# Cheating

Cheating means circumventing or downright violating rules, usually while trying to keep such behavior secret. You can cheat on your partner, in [games](game.md), in [business](business.md) and so forth, however despite cheating seeming like purely immoral behavior at first glance, it may be relatively harmless or even completely [moral](morality.md), for instance in [computer graphics](graphics.md) we occasionally "cheat" our sense of sight and fake certain visual phenomena which leads to efficient rendering [algorithms](algorithm.md). In [capitalism](capitalism.md) cheating is demonized and people are brainwashed to partake in **cheater witch hunts** as a part of new anti-cheating bullshit business (in principle very similar to the "[security](security.md)" business), in [fear culture](fear_culture.md), arbitrary [drama](drama.md) feeding the social media [fight](fight_culture.md) for attention, trying to monopolize game platforms with [bloat monopoly](bloat_monopoly.md) "anti cheat" systems etc. These so called "anti cheat" systems introduce unimaginable [bloat](bloat.md) and [bullshit](bullshit.md) and provide excuse for things like **[spying](surveillance.md)** (e.g. monitoring OS processes) and **[proprietary](proprietary.md) technology** (so that "cheaters can't study the system to trick it") creeping into the world of free software.

Official [LRS](lrs.md) stance on cheating is the following: **Cheating is fine.**

The truth is that **cheating is only an issue in a [shitty](shit.md) society** that is driven by [competition](competition.md) (even if you disagree). Indeed, in such society there is a huge motivation for cheating (sometimes literally physical survival) as well as potentially disastrous consequences of it. Under the tyranny of capitalism we are led to worship [heroes](hero_culture.md) and high achievers and everyone gets pissed when we get fooled. Corporations go "OH NOES our multi billion dollar entertainment industry is going to go bankrupt if consoomers get annoyed by cheaters! People are gonna lose their bullshit jobs! Someone is going to get money he doesn't deserve! Our customers may get butthurt!!!" (as if corporations themselves weren't basically just stealing money and raping people lol). So they start a huge brainwashing propaganda campaign, a cheater witch hunt. States do the same, communities do the same, everyone wants to stone cheaters to death but at the same time the society pressures all of us to compete to death with others or else we'll starve. We reward winners and torture the losers, then bash people who try to win -- and no, many times there is no other choice than to cheat, the top of any competition is littered with cheaters, most just don't get caught, so in about 99% of cases the only way to the top is to cheat and try to not get caught, just to have a shot at winning against others. It is proven time after time, legit looking people in the top leagues of sports, business, [science](science.md) and other areas are constantly being revealed as cheaters, usually by pure accident (i.e. the number of actual cheater is MANY times higher). Take a look for instance at the [Trackmania](trackmania.md) cheating scandal in which after someone invented a replay analysis tool he revealed that a great number or top level players were just cheaters, including possibly the GOAT of Trackmania [Riolu](riolu.md) (who just ragequit and never showed again lol). Of course famous cases like Neil Armstrong don't even have to be mentioned. { I just randomly found out that in the world of Pokemon tournaments cheating at top level also showed to be a huge issue lol. ~drummyfish } Cheater detection systems are (and always will be) imperfect and try to minimize [false positives](false_positive.md), so only the cheaters who REPEATEDLY make MANY very OBVIOUS mistakes get caught, the smart cheaters stay and take the top places in the competitive system, just as surely as natural selection leads to the evolution of organisms that best adapt to the environment. Even if perfect cheat-detection systems existed, the problem would just shift from cheating to immoral unsportmanship, i.e. abuse of rules that's technically not cheating but effectively presents the same kind of problems. How to solve this enormously disgusting mess? We simply have to stop desperately holding to the system itself, we have to ditch it.

