Cheating in Counter-Strike: Encyclopedia II - Cheating in Counter-Strike - Background information

Cheating in Counter-Strike - Background information

Cheating in Counter-Strike - What is Counter-Strike?

Counter-Strike (CS) is a popular team-based mod of Valve Software’s first-person shooter Half-Life. The game pits a team of players playing as counter-terrorists against another team of players playing the role of terrorists in rounds of competition won by completing an objective or eliminating the opposing team.

The game was originally available as a free download but due to its success the game was bought by Valve who released it as a retail product and continued the development of the title. This has also led to a remaking of the game on Valve's new Source engine which was developed for Half-Life 2, known as incarnation of the game, Counter Strike: Source. Counter-Strike is currently the most popular online first-person shooter in the world and Counter-Strike: Source is also extremely popular.

Cheating in Counter-Strike - What constitutes cheating in Counter-Strike?

In online gaming there are many offenses which may fall under the term cheating. Some offenses are only considered cheating in competitive leagues and whereas more serious offenses such as using a hacked executables or data files are almost always considered unacceptable by legitimate players. Even in organized leagues a punishment such as forfeiting a match may be seen as appropriate for breaking most league rules but being caught using a hack will often result in a ban from the league and can ruin a players reputation in the community for good. So, in online gaming there is a spectrum of what is considered cheating and a spectrum of acceptability even when cheating is recognized as such. Using hacked executables, data files or using any other external influence to alter the game are the practices most generally accepted as cheating. There are however also a number of grey areas in what is accepted as cheating, usually these grey areas involved taking advantage of bugs in the game, sometimes these exploits are widely considered to be cheating and other times they are considered acceptable usage of the game’s capacity for configuration. These exploits usually take the form of bugs in the map or bugs in the game engine which can be used to a players advantage through altering commands in the console or configuration file.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Background information", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki