As an experienced modder of the F1 game, I can say that it is so easy to mod the game in a way to give a performance improvement in a practically invisible way. Not only are we talking things such as 0.5% grip increases etc... we are talking; Better fuel consumption, Better tyre wear, Better tyre temperature working window, Bigger ERS battery Capacity, More ERS harvesting, More effective DRS, Less drag, Improved suspension, More grip on grass/marbles. All things that I have already modded (for videos) in the past and if I just improve any of those attributes by 0.5%+ or multiple attributes it will be visibly undetected.
Yeah and at the pro level this would be insane. The number of people able to get within half of second of the world record is over 1000z. So a very talented sim racer can just go from regular top 5% in the game to a pro.
The bit about cheaters accusing other people who are faster of cheating rings true to me from the speedrunning world, with loads of examples like how the guy who exposed Dream of cheating in Minecraft was also cheating himself
I won't speak for smaller events, but when it comes to absolute top tier racing, they need to be LAN events on in-house computers. We're talking about teams with millions of dollars to spend, surely they can fly drivers out to LAN events. Doesn't even need to have spectators, just a standard competitive arena.
This doesn't give you absolute safety either. People want to use their own components like wheels and pedals, forcing them to use one they're not familiar with is a massive hamstringing. Unfortunately that hardware can have cheats embedded in to it as well. This has been a problem with LAN events for other games for years.
Problem with esports is the massive rigs involved that the drivers are using and that they are all over the world, imagine the virtual 24h race and the insane requirements that would have to not only get all the people in one place, to have that number of rigs and then even facilities, food, sleeping areas etc. It works for FPS games as they're small teams and short events where maybe they bring their own keyboard and mouse at best.
@@Miragexe while that is indeed the case, i feel like we're strictly talking about F1 esport for now. I'm pretty sure that other sim titles like Iracing, Rfactor, and such, have built in anticheat with them. Problem is that Codemasters seemingly didn't have that anticheat within the F1 games
This reminds me of what happened in the Trackmania community, when a massive anticheat system got introduced and A LOT of "pros" got busted cheating most of their WRs. Also, the fact that after decades spent developing this title Codemaster still doesn't have an anti-cheat to speak of is absolutely insane.
People pay for the same game every year and they still don't know or care about developing a trusted anticheat system. Pathetic, and it is kind of payers fault to reward them every year anyways.
Getting caught with your cheats and saying the game company is working with you on them, is the equivalent of "I don't smoke! I'm holding them for a friend, I swear!"
It was a shady enough excuse when he said it. It got worse when EA and codies responded with radio silence. Now that Codemasters has affirmatively stated that they aren't working with him or anyone else on cheats, it seems pretty conclusive that the guy is a cheater, and action needs to be taken.
Yeah I don't buy the excuse. If the cheat really is as basic as the dev says EA and Codemasters would have nothing to gain from "testing" it. Plus having the folder open during a league race & reacting the way he did. It's incredibly sus.
I'd take that 70% figure with a massive pinch of salt, personally. Having been in a game where cheating, and more importantly accusations of cheating, were commonplace at times due to poor cheat detection, what became very obvious is that people who cheat and make cheats have a tendancy, be it conscious or not, to overestimate the number of cheaters to justify what they do. On the plus side, now that Codemasters & EA have been told how the cheat works they don't have many excuses for not closing the exploit off.
While this cheat is relatively easy to well solve for, because it's basically invalid inputs ( if you re-run the inputs of the race it should get you different results not sure how deterministic the F1 game engine is ). The sad reality is your never gonna close of 100% and you likely get to a point of electronic drive aids implemented in software where the defense seems almost impossible, the sad reality of anti-cheat any anti-cheat is that really it's a losing proposition, you can make it harder but never impossible.
"Having been in a game where cheating, and more importantly accusations of cheating, were commonplace at times due to poor cheat detection, what became very obvious is that people who cheat and make cheats have a tendancy, be it conscious or not, to overestimate the number of cheaters to justify what they do." You dont know how true that is. Currently, tarkov is infested with cheaters. Every single lobby is infested with them, and don't get me started with GTA online.
@@Khosumi Trust me I do. Game was APB: Reloaded, and literally every time someone did an 'interview' with a famous hacker or hack coder / seller they'd be "EVERYONE CHEATS EVEN BAD PLAYERS!". If that was true, then I was a gaming God on there to keep pace. And believe me, I'm not.
@@MasterofSpiders Logically all that means is that cheaters have about as much information on the actual number of cheaters as the rest of us when there's no good way to tell. They don't know either. The 70% number could be higher or lower than reality, or even spot on by accident.
Man Raycevik's video about racing games are true, we really are 10 years behind everyone else when the biggest competition for the biggest brand in motorsport still has a trivial cheating issue
@@ab8jeh and the likes of the big sims like rfactor2 and iRacing also have their share of big issues, and only iRacing's issue is avoidable if you're well of economically
There's only one game that successfully bridges the gap between arcade and sim right now: Wreckfest. All the other games are either mtx slot machines or nerd level sims. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge nerd and I love AC to bits.)
It's because the racinggenre has only 2 branches. Arcade and simulators but neither focus on competitive racing other than "tacked on" multiplayer. there's only a few games that fill that gap, yet struggle at the e-sport side of things.
I’ve worked in TV sports/news for 25 years and you’re doing good work here. You’ve had this channel for years and id bet most/all viewers would say you’re honest and trustworthy, even if it’s just sim racing/Motorsports it matters! So you’re starting from a good foundation and thats what’s needed for investigative journalism. But in general you know the basics: multiple reliable sources, objectivity, accuracy. It’s also imperative that other people check your work before released. Someone could feel angry enough to get lawyers involved so always good to take the time and double check things!
Man im genuinely sad that post got deleted, honestly i really respect the creator of the mod for making the post. His replies/convos in the comments were super interesting and cleared up a lot of stuff for me. Also thanks Jimmy for recording at least part of the thread so it is not lost forever!
yeah, the whole stick with "he's just a kid" doesn't gel well with me if he is, you know, competing for 3/4 million pounds. it's obvious imo that he and many are cheating, especially with the reactions, carreton too. but as we already knew, young, "immature" people don't really consider anything past their own gain, so no surprise, really?
Well, if you took the time to search his name on twitter, you'll find they're more than justified wanting people to leave him alone. Constant harassment under every post, must be insane for a 17 year old to have to deal with all of that.
Yeah that act from that team alone makes me think the use of cheating isn't just very well known by all the teams in F1 eSports, but might well be encouraged by the teams.
To be fair, if I was good enough to be somewhere near a million dollar prize pool, I wouldn't even think twice about cheating to make sure I'd get there. Especially seeing how easy it is to cheat in F1. And this is not me defending cheaters, this is me condemning the fact that the people who offer the prize pool don't seem to care that it's that easy.
Jimmy please be careful reporting on this, you need to know the sources as anyone can lie and pretend to be anyone online. Really pleased you're making this known and keeping us all informed!
I think this is a concern seeing as the video is more or less going over a Reddit post. That being said, a simple, "this is all speculative, don't take any of this as the truth" would work well to remedy the conundrum.
The most simple solution in my opinion is to do the same “screenshot” thing that they currently do, except compare to data on an official F1 server. Don’t just compare local data to earlier local data
Exactly this, max grip, top speed and whatever changes you could make with this hack are all predefined by the game. If everyone should have the same values, why not measure it against a yardstick which you know can't be tampered with.
@@2xb91 the problem with F1 is that is not deterministic. So even though there are hard values which cannot be modified there are some which changes. I think it's completely possible but it would require the engine to be changed first. Also if something like that is applied it should be doing multiple times per lap, ideally on every corner. Because again you could make an bypass or change the data throughout the game after connecting to server so it would be too late.