**Anticheating is a totalitarian [cancer](cancer.md)** and has to be ended. Anticheating goes strictly against freedom and [anarchist](anarchism.md) ideas because it requires an authority, a kind of police, surveillance, punishment mechanisms and so on. Technically speaking anticheating can be implemented in two main ways, both of which are highly [harmful](harmful.md). First one is the [antivirus](antivirus.md)/[DRM](drm.md) way and requires invading the player's computer with spyware that checks he is not running any cheating programs -- this of course comes with ensuring the player is rid of control over his own machine so that he's not able to prevent the anticheating program to do its job, so this is absolutely unacceptable for anyone supporting [free software](free_software.md). The other way is [mathematical](math.md), based on just observing the games and [statistically](statistics.md) deciding whether the player cheats or not -- this is better in not having to take away the user's freedom over his own machine, however it takes away the freedom to behave however one desires and it dictates you always have to play the same way (and, naturally, is imperfect and comes with false positives etc.). For example a great indicator of cheating in chess is that someone takes the same time to think about every move, it's unnatural and not how normal humans plays, so if someone plays like it he is labeled a cheater. But what if someone WANTS to play like it? What if someone makes it a self imposed challenge to make every move in exactly three seconds? Anticheater cults says you mustn't do it and you have to conform to how everyone else plays, that if you're just an amateur trying to have fun in unconventional ways you're unimportant and must try to approach the game how professionals approach it:  the game suddenly becomes a tyranny of the people who are serious about it, fun and creativity disappears. Similarly they say that it is, for example, statistically impossible for a 1500 rated player to suddenly play ten moves in a row like a 2500 rated player so if this occurs, you're again labeled a cheater and banned. But what if someone is 2500 rated and has been purposefully playing like a 1500 until now to keep a moment of surprise for a difficult opponent? Then we observe the same thing under completely legit circumstances. Now the anticheating cult will even go aggressive on you and they will attack you for breaking their badly designed system (which is designed to abuse you in the first place), they will ban you for [trolling](trolling.md) and advise you to kill yourself. No [fun](fun.md) or diversity of play is allowed in anticheating world, only normality is allowed, otherwise statistics won't work. But people who accept anticheating measures are much more likely to later on accept the same measures implemented in other parts of their life as well (see also [slowly boiling the frog](slowly_boiling_the_frog.md)).

In a good society, such as [LRS](less_retarded_society.md), cheating is not an issue at all, there's no incentive for it (people don't have to prove their worth by their skills, there are no money, people don't worship heroes, ...) and there are no negative consequences of cheating worse than someone [ragequitting](ragequit.md) an online game -- which really isn't an issue of cheating anyway but simply a consequence of unskilled player facing a skilled one (whether the pro's skill is natural or artificial doesn't play a role, the nub will ragequit anyway). In a good society cheating can become a mild annoyance at worst, and it can really be a positive thing, it can be [fun](fun.md) -- seeing for example a skilled pro face and potentially even beat a cheater is a very interesting thing. If someone wants to win by cheating, why not let him? Valid answers to this can only be given in the context of a shit society that creates cults of personality out of winners etc. In a good society choosing to cheat in a game is as if someone chooses to fly to the top of a mountain by helicopter rather than climbing it -- the choice is everyone's to make.

The fact that cheating isn't after all such an issue is supported by the hilariously vastly different double standards applied e.g. by chess platforms in this matter, on one hand they state in their TOS they have absolutely 0% tolerance of any kind of cheating/assistance and will lifeban players for the slightest suspicion of cheating yelling "WE HAVE TO [FIGHT](fight.md) CHEATING", on the other hand they allow streamers literally cheat on a daily basis on live stream where everyone is seeing it, of course because streamers bring them money -- ALL top chess streamers (chessbrah, Nakamura, ...), including the world champion Magnus Carlsen himself, have videos of themselves getting advice on moves from the chat or even from high level players present during the stream, Magnus Carlsen is filmed taking over his friend's low rated account and winning a game which is the same as if the friend literally just used an engine to win the game, and Magnus is also filmed getting an advice from a top grandmaster on a critical move in a tournament that won him the game and granted him a FINANCIAL PRIZE. **World chess champion is literally filmed winning money by cheating and no one cares** because it was done as part of a highly lucrative stream "in a fun/friendly mood". Chessbrah streams ordinarily consist of many viewers in the room just giving advice on moves to the one who is currently playing, of course they censor all comments that try to bring up the fact that this is 100% cheating directly violating the platform's TOS. People literally have no brains, they only freak out about cheating when they're told to by the industry, when cheating is good for business people are told to shut up because it's okay and indeed they just shut up and keep consuming.

