Cheaters never win, but that's not their goal.

A microcosm of cultural decay.

Everyone has heard that “cheaters never win,” but does anyone believe that? If you’ve ever played a competitive game like Counter-Strike, you’re well aware that a cheater on the other team means a certain loss. But doesn’t that mean the cheater won? Wouldn’t that contradict the saying? If cheaters never win, then why do people cheat — what could possibly motivate them?

Well, what is the benefit of winning at all? The desire to achieve is the hallmark of a healthy mind, and competition is an easy way to benchmark one’s own ability. A win grants the victor concrete validation of his efforts. It’s a testament to having achieved a certain level of skill, and a way to experience the pleasure of having achieved it. But cheaters are self-aware. A win can’t serve as a testament to their skills — they know that a cheated win indicates nothing about their skill. They can’t experience winning as a validation of their efforts — cheating is how they avoid effort.

It is in this sense that cheaters never win: by cheating, they’ve undermined and invalidated winning. They’re incapable of experiencing a win as an achievement because the awareness that it isn’t one is inescapable. So then what does motivate a cheater, if not achievement? To understand the answer, consider the two basic types, or perhaps stages, of cheaters: the egalitarian and the nihilist.

First, a note on the term “egalitarian.” It’s a beloved term used by leftists with the purpose of misdirection. Ostensibly, it indicates “equality of men,” but actually, it means the exact opposite. Egalitarians are not concerned with the only proper meaning of equality: that everyone is subject to the same rules. Instead, rules vary by person, with the goal being “equality of outcomes” in spite of their cause: an individual’s effort.

Similarly, the egalitarian cheater seeks the rewards of achievement in defiance of its requirements. In particular, he seeks the prestige of being a highly skilled player, proven by his record and rank, without actually practicing and becoming skilled. He is the type of cheater who tries to rationalize away the fact that he’s cheating, usually with statements like “I could do just as well without cheats,” or the classic “everyone else cheats, so this just levels the playing field.” But he’s unable to convince himself of this. He knows that if he could play just as well, then he wouldn’t cheat. He knows that if everyone actually was cheating, all wins would be meaningless, and no one would play at all. He’s unable to experience any independent satisfaction from his status, so he seeks validation from other people to fill in the void where his self-esteem should be.

Just like every other egalitarian, he completely depends on honest people while simultaneously destroying them. He steals prestige away from the people who would have earned it, and grifts his pseudo-self-esteem from his teammates and “friends.” The people with actual skills become an affront to him. They have what he pretends to have, which exposes and highlights the fraud in his own mind. Desperate to protect his facade of self-esteem, he cakes on another concealer: “they must be cheating too,” but he doesn’t really believe that, either. Having no sense of honesty and justice, “it’s unfair,” he concludes, that they don’t have to hide like he does.

Through his self-inflicted frustrations, the thin veneer of a legitimate goal that the egalitarian had boils off, leaving only the distilled essence of his psychology: what Ayn Rand calls “hatred of the good for being the good,”¹ and so the egalitarian decays into the nihilist. The nihilist is brazen about the fact that he’s cheating. In fact, he wants you to know. He pretends not to care about winning while mocking and targeting anyone who shows that they still do. He can be characterized by the phrase “If I can’t have it, then no one can.”

Both the egalitarian and the nihilist are completely selfless, i.e., they have no personal, independent motivations or standards of achievement — no self. Everything they do revolves around how they can affect or be perceived by others. While the egalitarian wants to defraud you and steal from you, the nihilist, fueled by the hatred of your virtues, is content just as long as you have lost something. The basic motivation binding these two types is your loss. An actual leech at least has no choice about bleeding others to survive, but the egalitarian and the nihilist have the indecency to do so on purpose.

Don’t be disarmed by the saying that “cheaters never win.” It’s certainly true that cheaters never win, but that’s merely a warning to cheaters — it grants no safety to the innocent. The unwritten subtext for the saying is: “but they’ll guarantee your loss.” Cheaters are out to harm you, so they need to be taken seriously and treated severely.