An easier way to do this would to just be to close the game if it detects the "screenshot" process being suspended. If the game does not receive data after a certain time in a session you just get thrown out.
It feels like E-Sports is like cycling was in the 90's while the big events may be 'clean-ish' qualifying and a number of other events are 'charged' or less enforced allowing cheats to be run. As always thanks for the great content Jimmy
"I'm not really a journalist..." You covered a story that you felt needed coverage, you qualified your opinions as such, and you pointed out the facts. You also attempted to reach out to get testimony from some of those directly involved, and barring that, you disclosed your journey into doing so. You used examples, cited sources, and explained the issue in detail. You are a journalist. Excellent vid, m9.5.
I appreciate the hell out of you digging into this. It's not your usual content, but it's important for the future of sim racing and you're doing a great job of getting down to the facts
I used to work in the gaming industry and every number we got indicated 10% of the userbase of most online games were cheating/willing to pay for cheats. The numbers came from criminal investigations, registered users to forums where you had to pay to get an invite, manual tests on servers (discord wasn't a thing back then). Most of those games were shooters and RTS games, but I don't see when it was 10% across the board, it would be any different in simracing. It's the reason I quit most multiplayer games except for iracing, as the risk of losing your account there and the matchmaking made it so I didn't have to deal with cheaters if they exist.
Taking that at face value, 70% is shockingly high. Add the fact that cheating is ridiculously easy, you would think that EA/CM would put some effort in this. Given the money involved with e-sports they would have a vested interest in keeping it clean. I actually stopped playing a lot of online games years ago because people were constantly cheating and got sick of having to deal with them.
If Codemasters is as committed to combating cheaters as they were at adding interesting stuff to F1 22, I can see why it sounds like we're just scratching the surface.
its mindboggling how you had a nice base for the game in 2016-18 and this is what you have done with it in the last few years? have been loyal since 2010, but after the buggy release last year i wont be preordering anymore.
@@broncobalboa I've only ever pre-ordered the 2020 Michael Schumacher edition of the game. I've also restricted myself to the even-numbered releases, which seems to have shielded me from a lot of the game's various issues, as those were somehow most common in the odd-numbered games.
I think you hitting on the point regarding them "not wanting to pay for anti-cheating software" hits the nail on the head with EA. It's been an issue with their FIFA games forever. It always has and will come down to profits. They'll just churn out a new game year after year without genuine care of fixing major issues because people will pay for the new game.
I think the biggest issue is like the one in TrackMania: theonly way to "prove" no cheating is input records and replaying them on a "vanilla" game. Turns out over half of the WR in TrackMania were cheated. That cheat was even easier; the game was ran at lower speeds to make it easier to react and optimize, then the recording was sped up.
It's more easy to get away with on online events. In-person Lan events like the early f1 eSports qualifiers, are impossible to cheat on. Also, people who use their own set up (Thomas ronhaar e.g) instead of teams like Ferrari who have their own section in the factory.
Although I agree with the approach that anyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, it is funny that like 3 or 4 days ago there was a screenshot of some timetrial leaderboard and Ronhaar was ahead of the cheats promo account by a couple hundredths. I would not consider it a direct proof of anything but on the other hand it would be a really impressive demonstration of skill or a weird coincidence.
I can see him being so pissed at it (and having a massive ego) to actually get down to do laps and laps and laps until he beat their time. But also, weird coincidence.
Eh... quite often cheaters aren't that good even when they're cheating. I've been in multiplayer matches where people with wall hacks and other cheats got shat on by the regular players, simply because they were _that_ bad at the game, and could only barely get along with the help of those cheats. What use is being able to shoot through walls if you can't aim or track moving players?
Cheating in sim racing as a whole seems to be getting worse by the day. 3 days ago I was in an open Assetto Corsa lobby racing MX5 cup cars Vallelunga, and we had someone join the lobby and go 6 seconds faster than me and the other top 2 guys in qulifying. He insisted he was not cheating, turned the cheats off, then 3 laps into the race, passed almost everyone on the straights with what seemed like a 200hp difference. I know its not the same as Esports, but it shows that some people cant handle loosing, regardless of what level they are at. Things like this are completely ruining sim racing for those of us that value fair racing, and I feel like its only a matter of time until sim racing is viewed as unattractive to the masses because of it. Thank you for this series of videos Jimmer. Someone has to talk about it.
Or maybe he just got a good exit out of the last corner? I have often overtaken people on a straight with quite a large difference in speeds and it's invariably because they seem to think that racing is all about braking as late as possible.
This situation is very similar to PUBG cheating scandal. One of the team was first exposed of cheating but later they found out most of the players were also cheating. In a game with large number of players at the same time its incredibly hard to notice cheating because and if one of the players is cheating in such a competitive environment you best believe most of them are cheating.
I love it how, in AC, there is a checksum that checks values of the files of the incoming user to the files stored on the server. So, unless everyone is cheating because they are all running the same cheat, no one is. Simple.
just some news for everyone. there's cheaters in every match you play in any game 07:00 some people actually have modified controllers with the code built in. this was a problem league had for a while
I've worked on anti-cheating technology for Electronic Arts. Any game downloaded to the PC can be modded unless you use the best technology from a company like Denuvo that we used to stop piracy on FIFA 16. It's pricey to use so game companies avoid using it. They want to sell games. From what we could see in the data, at least 50% of top players in any game cheat when there's money and pride involved.
Like I said in the previous video, probably everyone uses it to a certain degree. It reminds me so much of the doping drama in the previous decades where most don't want to use it but you have to if you want to have chance to win.
The only way to make this fair is to provide the same equipment via a 3rd party at the time of the event. So every machine is exactly the same (minus the config for each driver's preferences). But that would cost money and they are too busy making it. lol
reminds me of the situation with escape from tarkov right now.... one of their developers unanimously came out and basically gave a five point list of how cheating could be almost completely stopped but of course they're never going to do that
3:50 This only applies to public cheats. Anything a person is using in a serrious comp environment is going to be a paid for, private or semi-private cheat, which absolutely do store user info about everyone who uses them. You'd be surprised how often pro's from all games get blackmailed.
I'm just here for the drama. I don't own a sim setup or any sim racing games (no money), but I am invested to see how this will end and unravel. Keep us updated.
It's a part of a broader problem with online gaming in general. If you're so inclined just do a simple search for cheats or hacks for online games and if even half of them are legitimate it paints a grim picture. And those are just public operating in broad daylight sites, i'm sure there are privately made ones as well.
While it is, this is an esport in which prize money is concerned. Gaming is for fun, even if competitive. However sport is professional. To be professional it must at the very least be fair game. If sports involved inherent cheating nobody would even bother.
When it comes to F1 esports, it's not people saying "Ronhaar matched my time therefore cheating" its "Ronhaar is achieving times that aren't possible. Remember he was 0.2 faster than P2 when P2 was 0.2 faster than P20!
I think the hypothetical situation here is that an unknown person sets a new record, and gets called out by a long time player. The experienced player has spent many hours practicing, racing, and making setups, and as a result they managed to set a good time trial lap. How would an unknown person (with no experience in esports races, not part of a team, never had a record before) beat that time? It's possible that an unknown young talent appears, but you'd expect someone to slowly make their way up, instead of immediately beating esports-level lap times.
There's one more thing i don't understand. If the Cheats are directly thrown into the game files, why don't the racing leagues (like PSGL) make a rule that you HAVE to Stream your POV to either Twitch (if they're streamers) or to a guy monitoring on Discord. Obviously screen share on Discord, not only the game. Then after the Race the drivers have to leak the game files immediately without hiding scenes or censoring stuff. edit: i wrote this comment halfway through the video and that idea was mentioned towards the end. My point still stands. Looking forward to LAN Events to get some clarity through all this bullshit
Imagine you're watching a F1 esport race and suddenly the P2 car fires a red shell at the P1 car and it just explodes. That's the kind of cheating I want to see.