**It's impossible to prevent cheating**, contrary to what capitalists want you to believe. As always a capitalist will want to sell you the idea that anything can be achieved by investing enough money, that if they pay 100 experts on cheating and 100 experts on programming, they will create a miraculous algorithm that will catch any cheater. This is just theatre like any other business, we must realize that some things simply cannot be done. Even if you pay 100 experts on mathematics, you won't be able to solve something that's mathematically impossible -- but for the same amount of money you can convince people that you can. Let's continue with chess -- to prevent cheating, two players would have to be seated naked in an electromagnetically isolated soundproof box with no view outside, only with the chessboard. We know we can't do this, maybe we can come close during world championship, a match between two physically present humans, but not so much in over the board tournaments with hundreds of people around, players and spectators, who can freely walk around, go to the toilet, privacy has to be respected, people can communicate with undetectable visual signals, security and arbiters make errors, they're tired, under stress, lazy and negligent, can be bribed (or you may simply bribe a poor cleaning lady to smuggle you a phone to the toilet) and so on. However that's still nothing compared to online chess -- to think cheating can be prevented there is absolute madness and stupidity. All that can be done is to show exemplary punishments of a few blatant cheaters to create the illusion that cheating is eliminated. Cheating can't be prevented, you can only make people not notice them too much by eliminating those whose cheating is too obvious. There can exist no algorithm that will reliably detect a cheater from play alone (or even from a huge set of games), it's mathematically impossible -- like Daniil Dubov said: "the algorithms only detect idiots" and likewise it can be said that the existence of such algorithms only comforts idiots. A smart cheater won't be caught, only the stupidest that copy paste every single move from the latest stockfish will be spotted and publicly executed to assure the audience that "cheaters will get caught", but the smart ones won't be, those that will use the engine only sometimes, in critical situations, who will combine different engines and their older versions so that the moves will never match an output of any single one. There is no way to tell if a player is simply good because he sees the moves with his brain or because he sees them with an aid of a computer. Not even multi angle cameras all around watching the player would prevented cheating, there are thousands of ways to cheat this (feed false video, feed false audio while listening to advice, buy a miniature earbud, [anal bead](anal_bead.md), use Morse code tapping on the floor, let someone wave you signals through the window from the camera's blind spot, let someone communicate you advice through a single pixel on your screen that will get lost in video compression, ...). Of course the capitalist won't let you see the algorithms or his data, he'll say "trust us, we have a good algorithm and we are reducing cheating to minimum", he'll say the details can't be made public so that cheaters won't exploit the knowledge ([security through obscurity](security_through_obscurity.md)), but the real reason is simply that revealing the details would show their system doesn't really work. As always, they're only selling you an illusion.

Back in the day of early Internet there were practically no anticheating measures in online games and everything worked -- yes, cheaters did appear, but we must realize that it's not like EVERYONE will start to cheat immediately if there are no anticheat mechanisms. If you swim in a pool, you may sometimes drink someone's piss and if you play online games, you may sometimes meet a cheater -- unless you're a mentally unstable pussy, you can take it no problem. The existence of anticheat mechanisms may itself incite cheating even more by the effect of forbidden fruit, it becomes a challenge (and to some even business) to beat the system. If top 100 places in the ladder are all obvious cheaters, will anyone see any more fun joining them? No. If you have the need to compare yourself to others, just form a group of friends who you know don't cheat and compare your score or ratings among each other, ignore the anonymous cheaters.


