C. Buddha's Hasty Musings

Yesterday I sat down and played Ghost Recon Breakpoint, a game from around 5 years ago that I picked up on the cheap at the recent Steam Summer Sale. I was getting into the campaign and decided to try a multiplayer match before I went to sleep.

The format was a 4 on 4 team elimination game and I got beamed at the end of the first round trying to revive a teammate. Before the next match, another teammate indicated in the chat that I should just camp until I figured out how to play. So I crouched behind cover near an objective that popped up mid-match and waited until I heard footsteps. An enemy player stated activating the surveillance thingy at the objective. I waited until he was halfway done, and then peeped around cover and unloaded a burst into his head… And then he turned around and saw me. I still had the drop on him, so I emptied the entire clip at him. I could see most of the shots hit, but he still didn’t go down – what the hell!?! So I retreated back behind a container and started reloading. Meanwhile, a new message from my last remaining teammate (and tactics sensei) popped up in chat: OH! CHEATER!

I went the other way around the container, finished reloading, and peeked again. The enemy I had shot had pulled a pistol and was walking to where I had been before. I lit him up again, again to no effect. At that point, I gave up and was downed by the rest of the enemy team, who had converged on the area. My view changed to my remaining teammate’s POV. He stood completely still for a few seconds as if AFK, and then charged into the fray. From that point, it turned into something completely different, and it became clear that my teammate had activated cheats of his own when he was standing still, because he managed to eliminate all but the cheater on the enemy team, but had absorbed hundreds of rounds while doing so. It turned into a stalemate between two cheaters in god mode who could not be killed by other players or the shrinking boundaries of the map, and the round eventually timed out.

While we were watching this increasingly tedious match between cheaters, I chatted with the other players and asked if cheating was common in this game. They told me it was generally just a few well-known players who cheated, and that most people immediately dropped from games if they saw their names. I said it was too bad because the game seemed fun, and everyone agreed. After the round timed out, everyone except for me dropped, and my team won the next round and the entire match, by default… Victory!

So that game (specifically the multiplayer aspect), which otherwise seems really polished, has been completely ruined by cheaters… and yes, the cheaters were typical enough to spam CHINA NUMBER 1 in the chat several times, so either they were paying for time in a gaming cafe to ruin other people’s online fun, or it was a false flag operation against the estate of the author of the Hunt for Red October. Either way, fuck those cheaters.