions that award cash for victories. It's not terribly clear what he would be using to cheat, but YouTube is littered with videos showing how he seemingly has knowledge of what's going on in parts of the map he shouldn't be able to see. This would indicate he's allegedly using some kind of "ESP" or "wall-hacking" cheat, which lets the player see opponents through walls. The key seems to lie with a presumed second monitor off to his right, which he often sneaks peeks at in Twitch footage of his matches.
Last month, "Canadian," the captain of Rainbow Six Siege's Mythic team, released a video (below) compiling nine of the worst of Clever's alleged cheats. In the first clip, Clever points out that there's an enemy player on the stairs despite never actually seeing or hearing him from his location in another part of the map, and he makes no sight contact with said player until he shoots him. Elsewhere, he calls out that he "hears" a player on the third floor, when Clever himself is actually outside the building on the ground. Yet another video from "King Distilled" shows Clever making all kinds of calls that should be impossible.
The argument that's usually thrown out in support of Clever is that he's just looking at information pertaining to his IT business while playing. The problem is that Clever does it almost ceaselessly, though furtively, and usually while he's trying to make precise, sneaky kills that would ostensibly require one's full attention. What's more, at least two Reddit users have pointed out that one can find videos of Clever playing other games in which he never looks at the mystery screen at all.
The twist is that the ESL claimed they'd been looking into the issue since "day one" a month ago. But nothing's been done about it since. In a separate thread from Thursday, the ESL responded to a 1,577-word criticism of its general integrity and its decision to take no action against Clever by saying "we were trying to find anything from legal side which could allow us to ban him. Unfortunately we didn't so we can't ban him."
In a statement posted on Reddit on Friday, the ESL addressed the issue by expressing its support of the anti-cheating measures it already has in place, namely FairFight, a server-based anti-cheating engine, and its own MOSS monitoring system and ESL Anticheat. And in the case of Clever, "none of the tools have so far provided a 100% certainty of a cheat being used." Indeed, even Canadian acknowledged in his video that the second monitor isn't showing up in Clever's MOSS files, but it's clear he's looking at a monitor or at least something.
Image: Ubisoft
"Public suspicions and circumstantial evidence do lead us to investigate, to double check anti-cheat data, to look at all the material, and to fine-tune our detections, but in the end we need to have proof," the ESL said. "Either in the form of hard data from our tools, or a seamless string of evidence based on recorded material that we feel comfortable defending in court."
While some may argue the tactics amount to little more than harassment, the community itself has done a good job of policing the issue. Clever himself appears to have taken a hiatus from the scene, and he deleted both his Twitch account and his Twitter account. The ESL itself noted on Thursday that he hasn't played any matches since the accusatory videos started to surface. Still, even though Clever might not have been too clever when it came to hiding his tactics (if he was truly cheating), his story hints at the possibility that the problem may be far worse than anyone realizes.
The kind of cheats that Clever is accused of using are especially hard to detect if used wisely. It's not as if he enabled a "god mode" that allows him to soak up bullets without worry. Wall-hacking simply lets cheaters see other players through walls, and unless they're being very obvious about it—for example, by constantly looking at the walls instead of checking their corners—they could get away with it for a long time before being caught.
We don't know if Clever is using that kind of cheat, but a quick Google search shows that this type of Rainbow Six Siege cheat is currently for sale, and that the people who sell it claim that it is currently undetected, meaning ESL's anti-cheat won't be able to find it. You can see what it looks like in the video below.
Rainbow Six Siege's PC release, in fact, has been dogged by problems with cheating since its release last December. Ubisoft released a patch addressing some of the worst issues only a couple of weeks in, followed by another in February. It then released another just a couple of weeks later.
But one of the problems with simply banning people like Clever, the ESL notes, is the absence of any kind of built-in arbitration system for the newborn field of eSports. As a result, any cases go to the regular courts, where there aren't any specialists on cheating or eSports. ESL mentioned an unspecified, "much clearer," previous cheating case when it still had a rough time in local German courts because it was difficult to point out the "super fine-tuned aimbot, that was just barely visible on the replays."
Such subtle hacks recall a similar problem faced by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive players in 2014, when three of the game's most high-profile players were caught using a hack in their matches. And as in the case of Clever, it led to what eSports commentator Duncan “Thorin” Shields called a "witch hunt" in the community to sniff out other cheaters. The subtlety itself added to the scare.
“So if you’re already one of the best players in the world, it’ll make it so you just look like you’re having your best game. It won’t even seem like you’re hacking and that was an impossible movement,” Shields said. “This is a cheat that doesn’t have anything visible on the screen. The only way you’d know if someone did it is if you caught them at the point they installed it on that machine and activated it.”
Try explaining stuff like that in a German courtroom to some random Joe Blow—you know, the kind of guy who's fond of making quips about how the last video game he played was Pac-Man in '82. And then imagine millions of dollars resting on his or her opinion.
Yeah, it's not too surprising that the ESL has chosen to limit itself to "material-based cheating bans on cases where we know how we can present the evidence."
Neither the ESL nor Clever responded to our request for comment.
'Rainbow Six Siege' eSports Scandal Shows That Cheaters Might Be Winners
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