**Anticheating also doesn't make any sense.** Why would you want to ban cheating? Usually you'll get these answers:

- "It ruins fun for others". **DEBUNKED**. No, what ruins fun for others is usually [rape](rape.md), not cheating -- a very skilled player can do this too without cheating. So this is not an argument against cheating, it's an argument against using high skill in certain ways. Cheater who is cheating well is literally indistinguishable from a skilled player. I.e. this shouldn't be addressed by banning cheating but perhaps by things like matchmaking similarly skilled players. NOTE: we actually don't advise matchmaking though, that's another thing that kills fun. This is just debunking of the anticheating argument.
- "It's unfair, the cheater doesn't have to try hard to beat people who try very hard." **DEBUNKED**. Firstly that's the same thing like talent for example: a talented man doesn't have to try that hard to beat untalented people -- so you think being talented is like cheating? Should talent be banned? Yes, of course, even a talented man has to try hard to become the best for example, but it likewise goes for the cheater: GOOD cheating is not laziness, it requires usually as much effort as getting good at the game, you just put the effort in different things --  just as making [tool assisted speedruns](tas.md) is no easier than making RTA runs, it's just energy spent differently -- cheating just yields better results for that same effort, but again, that's the same as with talent: talent makes you get better results for the same effort, so you cannot reject cheating without also rejecting talent this way. Take Lance Armstrong: he was doping but he was still trying his best and working as hard as others, probably even harder than many -- would you now say this was OK then by your logic? So again, this point makes no sense.
- "It's disrespectful", "it's unethical" or some arbitrary emotional shit like that. **DEBUNKED**. This is not an argument, it's just sentences you've been taught to think based on the arguments given above that have already been debunked.

{ Because I advocate acceptance of cheating people may perhaps think I like to cheat myself and may be asking if I ever cheated in online games or similar competition. The answer is: 100% NO, I don't see a slightest point in cheating -- I would cheat if I enjoyed it but there is completely zero value in doing it for me personally, so I never did and never even thought about it, I never even helped myself with a little cheat in legit playthroughs of singleplayer games, I think that's only for pussies and women and it would absolutely kill my joy of finishing the game, I usually even refuse to play games on non-hard difficulty. If I ever played online games, I did it for enjoyment of the play itself and many times for testing how good I can get, cheating would help me with neither. I only ever used cheats in "sandbox" plays of offline games like GTA, when I simply want to become god and rain havoc on the world, but this is absolutely standard and accepted even by normies, so not much point in even mentioning this. Think about the motivation behind cheating: online cheating is NEVER done for satisfying a need of accomplishment, the cheater himself KNOWS he didn't legitimately achieve the victory, i.e. cheating is done for other reasons -- sometimes lighthearted trolling and fun (which actually is probably a cool reason), but most often the reason is following: ATTENTION. Online cheater cheats not to feel accomplishment but to gain attention, fame, followers, to masturbate his egoism and/or to mine some money, power and other advantages from the online attention capital. It's basically pure capitalism: he sees an opportunity for profit, it's like business, and so he simply grabs it -- it doesn't even matter what the business in question is, it's more of seeing a hole in the market, potential for abuse, a place to be filled, like seeing money on the ground: he simply can't leave it lying there, for him there is no ethics or shame, just a "stupidity of not taking an opportunity". Hopefully it's clear I'm not in a slightest interested in behaving like a cretin capitalist monkey, and that I find it quite filthy, retarded, unethical and good only for Americans maybe, hence it should be pretty clear why I am not interested in cheating. However I still think the option to cheat should be open, so that people can decide themselves whether to cheat or not. ~drummyfish }

## How To Cheat

WORK IN PROGRESS

Here will be a general advice on how to cheat in online games and similar kinds of [competition](competition.md).

NOTE: obviously a lot of this advice revolves around [competition](competition.md), a concept that's itself unethical, so naturally a lot of the advice given here is likewise not embraced by [LRS](lrs.md), but it's simply how you cheat well in current society. In a good society that accepts cheating things would actually get much better, it would get easier to cheat and would no longer for example require lying, you'd just declare you're cheating and be fine.

- **Actually get somewhat good at the game.** This is step number one, a necessary prerequisite for success -- yes, successful cheating requires some "[work](work.md)", sometimes as much as actually getting legitimately good at the game -- cheating won't help you be lazier, it will just help you achieve seemingly better results. You can't fool anyone if you don't know basics of the game, and to fool experts you must at least be familiar with deeper aspects of the game. You must be able to mimic human play and not only that, you must mimic the best human play, answer questions about advanced concepts if someone interrogates you, demonstrate some skill if you're asked to show you can play or if you simply find yourself in a situation where you must play and can't cheat, like a real life event. If you just use chess engine to play better chess moves than the world champion but keep taking 1 minute to make absolutely obvious moves, or if someone talks to you and finds out you don't even know what "en passant" is or who Bobby Fisher was, you're absolutely busted right there. The most successful cheaters were actually often the BEST people at their game, for example Lance Armstrong, Riolu in Trackmania and so on. Successful cheating is not easy, it must be smart cheating, and smart cheating absolutely requires deep understanding of the game.
- **Get familiar with how they detect cheating.** Spend a lot of time on researching anti-cheating systems and how people detect cheaters, study how other cheaters got caught and avoid that. For example in chess the time you take to make certain moves is used to detect cheating, so you want to have this covered -- don't blindly copy moves from an engine, rather try to play yourself and then only in a critical situation quickly let engine suggest a move, but still think about why it's good etc. Let the engine only give you a slight push, like a wind in your back -- if you fly a jetplane against a sprinter, someone's probably going to notice. In [speedrunning](speedrun.md) every game has quirks that are used to detect for example splicing (likely the most common form of cheating speedruns) -- for example in Mario 64 they use the fact that Mario blinks regularly, so if the video is edited there will be a discrepancy, you must think about this. Audio is used for this too, make sure regular patterns in the background noise don't give away that you cut the video, check the audio spectrogram if it doesn't show the cuts etc.
- **Don't cheat too much, you increase the chance of providing proof of you cheating and/or making a mistake.** It's easy to cheat more and more once you see it's working, it becomes a very comfortable habit AND it also comes with you becoming more relaxed, careless and prone to making a mistake. But remember: this is what will most likely get you caught and this is what anti-cheaters also rely on -- they may already be suspecting you but waiting for more evidence, you don't want to provide it. Perfect cheat detection doesn't exist -- they like to pretend they have bulletproof methods but it's a facade, they in fact rely on you fucking up, you have to cooperate a bit to get caught -- don't do it. Serial killers usually get caught because they don't stop, they keep doing it over and over until they make one small mistake, or they simply give the investigators so much data that statistics eventually extracts proof and predictions from it: each new murder simply gives a new data point to the detectives that reveals a little bit more about your location, habits, modus operandi etc. Be paranoid: if no one is suspecting you, it may be the case they are secretly suspecting you and want you to think you're safe, they may be closely watching you, so if you can, stop cheating for a very long time, then it's more likely they stopped watching you due to spending too many resources for long time without any results. Also know that each new cheating attempt is also a new risk: more attempts equals greater overall probability of failure; even if there is just 1 in 100 chance of you getting caught, cheating 100 times is suddenly pretty dangerous. So only cheat very, very sparingly -- save it for when it matters. For example in a chess tournament play yourself against opponents you know you can beat alone and against the strong opponents only cheat in the key, decisive moment; then outside tournaments, when losing doesn't matter as much, try again to play yourself as much as possible.
- **Be good with technology, know your shit.** If you're a [Windows](windows.md) used who tries to cheat by googling  "minecraft cheating programs free download", you probably don't know shit about technology, you have to actually learn something. Many get caught for stupid shit like leaving metadata in their video that says the video is edited, or they have no clue that cheating software leaves [watermarks](watermark.md) in videos (this actually caught many geometry dash cheaters). Ideally you want to [program](programming.md) YOUR OWN tools, develop your own methods of modifying the game etc.