Hey Jimmer. Do you have similar concerns about your Team87 competition at all? It's such a great initiative, it would be a shame if the competition was distorted in the same way as seems to be happening in esports.
Its all games that have online competitions. The companies do not want to stop the cheaters because most of them are streamers, or people who are gonna bring eyes to the product they are selling.
Surly creating an Anti Cheat should not be that hard if the physics are deterministic. Run the physic calculation on the server and compare them with the client. If they dont Match, someone has changen values.
Relax haha, he's made an 11 min video based upon a subreddit thread of a guy who claimed to be the maker of a hack mod, there was no vetting process. He could be a 12 year old for all we know. Liked the Jarno interview though
trackmania had a similar incident were a guy who was very vocal on forums about cheating ended up cheating himself to get world record times on multiple tracks by slowing down the ingame speed and basically playing in slowmotion.
What I hate the most about this discussion is that Codemasters will probably just slap some well-known anti-cheat like Battleye or whatever would be relevant for the F1 game and call it a day. And so will the community thinking that if the game shows a "Battleye" icon to you during the loadscreen then it's surely impossible to cheat On the other side of the spectrum you have developers of games like The Cycle: Frontier who, when the cheating became rampant, put up walls on walls upon walls of different anti-cheats. Ones they tell you they use and ones they don't. Along with other counter-measures like a ranking system it worked, but that's because they genuinely cared to get on top of that situation and hired people specializing in this field Codemasters have already proven they don't give two shits. Words and declarations don't matter, actions do - and we see the whole extent of their actions laid out right in front of us. It is 2023 and their EXTREMELY COMPETITIVE game series supported by the official F1 has an anti-cheat measure so useless you can sum up how it works in a single short paragraph. That's how much they care. I really hope people will surprise me and not just take Battleye as THE answer to the problem, because to truly make codemasters invest into this enough to make cheating actually hard they will need A LOT of pushing from the community. After all they haven't even acknowledged the problem yet as their precious little image is too much of a priority for them to as much as mention that cheating in their games is possible and they are actually working on it, hiring specialists for example I want the reality to prove me wrong but I really worry that once cheating in the next F1 games becomes just a tiny bit harder than literally typing "f1 22 grip hack" into Google people will call it a day, because now you need to go to the 2nd page of google results or even join a discord server with thousands of cheaters there(often paying ones) - like Rust has for example. As as far as I know Rust devs put in some anti-cheater work in, yet it's still fairly common to see them there Battleye or an equivalent would be a step in the right direction, but it won't cut it.
Combating Cheats is very hard as history as proven. Several other EA games have well known cheating issues Battlefields and Modern Warfare . Along with games like GTA online or Counter Strike. There are just so many levels and ways to cheat.
@@clockdva20 poor battlefields 4 and 1.. I love these games but.. It is a lot worse in Bf1, I'm not sure but doesn't that game NOT have fully community moderated servers? If that is the case then WHAT A SURPRISE that cheating there is easier
The fact they dont use cockpit view i consider cheating and how its not compulsory is pathetic from the organsiers. A simulation should be as close as you can get to being real. Allowing the above cockpit cam is as stupid as the decisions we see from the FIA every race weekend.
I've been thinking this for a long time but I'm glad more people are starting to come round to the idea that this is happening! And to think people are winning money through this exploit is crazy great video Jimmy 💯
There is a lot of truth to that statement the Modder said, If you are so confident that nobody can beat you, then you must be cheating to have that level of confidence/arrogance, because if you are legit and you can do it, do you really not accept others are as good or better?
Not watched yet, but just to note: take absolutely everything the guy said on Reddit with a massive grain of salt. There's no doubt that he's what most developers would call "a script kiddie": someone with little knowledge, but enough bruteforce time and searched forum threads to have picked up how to do the basics. As such he actually has absolutely no idea how much people cheat in F1 esports, and very little idea what issues exist and are exploited by other cheats that are out there (and as such, also has no idea how the situation should be fixed). The people who are actually capable at producing cheats & know all about this stuff turn it into their full-time jobs: they don't give cheats or info out for free.
Yeah, it's seemingly just a CE script and a console app (the 178(!) lines of code mentioned in the video, which he admits he got ChatGPT to write for him, lol) that suspends the game process while the patches are injected. To your last point, I'm sure there are many hobbyists out there with such skills who don't at all fancy having a full-time job reverse engineering games. I mean, just because you're able to change the crank shaft on your own car doesn't mean you want to be a full-time mechanic. Edit: Having read a bit more about this, some nutters have apparently paid 90 Euro for such a cheat (which reportedly contained malware) before finding this free one, while others have bought a subscription for 50 Euro a month! This is SO insane!
Jimmy Broadbent: Praga Cup Champion, iRacing Le Mans and Daytona winner, Racing Organization Founder, Award-winning Streamer, and now, Sim Racing Investigative Journalist
As only 1000 people have downloaded this cheat I don't think so. (It's hard to tell if you were joking because I've seen many people making such accusations when in reality they're just slow.)
All that would need to be done is have a program that checks the values against the server every time someone joins, or hell, every half second while they are joined. And obviously have a redundancy from the server that checks if the person's anti-cheat is turned on. If the server detects that it isn't turned on, immediate boot.
Seems like nowadays before you get into literally any new game, you have to chose not based on the game itself, but rather how many cheaters there are. Gaming is dying honestly.
while the cheats sounded straightfoward with the simple bypass, im 100% positive that they still took a massive amount of time to develop due to the fact that you would have to somehow figure out that whole "screenshot" thing in the first place. The modder likely says this is easy because the cheats work on older titles, as the bypass was already known. also the modder saying that an anticheat is easy to implement is a *disturbingly* naive take.
@@michaelharder3055 point being that its not like finding that was easy in the first place. its just easy to implement in a newer game with the same system because of the initial work done
Even discovering the snapshot would be fairly trivial because it's relatively common in various games an an anti-cheat mechanism, and any function that starts checking a bunch of config data on start-up is fairly obvious. For a decent modder this is genuinely childs play, and you can either inject modded configs by suspending the process, or create a script to load the modded configs into memory first and change the pointers for the function so it doesn't have to be suspended at all - which is sometimes needed as anti-cheat methods can monitor certain processes and detect whether they get suspended for injection.
@@tomh6010 you still have to do a substantial amount of work to view and translate the memory of a game to recognize it's doing that in the first place, then debug your injection such that it happens at the right time and persists as intended.
@@0xGRIDRUNR It sounds like you massively underestimates the abilities of hackers because it sounds like a herculean effort which it most certainly was not. Some hacks comparable to this literally took a weekend to hack.
I would love to have this Modder change the mod in the middle of a Esport event to make it obvious that people are cheating. Like in real F1 when they realised that teams were detecting the signal sent to the starting lights before they went off and not doing starts properly, so they sent the signal without the lights going off and caught the teams cheating.
I would hesitate to take this cheat creator's word. Cheaters tend to jump through a lot of hoops to justify their cheat usage, so something like the "70% of the pros might have cheated" line is a red flag to me. Even if I also think there's a cheating problem in racing games.
Hi Jimmy, we have contacted you on your email, but I figured it might be worth it to leave a comment too. Basically, we have created a telemetry based tool that allows us to detect a person using a grip hack. We have been able to idenfity those that cheated without injecting any software into the drivers' game client. The system is not perfect, but is at least SOMETHING, as opposing to absolute lack of support in this matter from the game devs. I would love to get in touch with you and elaborate on that topic! Great video by the way, as always. There's only one thing that is not 100% true. Cheating on lan, especially in the kind of game that does not give any advantage by blatantly, for example, showing people through walls like it is in FPS games. The way of injecting cheats into the game would have to be done through the devices used by the driver. As long as the wheelbase is installing any kind of firmware on the PC (and as we all know - all of them do) it would be possible to inject a dll with the wheel drivers and even more importantly - delete them as the wheel gets unplugged. It was done in the past in other games, it could happen here too! Plugging the USB stick is not gonna cut it, these offline events are moderated by staff members being on stage behind the drivers, but as long as nothing else gets plugged into the PC and nothing suspicious is happening, but the wheel is still being connected... surely that gives a lot of possibilities, that is of course presuming these events are run on drivers wheels, which from feeling and comfort point of view, might very well be the case :)
Having worked at multiple video game companies, the possibility of Alvaro being tasked by a security/game dev team and the esports team not being aware does not surprise me at all
I was 99% sure it was a bs excuse when he made that tweet. Surely EA already knows every possible weakness and how these mods are able to be implemented. It doesn’t take a top level player to know the game can be modified, and definitely is at this point. The crazy thing to me is the dev companies don’t seem to care AT ALL! Surely they could release a patch that closes up this specific hole. And the most absurd part is the insane prize money of F1 esports in addition to big F1 teams backing the players. You’d think those teams would have enough power to fight for a fair esports environment. But they may even be well aware of the cheating and possibly encouraging using it.
Yeah, let’s be honest - a coder wants to know how it works technically. They have no interest in what lap times you can achieve with it. They can load it up themselves and play with it if they want. Having a fast person use it does nothing to confirm if something works. It’s also not their job to figure out who is cheating. It’s their job to figure out how this works and stop it from working. It’s on the tournament organizers to deal with the drivers.
I just remembered that time Codemasters failed to program competent RX AI in Dirt and realized: Maybe the reason they haven't been able to fix the cheating problem is because they are actually incompetent at coding and doesn't know how to do it
Well I guess you haven't watched esports because if you did you would know all the cars are set to equal so being in a McLaren is not different to a Merc, Williams or Red Bull
In COD when I used to play comps a while back (quite a while back like 10-15 years) there was a thing called Punk Buster that would pick up on hacks/cheats and it worked really well, and the cheats in COD at the time were super easy to code, it absolutely can be done.
The thinking it's not possible to go faster is understandable, I'm normally around 1-2 seconds off of alien pace on iracing, and it baffles me how they get the time outta the car like they do. So I can understand that same viewpoint, when you genuinely are one of the fastest, and all of a sudden you're being beaten by a tenth or two, I imagine the mindset is probably amplified tbf
The point, that he's stating about "If you accuse someone of cheating, just because he beats you, then you would have to be cheating yourself" is ABSOLUTELY massively accurate. Think about it. You'll HAVE to have an ego the size of jupiter to think you are automatically better than someone you don't otherwise know.
When it comes to cheating while at a LAN or anything in that direction i can say there has been several cases throughout gaming, one of them being a person hiding cheats with the Word.exe name and icon, he was cheating while doing a CS tournament, could try dig up other cases easily, but this is one i remember from the top of my head at the moment
11:38 Just some advice for next time: If someone really wants to be anonymous, you need to paraphrase everything they say. Writing styles are distinct unfortunately.
All you need to do is check lap times for known tracks and see that people are posting ridiculously fast times which are simply impossible without modding the game and adding all kinds of traction control or driver aids. Being a minute or more faster than the known lap record for Nordschliefe or similar tracks is a big of a giveaway.
Imagine if the game were updated to randomly refresh the local grip values from the server at some point mid-race. Crossing the start/finish would be a good spot for the changeover. See what percentage of the field suddenly starts crashing on turn one. Suppose you could do it at a pit stop if you wanted it to be a little less obvious.
The cheat makers would just patch that functionality out and continue with their grip multipliers. A lot of people don't seem to understand that you can't trust the client, especially not when the client is a PC. It's like expecting a criminal to admit his crimes if the police were to call him on the phone.
Jimmy Broadbent, professional shed dweller turned irl racing driver turned investigative journalist.
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Jimmer is the man!
I know right, I vote for Jimmy as irl F1 tv pundit or better yet, in race commentator.
As an experienced modder of the F1 game, I can say that it is so easy to mod the game in a way to give a performance improvement in a practically invisible way. Not only are we talking things such as 0.5% grip increases etc... we are talking; Better fuel consumption, Better tyre wear, Better tyre temperature working window, Bigger ERS battery Capacity, More ERS harvesting, More effective DRS, Less drag, Improved suspension, More grip on grass/marbles. All things that I have already modded (for videos) in the past and if I just improve any of those attributes by 0.5%+ or multiple attributes it will be visibly undetected.
Would love to hear your take on all of this!
yeah, it still pathetic how easy the modder was able to bypass the lame security control of the game.
Yeah and at the pro level this would be insane. The number of people able to get within half of second of the world record is over 1000z. So a very talented sim racer can just go from regular top 5% in the game to a pro.
@@mb2776 which is why all of these official leagues are bullshit. NOT LAN and not on a decent game. Its all a weird sham right now.
its weird the game would take a snapshot of the client stats to compare in the future. why not compare it to an master sheet in a codemaster server?
The bit about cheaters accusing other people who are faster of cheating rings true to me from the speedrunning world, with loads of examples like how the guy who exposed Dream of cheating in Minecraft was also cheating himself
That sounds hilarious, can you direct me to a source talking on that?
Love your speedruns! Been long time fan of yours!
and then you hire scientists to prove that you are cheating lmao
@@Gatitasecsii Karl Jobst did videos regarding this topic. Not sure which title is it but it should be pretty easy to figure out
@@Gatitasecsii Matt Parker's video on it is also very informative.
I won't speak for smaller events, but when it comes to absolute top tier racing, they need to be LAN events on in-house computers. We're talking about teams with millions of dollars to spend, surely they can fly drivers out to LAN events. Doesn't even need to have spectators, just a standard competitive arena.
This doesn't give you absolute safety either. People want to use their own components like wheels and pedals, forcing them to use one they're not familiar with is a massive hamstringing. Unfortunately that hardware can have cheats embedded in to it as well. This has been a problem with LAN events for other games for years.
Problem with esports is the massive rigs involved that the drivers are using and that they are all over the world, imagine the virtual 24h race and the insane requirements that would have to not only get all the people in one place, to have that number of rigs and then even facilities, food, sleeping areas etc.
It works for FPS games as they're small teams and short events where maybe they bring their own keyboard and mouse at best.
However if 70% were to cheat in the online qualifier then it brings the overall level of competition down
@jimmydesouza4375 they could just basically make it a spec series
@@Miragexe while that is indeed the case, i feel like we're strictly talking about F1 esport for now. I'm pretty sure that other sim titles like Iracing, Rfactor, and such, have built in anticheat with them. Problem is that Codemasters seemingly didn't have that anticheat within the F1 games
This reminds me of what happened in the Trackmania community, when a massive anticheat system got introduced and A LOT of "pros" got busted cheating most of their WRs.
Also, the fact that after decades spent developing this title Codemaster still doesn't have an anti-cheat to speak of is absolutely insane.
Riolu moment in F1
But then hefest got this run
People pay for the same game every year and they still don't know or care about developing a trusted anticheat system. Pathetic, and it is kind of payers fault to reward them every year anyways.
Getting caught with your cheats and saying the game company is working with you on them, is the equivalent of "I don't smoke! I'm holding them for a friend, I swear!"
It was a shady enough excuse when he said it. It got worse when EA and codies responded with radio silence.
Now that Codemasters has affirmatively stated that they aren't working with him or anyone else on cheats, it seems pretty conclusive that the guy is a cheater, and action needs to be taken.
Yeah I don't buy the excuse. If the cheat really is as basic as the dev says EA and Codemasters would have nothing to gain from "testing" it. Plus having the folder open during a league race & reacting the way he did. It's incredibly sus.
Clara!
@Kevin Crotty in the last video jarno said he literally was working with codies and that all the teams knew about it?
@Kevin Crotty in the last video jarno said he literally was working with codies and that all the teams knew about it?
I'd take that 70% figure with a massive pinch of salt, personally.
Having been in a game where cheating, and more importantly accusations of cheating, were commonplace at times due to poor cheat detection, what became very obvious is that people who cheat and make cheats have a tendancy, be it conscious or not, to overestimate the number of cheaters to justify what they do.
On the plus side, now that Codemasters & EA have been told how the cheat works they don't have many excuses for not closing the exploit off.
While this cheat is relatively easy to well solve for, because it's basically invalid inputs ( if you re-run the inputs of the race it should get you different results not sure how deterministic the F1 game engine is ).
The sad reality is your never gonna close of 100% and you likely get to a point of electronic drive aids implemented in software where the defense seems almost impossible, the sad reality of anti-cheat any anti-cheat is that really it's a losing proposition, you can make it harder but never impossible.
@@deathZor42so make it harder...
I mean just letting it happen doesn't make any sense.
"Having been in a game where cheating, and more importantly accusations of cheating, were commonplace at times due to poor cheat detection, what became very obvious is that people who cheat and make cheats have a tendancy, be it conscious or not, to overestimate the number of cheaters to justify what they do."
You dont know how true that is. Currently, tarkov is infested with cheaters. Every single lobby is infested with them, and don't get me started with GTA online.
@@Khosumi Trust me I do.
Game was APB: Reloaded, and literally every time someone did an 'interview' with a famous hacker or hack coder / seller they'd be "EVERYONE CHEATS EVEN BAD PLAYERS!".
If that was true, then I was a gaming God on there to keep pace. And believe me, I'm not.
@@MasterofSpiders
Logically all that means is that cheaters have about as much information on the actual number of cheaters as the rest of us when there's no good way to tell. They don't know either. The 70% number could be higher or lower than reality, or even spot on by accident.
Man Raycevik's video about racing games are true, we really are 10 years behind everyone else when the biggest competition for the biggest brand in motorsport still has a trivial cheating issue
The F1 game is terrible. It's no surprise.
@@ab8jeh and the likes of the big sims like rfactor2 and iRacing also have their share of big issues, and only iRacing's issue is avoidable if you're well of economically
There's only one game that successfully bridges the gap between arcade and sim right now: Wreckfest. All the other games are either mtx slot machines or nerd level sims. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge nerd and I love AC to bits.)
It's because the racinggenre has only 2 branches. Arcade and simulators but neither focus on competitive racing other than "tacked on" multiplayer. there's only a few games that fill that gap, yet struggle at the e-sport side of things.
It's because people do t give a fuck about racing games, just franchises. They then stick to their corner and shit on everything that isn't "it"
I’ve worked in TV sports/news for 25 years and you’re doing good work here. You’ve had this channel for years and id bet most/all viewers would say you’re honest and trustworthy, even if it’s just sim racing/Motorsports it matters! So you’re starting from a good foundation and thats what’s needed for investigative journalism. But in general you know the basics: multiple reliable sources, objectivity, accuracy. It’s also imperative that other people check your work before released. Someone could feel angry enough to get lawyers involved so always good to take the time and double check things!
Man im genuinely sad that post got deleted, honestly i really respect the creator of the mod for making the post. His replies/convos in the comments were super interesting and cleared up a lot of stuff for me. Also thanks Jimmy for recording at least part of the thread so it is not lost forever!
The best part of this is that the F1 cheat basically works via a Race Condition.
It takes a certain combination of interests to get that joke 🤣
I love niche jokes like this
God damn that's good lmao
That's hilarious, I guess I have to watch the whole video now.
A phonecall from his "people" after 10 or 20 attempts to contact would definitely be justified. After 1 attempt? That's panic.
yeah, the whole stick with "he's just a kid" doesn't gel well with me if he is, you know, competing for 3/4 million pounds. it's obvious imo that he and many are cheating, especially with the reactions, carreton too. but as we already knew, young, "immature" people don't really consider anything past their own gain, so no surprise, really?
Well, if you took the time to search his name on twitter, you'll find they're more than justified wanting people to leave him alone.
Constant harassment under every post, must be insane for a 17 year old to have to deal with all of that.
@@danielo7985don't cheat then
Yeah that act from that team alone makes me think the use of cheating isn't just very well known by all the teams in F1 eSports, but might well be encouraged by the teams.
To be fair, if I was good enough to be somewhere near a million dollar prize pool, I wouldn't even think twice about cheating to make sure I'd get there. Especially seeing how easy it is to cheat in F1. And this is not me defending cheaters, this is me condemning the fact that the people who offer the prize pool don't seem to care that it's that easy.
Jimmy please be careful reporting on this, you need to know the sources as anyone can lie and pretend to be anyone online.
Really pleased you're making this known and keeping us all informed!
I think this is a concern seeing as the video is more or less going over a Reddit post. That being said, a simple, "this is all speculative, don't take any of this as the truth" would work well to remedy the conundrum.
It's legit because on unknowncheats he said the same thing
@EOIC I mention numerous times that there was no proof to back up this claim
The most simple solution in my opinion is to do the same “screenshot” thing that they currently do, except compare to data on an official F1 server. Don’t just compare local data to earlier local data
Exactly this, max grip, top speed and whatever changes you could make with this hack are all predefined by the game. If everyone should have the same values, why not measure it against a yardstick which you know can't be tampered with.
@@2xb91 the problem with F1 is that is not deterministic. So even though there are hard values which cannot be modified there are some which changes. I think it's completely possible but it would require the engine to be changed first. Also if something like that is applied it should be doing multiple times per lap, ideally on every corner. Because again you could make an bypass or change the data throughout the game after connecting to server so it would be too late.
They can also simulate inputs on a standard game and compare results, server side.
@@robertt9342 takes up way to much resource
An easier way to do this would to just be to close the game if it detects the "screenshot" process being suspended. If the game does not receive data after a certain time in a session you just get thrown out.
It feels like E-Sports is like cycling was in the 90's while the big events may be 'clean-ish' qualifying and a number of other events are 'charged' or less enforced allowing cheats to be run. As always thanks for the great content Jimmy
"I'm not really a journalist..."
You covered a story that you felt needed coverage, you qualified your opinions as such, and you pointed out the facts. You also attempted to reach out to get testimony from some of those directly involved, and barring that, you disclosed your journey into doing so. You used examples, cited sources, and explained the issue in detail.
You are a journalist. Excellent vid, m9.5.
I appreciate the hell out of you digging into this. It's not your usual content, but it's important for the future of sim racing and you're doing a great job of getting down to the facts
I used to work in the gaming industry and every number we got indicated 10% of the userbase of most online games were cheating/willing to pay for cheats. The numbers came from criminal investigations, registered users to forums where you had to pay to get an invite, manual tests on servers (discord wasn't a thing back then). Most of those games were shooters and RTS games, but I don't see when it was 10% across the board, it would be any different in simracing. It's the reason I quit most multiplayer games except for iracing, as the risk of losing your account there and the matchmaking made it so I didn't have to deal with cheaters if they exist.