A precondition to the success of any competition is that there are no unearned advantages. Cheaters are like a parasite: no matter how good the game is, if they’re not eliminated, the game will slowly, then quickly fail. Game studios recognize this, so the fact that every competitive game is still riddled with cheaters indicates a fundamental problem with their approach.

Consider the basic strategy for mitigating cheaters that’s used today:

1. Create or improve the existing anti-cheat software.

2. When a cheater is detected, ban some combination of their account, hardware IDs, and phone number.

Then consider that:

• Cheaters either expect to be banned eventually, so they don’t invest in their account, or they’re so confident that they’ll never get caught that they’re unaffected.

• Hardware ID banning is largely a gimmick because most cheat programs include hardware ID spoofers, but it's also trivial to change your hardware IDs manually if yours gets banned.

• Changing a phone number costs $15 from T-Mobile, which is an insignificant cost to a cheater. Compare that to the cost of any cheat software: a quick Google search reveals that most cheats for Counter-Strike cost around $40 per month. There are much more expensive cheats available, and cheaters pay for them.

Given how common it is for cheaters to play for years without being caught and banned, the inconvenience of being banned is quite small, especially relative to the damage they cause to the reputation of the game, to the studio, and to the other players. A cheater can return to ruining the game on a new account within hours.

Rather than addressing this problem at the root, studios introduce time obstacles for competitive play, which frustrate legitimate players and leave cheaters unaffected. In Counter-Strike, for example, to play in “prime status” competitive matches, you have to achieve level 21 in the game, which usually takes around 10 weeks. A cheater gets around this by buying an account that has already satisfied that requirement, and for only a small fraction of what their cheating software costs.

What’s missing in the “inconvenience approach” is enduring consequences. There is no way to actually ban the cheater, i.e., the person behind the account, the hardware, or the phone number. These identities are ephemeral and easy to change. When they are banned, a cheater will just come back with a new account and an improved cheat, ad infinitum.

Associating a person's real identity with their account as a requirement to play in competitive modes would fill this void. Under this approach, when a person is caught cheating, they would be banned, not just their account, or any other ephemeral identity. Being caught cheating would carry the risk of being banned for life from competitive play, not just being inconvenienced. Over time, as cheaters are permanently removed from competitive play, this system would tend towards a total elimination of cheaters.

So why hasn’t this been done already? I’m not sure.

An idea that’s as ridiculous as it is common is that game studios purposely don’t eliminate cheaters because they earn money from them. But every game studio recognizes the damage cheaters cause to their game, which explains why they spend millions of dollars on anti-cheat software. The fact is that anti-cheat is hard, and as I’ve explained, the current approach is futile.

So then is it too expensive to collect and verify the identities of every player? Maybe, but I doubt it. I think a system like this can be profitable on its own, but if not, at least the costs can be offset by licensing it to other games. The more participants, the more effective and valuable the system becomes. Imagine, for example, if this system were licensed between Counter-Strike, Call of Duty, Fortnite, Valorant, and Rainbow Six Siege. If a cheater was caught in any one of these games, their ban would extend to every one of them.

Could it be regulatory restrictions? Definitely. Canada has 61 pages of PIPEDA regulations, and the EU has 88 pages of GDPR regulations. An online game can be available worldwide, so building and maintaining a system that’s compliant with every slightly different and evolving local regulation is very costly.

What about player hesitancy? Counter-Strike already has the “prime” competitive queue for players who choose to add a phone number to their account. It’s voluntary, but everyone signs up for it because no one wants to play with a cheater. A real identity system would see rapid voluntary adoption driven by every legitimate player’s desire for real competition. And frankly, an innocent person has nothing to hide — what honest objection can there be to such a system?

A cheater’s worst nightmare is justice. They depend on hiding their identity because that’s how they evade the consequences of their actions. When caught, the egalitarian would be stripped of his stolen identity, and the nihilist would be stripped of his power to destroy. While a cheater fears their identity, an honest person takes pride in it. Both have earned it.

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1. The phrase is found in the essay “The Age of Envy” in her book Return of The Primitive.