- **Don't overcomplicate it, [keep it simple](kiss.md).** Remember that less is more, a complex way of cheating is probably more likely to fail due to just one part failing.
- **Practice**, a cheater is like illusionist, he comes up with a trick but then also has to perfect its execution, he must NEVER fail it in public, else he gives it away. However practice in a way that doesn't pose risk, i.e. don't practice online against other people; instead practice offline, record yourself and see if you look convincing, if there is something suspicious etc. There may be a good way to e.g. fake blindfold plays by hiding a secondary monitor somewhere while wearing fake blindfold, however it's extremely hard to do many things at once so that you don't fuck anything up, some got caught like this because they were blatantly staring in the direction of the monitor and then sitting in very weird positions to see through the blindfold; one shitty [female](woman.md) streamer actually even fucked up by responding to Twitch chat she was reading on her hidden monitor when she was supposed to no longer see the monitor. You think it's stupid -- it is -- but under pressure it's extremely hard to do many things simultaneously correctly, you absolutely must train to avoid this kind of fuckup.
- **Plan and be ready**, think ahead. If one day you play like a beginner and next week you're beating the champion, you're in trouble: plan your progression, progress slowly, make it look natural. Don't go from not cheating to full cheating mode, incorporate cheating by small doses, big spikes in performance are suspicious. Be ready for accusations and ways they might check you, anticipate that they may for example suddenly ask you to send a replay file of a record you just achieved: forge the replay, make sure it's good and have it ready. Prepare answers to interrogation questions, prepare ways to cover up your fuck ups if they happen, you don't want to be making up weak excuses on the spot. Take this as part of the whole cheating [project](project.md), every project requires planning, risk assessment, backup plans and so on.
- **Don't overdo it** -- once again, it's tempting to become the absolute number one and GOAT if you can, but that also puts you in greater risk and under bigger scrutiny, number one is a dangerous spot, greed also got too many people caught. Lose sometimes on purpose. Achieve only as much as you need -- if you just stay in top 10, you will still be famous, get a lot of attention (if that's what you're after) with a lot less risk, AND you still keep a valuable excuse card: you may actually argue: "if I am cheating, why am I not number one?".
- **Don't drag other people in**, not even your closest relative must know, keep it only for yourself, don't brag about cheating the system when you get drunk, don't ask other how to cheat etc. Even if you trust the man, he will be become a weak link in your lie forever, he may slip sometimes, he may get pressured by someone to talk and break, just don't do it. For this it's best if you find methods that you can pull off yourself, without any help.
- **Learn to lie, be a psychopath**, you must 100% convince yourself you are not doing anything wrong and completely believe it, only that way you can absolutely convincingly lie with dead straight face looking someone in the eyes, even if it's your wife or your children, you can just be looking at them and say: "NO, I swear on my life and everything that's dear to me I NEVER, NEVER cheated and NEVER will, I would NEVER cheat, it is an absolutely disgusting behavior and I would rather die than cheat at this beautiful game that means everything to me." Being a [capitalist](cpaitalism.md) is advantage here -- you already posses these abilities, you must just see it as [business](business.md) now: there is no good or wrong, only an abstract game, people are just pawns, nothing besides this game exists, you are just trying to extracting maximum profit for yourself. If you become charismatic, a kind of [unquestionable authority](hero_culture.md), you increase chance of success: many cheaters went on undetected because they simply LOOKED like amazing people, they were active in the community, helped other people, gave advice, made videos, and for this no one ever even checked them -- just like the serial killers, no one would have thought they could be doing it. If you are disabled or black or otherwise "inspiring" that's absolutely excellent -- no one is allowed to even accuse you unless there's like 300% blatant evidence.
- ...

## See Also

- [trolling](trolling.md)
- [capitalism](capitalism.md)