Taking that at face value, 70% is shockingly high. Add the fact that cheating is ridiculously easy, you would think that EA/CM would put some effort in this. Given the money involved with e-sports they would have a vested interest in keeping it clean. I actually stopped playing a lot of online games years ago because people were constantly cheating and got sick of having to deal with them.
If Codemasters is as committed to combating cheaters as they were at adding interesting stuff to F1 22, I can see why it sounds like we're just scratching the surface.
its mindboggling how you had a nice base for the game in 2016-18 and this is what you have done with it in the last few years? have been loyal since 2010, but after the buggy release last year i wont be preordering anymore.
That's a use of the phrase 'interesting stuff' I've not heard before.
@@broncobalboa I've only ever pre-ordered the 2020 Michael Schumacher edition of the game. I've also restricted myself to the even-numbered releases, which seems to have shielded me from a lot of the game's various issues, as those were somehow most common in the odd-numbered games.
I think you hitting on the point regarding them "not wanting to pay for anti-cheating software" hits the nail on the head with EA. It's been an issue with their FIFA games forever. It always has and will come down to profits. They'll just churn out a new game year after year without genuine care of fixing major issues because people will pay for the new game.
The main problem with all games now days…
Anti-cheat is expensive. And it's never a 1-time expense.
I think the biggest issue is like the one in TrackMania: theonly way to "prove" no cheating is input records and replaying them on a "vanilla" game.
Turns out over half of the WR in TrackMania were cheated. That cheat was even easier; the game was ran at lower speeds to make it easier to react and optimize, then the recording was sped up.
How does anyone get away with cheating in professional and official F1 esports?
1. Install cheats
2. play game.
It's more easy to get away with on online events. In-person Lan events like the early f1 eSports qualifiers, are impossible to cheat on.
Also, people who use their own set up (Thomas ronhaar e.g) instead of teams like Ferrari who have their own section in the factory.
Because they have no anti cheat system in place.
@@loganh9937 impossible to cheat on lan? want me to remind you of cheaters in the csgo pro league?
@@swilleh_ Not impossible but much less likely and common
Although I agree with the approach that anyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, it is funny that like 3 or 4 days ago there was a screenshot of some timetrial leaderboard and Ronhaar was ahead of the cheats promo account by a couple hundredths. I would not consider it a direct proof of anything but on the other hand it would be a really impressive demonstration of skill or a weird coincidence.
I can see him being so pissed at it (and having a massive ego) to actually get down to do laps and laps and laps until he beat their time. But also, weird coincidence.
Eh... quite often cheaters aren't that good even when they're cheating. I've been in multiplayer matches where people with wall hacks and other cheats got shat on by the regular players, simply because they were _that_ bad at the game, and could only barely get along with the help of those cheats. What use is being able to shoot through walls if you can't aim or track moving players?
Client side authentication is always going to have backdoors. I cant believe that CM and EA don't have a server side version of this authentication.
Cheating in sim racing as a whole seems to be getting worse by the day. 3 days ago I was in an open Assetto Corsa lobby racing MX5 cup cars Vallelunga, and we had someone join the lobby and go 6 seconds faster than me and the other top 2 guys in qulifying. He insisted he was not cheating, turned the cheats off, then 3 laps into the race, passed almost everyone on the straights with what seemed like a 200hp difference. I know its not the same as Esports, but it shows that some people cant handle loosing, regardless of what level they are at. Things like this are completely ruining sim racing for those of us that value fair racing, and I feel like its only a matter of time until sim racing is viewed as unattractive to the masses because of it. Thank you for this series of videos Jimmer. Someone has to talk about it.
Or maybe he just got a good exit out of the last corner? I have often overtaken people on a straight with quite a large difference in speeds and it's invariably because they seem to think that racing is all about braking as late as possible.
keep doing this please the only way is to embarass EA into doing something about it
This situation is very similar to PUBG cheating scandal. One of the team was first exposed of cheating but later they found out most of the players were also cheating. In a game with large number of players at the same time its incredibly hard to notice cheating because and if one of the players is cheating in such a competitive environment you best believe most of them are cheating.
During the event, you could load stuff over the wheel for instance. If you use your own.
I love it how, in AC, there is a checksum that checks values of the files of the incoming user to the files stored on the server. So, unless everyone is cheating because they are all running the same cheat, no one is. Simple.
You think you can't program the game to send a fixed value instead of a live checksum?
As someone that used to deal with a lot of cheating on iR, before iR got 'big', this is exceptionally scary for the sim racing community....
just some news for everyone. there's cheaters in every match you play in any game
07:00 some people actually have modified controllers with the code built in. this was a problem league had for a while
I find the lackluster anti-cheat measures from a company called Codemasters to be quite ironic at least.
I've worked on anti-cheating technology for Electronic Arts. Any game downloaded to the PC can be modded unless you use the best technology from a company like Denuvo that we used to stop piracy on FIFA 16. It's pricey to use so game companies avoid using it. They want to sell games.
From what we could see in the data, at least 50% of top players in any game cheat when there's money and pride involved.
Like I said in the previous video, probably everyone uses it to a certain degree. It reminds me so much of the doping drama in the previous decades where most don't want to use it but you have to if you want to have chance to win.
Right. It’s sad that we iterate the same follies as seen in the past, naively expecting them not to be exploited in a competitive arena.
The only way to make this fair is to provide the same equipment via a 3rd party at the time of the event. So every machine is exactly the same (minus the config for each driver's preferences). But that would cost money and they are too busy making it. lol
I can't believe that I'm actually happy that GT7 is console only and always online. Really cuts out the cheating by a lot
there are still sadly cheaters in console with many inputs, incredible how pathetic people can be
@zilentzap if there is a reward for something, you're going to get people going above and beyond to reach it for themselves
My biggest gripe is why is it always online for SINGLEPLAYER modes? Why cant it be separate
@@logoncal3001 yeah that’s why I can’t play it anymore makes me mad lol
GT7 isn't always online in an effort to prevent cheating, it's always online in an effort to make more money from microtransactions.
reminds me of the situation with escape from tarkov right now.... one of their developers unanimously came out and basically gave a five point list of how cheating could be almost completely stopped but of course they're never going to do that
3:50 This only applies to public cheats. Anything a person is using in a serrious comp environment is going to be a paid for, private or semi-private cheat, which absolutely do store user info about everyone who uses them. You'd be surprised how often pro's from all games get blackmailed.
Man. If 70% were cheaters, that puts even myself into Esports contention if that 70% suddenly got banned.
No Dylan, no 😂
Exactly the same is currently happening in Escape from Tarkov, and I suspect almost all other multiplayer games.
Jimmer is now the Coffeezilla of sim racing. Great unbiased reporting
I'm just here for the drama. I don't own a sim setup or any sim racing games (no money), but I am invested to see how this will end and unravel. Keep us updated.
Imagine Jimmer become the GOAT because he doesn't hack bur everybody else does.
Jimmer already is my GOAT - just like, you know, saying ( :
Keep pushing Jimmy. These questions need to be asked, and nobody else seems willing to do it
It's a part of a broader problem with online gaming in general. If you're so inclined just do a simple search for cheats or hacks for online games and if even half of them are legitimate it paints a grim picture. And those are just public operating in broad daylight sites, i'm sure there are privately made ones as well.
While it is, this is an esport in which prize money is concerned. Gaming is for fun, even if competitive. However sport is professional. To be professional it must at the very least be fair game. If sports involved inherent cheating nobody would even bother.
9:16 the logic is actually reasonable. If you yourself do not think that the time is possible, than how did you get it?
When it comes to F1 esports, it's not people saying "Ronhaar matched my time therefore cheating" its "Ronhaar is achieving times that aren't possible.
Remember he was 0.2 faster than P2 when P2 was 0.2 faster than P20!
I think the hypothetical situation here is that an unknown person sets a new record, and gets called out by a long time player. The experienced player has spent many hours practicing, racing, and making setups, and as a result they managed to set a good time trial lap. How would an unknown person (with no experience in esports races, not part of a team, never had a record before) beat that time? It's possible that an unknown young talent appears, but you'd expect someone to slowly make their way up, instead of immediately beating esports-level lap times.
There's one more thing i don't understand.
If the Cheats are directly thrown into the game files, why don't the racing leagues (like PSGL) make a rule that you HAVE to Stream your POV to either Twitch (if they're streamers) or to a guy monitoring on Discord. Obviously screen share on Discord, not only the game.
Then after the Race the drivers have to leak the game files immediately without hiding scenes or censoring stuff.
edit: i wrote this comment halfway through the video and that idea was mentioned towards the end. My point still stands. Looking forward to LAN Events to get some clarity through all this bullshit
Developers put cheats in. Or else it wouldn't be a thing at all.
But for a competition, it's wrong.
To solve it, have everyone in the same location.
Imagine you're watching a F1 esport race and suddenly the P2 car fires a red shell at the P1 car and it just explodes. That's the kind of cheating I want to see.
As if they would ban 70% drivers it would kill of every sponsorship and fans
Hey Jimmer. Do you have similar concerns about your Team87 competition at all? It's such a great initiative, it would be a shame if the competition was distorted in the same way as seems to be happening in esports.
Its all games that have online competitions. The companies do not want to stop the cheaters because most of them are streamers, or people who are gonna bring eyes to the product they are selling.
I really hope we don’t find out that for some reason there are sanctioned cheaters! Money corrupts and who knows who could benefit from a cheater
I'm pretty sure about ESports teams aware of their drivers cheating. I will not say any name to avoid problems, but I'm sure.
In cs there was a case of a cheater uploading through his personal mouse.
Surly creating an Anti Cheat should not be that hard if the physics are deterministic. Run the physic calculation on the server and compare them with the client. If they dont Match, someone has changen values.
It seems like this would be low hanging fruit for AI
The old motor sports saying. “He must be cheating, because I’m cheating like a bastard and he’s beating me”
Jimmer becoming the @coffeezilla of esports scandals!
he should start saving up for that $10M studio!
Relax haha, he's made an 11 min video based upon a subreddit thread of a guy who claimed to be the maker of a hack mod, there was no vetting process.
He could be a 12 year old for all we know. Liked the Jarno interview though
trackmania had a similar incident were a guy who was very vocal on forums about cheating ended up cheating himself to get world record times on multiple tracks by slowing down the ingame speed and basically playing in slowmotion.
What I hate the most about this discussion is that Codemasters will probably just slap some well-known anti-cheat like Battleye or whatever would be relevant for the F1 game and call it a day. And so will the community thinking that if the game shows a "Battleye" icon to you during the loadscreen then it's surely impossible to cheat
On the other side of the spectrum you have developers of games like The Cycle: Frontier who, when the cheating became rampant, put up walls on walls upon walls of different anti-cheats. Ones they tell you they use and ones they don't. Along with other counter-measures like a ranking system it worked, but that's because they genuinely cared to get on top of that situation and hired people specializing in this field
Codemasters have already proven they don't give two shits. Words and declarations don't matter, actions do - and we see the whole extent of their actions laid out right in front of us. It is 2023 and their EXTREMELY COMPETITIVE game series supported by the official F1 has an anti-cheat measure so useless you can sum up how it works in a single short paragraph. That's how much they care. I really hope people will surprise me and not just take Battleye as THE answer to the problem, because to truly make codemasters invest into this enough to make cheating actually hard they will need A LOT of pushing from the community. After all they haven't even acknowledged the problem yet as their precious little image is too much of a priority for them to as much as mention that cheating in their games is possible and they are actually working on it, hiring specialists for example
I want the reality to prove me wrong but I really worry that once cheating in the next F1 games becomes just a tiny bit harder than literally typing "f1 22 grip hack" into Google people will call it a day, because now you need to go to the 2nd page of google results or even join a discord server with thousands of cheaters there(often paying ones) - like Rust has for example. As as far as I know Rust devs put in some anti-cheater work in, yet it's still fairly common to see them there
Battleye or an equivalent would be a step in the right direction, but it won't cut it.
Combating Cheats is very hard as history as proven.
Several other EA games have well known cheating issues Battlefields and Modern Warfare . Along with games like GTA online or Counter Strike.
There are just so many levels and ways to cheat.
@@clockdva20 poor battlefields 4 and 1.. I love these games but..
It is a lot worse in Bf1, I'm not sure but doesn't that game NOT have fully community moderated servers? If that is the case then WHAT A SURPRISE that cheating there is easier
The fact they dont use cockpit view i consider cheating and how its not compulsory is pathetic from the organsiers. A simulation should be as close as you can get to being real. Allowing the above cockpit cam is as stupid as the decisions we see from the FIA every race weekend.
I'm here for Jimmy's slow transition into an investigative journalist
the problem is the game itself, the cheats fixes the ridiculous "realism" that made it unplayable
From shed dweller to TH-camr to racecar driver, and now investigative journalist. He’s growing up so fast!
@DunkZ comment thief
I've been thinking this for a long time but I'm glad more people are starting to come round to the idea that this is happening! And to think people are winning money through this exploit is crazy great video Jimmy 💯
lets go when ur feeling down blonde jimmer posts
There is a lot of truth to that statement the Modder said, If you are so confident that nobody can beat you, then you must be cheating to have that level of confidence/arrogance, because if you are legit and you can do it, do you really not accept others are as good or better?
Not watched yet, but just to note: take absolutely everything the guy said on Reddit with a massive grain of salt. There's no doubt that he's what most developers would call "a script kiddie": someone with little knowledge, but enough bruteforce time and searched forum threads to have picked up how to do the basics.
As such he actually has absolutely no idea how much people cheat in F1 esports, and very little idea what issues exist and are exploited by other cheats that are out there (and as such, also has no idea how the situation should be fixed).
The people who are actually capable at producing cheats & know all about this stuff turn it into their full-time jobs: they don't give cheats or info out for free.
Yeah, it's seemingly just a CE script and a console app (the 178(!) lines of code mentioned in the video, which he admits he got ChatGPT to write for him, lol) that suspends the game process while the patches are injected.
To your last point, I'm sure there are many hobbyists out there with such skills who don't at all fancy having a full-time job reverse engineering games. I mean, just because you're able to change the crank shaft on your own car doesn't mean you want to be a full-time mechanic.
Edit: Having read a bit more about this, some nutters have apparently paid 90 Euro for such a cheat (which reportedly contained malware) before finding this free one, while others have bought a subscription for 50 Euro a month! This is SO insane!
Jimmy Broadbent: Praga Cup Champion, iRacing Le Mans and Daytona winner, Racing Organization Founder, Award-winning Streamer, and now, Sim Racing Investigative Journalist
This video made me feel awesome! I thought I was just a slow simracer, but it turns out everyone else is cheating!
As only 1000 people have downloaded this cheat I don't think so. (It's hard to tell if you were joking because I've seen many people making such accusations when in reality they're just slow.)
Cheating in most multiplayer games is an epidemic.
This should automatically make anyone not cheating feel faster than they were
All that would need to be done is have a program that checks the values against the server every time someone joins, or hell, every half second while they are joined. And obviously have a redundancy from the server that checks if the person's anti-cheat is turned on. If the server detects that it isn't turned on, immediate boot.
randomcallsign here: maybe
Seems like nowadays before you get into literally any new game, you have to chose not based on the game itself, but rather how many cheaters there are. Gaming is dying honestly.
The sheer happiness I feel whenever my hatred of Formula 1 and F1 Esports is validated. It's so good knowing I was always right lol.
You know they're cheating when the cars do a little wiggle
while the cheats sounded straightfoward with the simple bypass, im 100% positive that they still took a massive amount of time to develop due to the fact that you would have to somehow figure out that whole "screenshot" thing in the first place. The modder likely says this is easy because the cheats work on older titles, as the bypass was already known.
also the modder saying that an anticheat is easy to implement is a *disturbingly* naive take.
Which they discovered several years ago, This is not rocket science.
@@michaelharder3055 point being that its not like finding that was easy in the first place. its just easy to implement in a newer game with the same system because of the initial work done
Even discovering the snapshot would be fairly trivial because it's relatively common in various games an an anti-cheat mechanism, and any function that starts checking a bunch of config data on start-up is fairly obvious. For a decent modder this is genuinely childs play, and you can either inject modded configs by suspending the process, or create a script to load the modded configs into memory first and change the pointers for the function so it doesn't have to be suspended at all - which is sometimes needed as anti-cheat methods can monitor certain processes and detect whether they get suspended for injection.
@@tomh6010 you still have to do a substantial amount of work to view and translate the memory of a game to recognize it's doing that in the first place, then debug your injection such that it happens at the right time and persists as intended.
@@0xGRIDRUNR It sounds like you massively underestimates the abilities of hackers because it sounds like a herculean effort which it most certainly was not. Some hacks comparable to this literally took a weekend to hack.
I would love to have this Modder change the mod in the middle of a Esport event to make it obvious that people are cheating. Like in real F1 when they realised that teams were detecting the signal sent to the starting lights before they went off and not doing starts properly, so they sent the signal without the lights going off and caught the teams cheating.
Would be interesting to see if the modder could come up with something implemented into the cheats to catch out cheaters like dude did with cs:go 🤞🤣
As a gta player 70% are rookie numbers
I would hesitate to take this cheat creator's word. Cheaters tend to jump through a lot of hoops to justify their cheat usage, so something like the "70% of the pros might have cheated" line is a red flag to me. Even if I also think there's a cheating problem in racing games.
Ea would be foolish not to add antichrist they even have it for fifa so surely it's not too difficult and expensive
Yh Jesus has been getting too good in the redbull lately
Ah shit here we go again
Hi Jimmy, we have contacted you on your email, but I figured it might be worth it to leave a comment too.
Basically, we have created a telemetry based tool that allows us to detect a person using a grip hack. We have been able to idenfity those that cheated without injecting any software into the drivers' game client. The system is not perfect, but is at least SOMETHING, as opposing to absolute lack of support in this matter from the game devs.
I would love to get in touch with you and elaborate on that topic!
Great video by the way, as always. There's only one thing that is not 100% true. Cheating on lan, especially in the kind of game that does not give any advantage by blatantly, for example, showing people through walls like it is in FPS games. The way of injecting cheats into the game would have to be done through the devices used by the driver. As long as the wheelbase is installing any kind of firmware on the PC (and as we all know - all of them do) it would be possible to inject a dll with the wheel drivers and even more importantly - delete them as the wheel gets unplugged. It was done in the past in other games, it could happen here too!
Plugging the USB stick is not gonna cut it, these offline events are moderated by staff members being on stage behind the drivers, but as long as nothing else gets plugged into the PC and nothing suspicious is happening, but the wheel is still being connected... surely that gives a lot of possibilities, that is of course presuming these events are run on drivers wheels, which from feeling and comfort point of view, might very well be the case :)
Having worked at multiple video game companies, the possibility of Alvaro being tasked by a security/game dev team and the esports team not being aware does not surprise me at all
I was 99% sure it was a bs excuse when he made that tweet. Surely EA already knows every possible weakness and how these mods are able to be implemented. It doesn’t take a top level player to know the game can be modified, and definitely is at this point. The crazy thing to me is the dev companies don’t seem to care AT ALL! Surely they could release a patch that closes up this specific hole. And the most absurd part is the insane prize money of F1 esports in addition to big F1 teams backing the players. You’d think those teams would have enough power to fight for a fair esports environment. But they may even be well aware of the cheating and possibly encouraging using it.
Yeah, let’s be honest - a coder wants to know how it works technically. They have no interest in what lap times you can achieve with it. They can load it up themselves and play with it if they want. Having a fast person use it does nothing to confirm if something works. It’s also not their job to figure out who is cheating. It’s their job to figure out how this works and stop it from working. It’s on the tournament organizers to deal with the drivers.
I just remembered that time Codemasters failed to program competent RX AI in Dirt and realized: Maybe the reason they haven't been able to fix the cheating problem is because they are actually incompetent at coding and doesn't know how to do it
don't* :^)
Seeing as they can't get a handle on some bugs that have been present since 2016, yeah
I watch a fair amount of F1 esports and league races and I always found it suspicious that almost anybody that drove a Mclaren was faster than Jarno
Well I guess you haven't watched esports because if you did you would know all the cars are set to equal so being in a McLaren is not different to a Merc, Williams or Red Bull
@@maxb148 I kno all the cars are equal which proves my point
In COD when I used to play comps a while back (quite a while back like 10-15 years) there was a thing called Punk Buster that would pick up on hacks/cheats and it worked really well, and the cheats in COD at the time were super easy to code, it absolutely can be done.
The thinking it's not possible to go faster is understandable, I'm normally around 1-2 seconds off of alien pace on iracing, and it baffles me how they get the time outta the car like they do. So I can understand that same viewpoint, when you genuinely are one of the fastest, and all of a sudden you're being beaten by a tenth or two, I imagine the mindset is probably amplified tbf
If everyone is cheating then noone is cheating
PUBG Asia server mentality 😂
The point, that he's stating about "If you accuse someone of cheating, just because he beats you, then you would have to be cheating yourself" is ABSOLUTELY massively accurate. Think about it. You'll HAVE to have an ego the size of jupiter to think you are automatically better than someone you don't otherwise know.
The guy from reddit was a troll. In case you did not figure it out yourself. He knows nothing about cheating, programming, etc
The same guy literally said the same thing on unknowncheats. You can't even check the sources before posting lol
Agreed. Seems suspect. Jimmer is still learning the ropes of investigative journalism.
When it comes to cheating while at a LAN or anything in that direction i can say there has been several cases throughout gaming, one of them being a person hiding cheats with the Word.exe name and icon, he was cheating while doing a CS tournament, could try dig up other cases easily, but this is one i remember from the top of my head at the moment
I feel like more people need to be slapped in public by their mothers....
I feel like you need some serious mental help....
We need to bring back bullying. In this case, bully the fuck out of those cheating fucks.
11:38 Just some advice for next time: If someone really wants to be anonymous, you need to paraphrase everything they say. Writing styles are distinct unfortunately.
All you need to do is check lap times for known tracks and see that people are posting ridiculously fast times which are simply impossible without modding the game and adding all kinds of traction control or driver aids. Being a minute or more faster than the known lap record for Nordschliefe or similar tracks is a big of a giveaway.
dont like the game, dont like the community. I would not be surprised if this 70% figure would be an understatement
Imagine if the game were updated to randomly refresh the local grip values from the server at some point mid-race. Crossing the start/finish would be a good spot for the changeover. See what percentage of the field suddenly starts crashing on turn one. Suppose you could do it at a pit stop if you wanted it to be a little less obvious.
The cheat makers would just patch that functionality out and continue with their grip multipliers. A lot of people don't seem to understand that you can't trust the client, especially not when the client is a PC. It's like expecting a criminal to admit his crimes if the police were to call him on the phone.
It's never cool for anyone to use cheats in any games.