CS-Nation

Covering the future of Counter-Strike
anti-cheats
article: anti-cheats
When CS 1.3 was near completion, a modification the "Online Game Cheats" (OGC) client hook was released. OGC was, at first, a small cheat with only a few built-in upgrades (so to speak) to the user's environment. Soon, thousands of gamers around the world consumed OGC like candy and the version numbers sky-rocketed with new exploits being added regularly.

Soon, OGC had an innumerable amount of features. When just one person would go all out, it wasn't rare at all for half the server to empty in 5 minutes time. This wretched disease passed through the Counter-Strike community for months and months, and gamers were fed up. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of people quit playing the game just because of this cheat. I too simply couldn't play anymore.

But this article isn't about the cheats and how they've affected us, it's about the actions made by many other groups to stop them.

the first wave

The OGC client hook ended up having various on-screen displays, including a team-neutral radar. The client hook is no longer in development.
The fight against cheats began with PunkBuster. Clans could restrict use of their tag in Punkbuster servers and cheats were very, very minimal when the development was at its peak. The PunkBuster developers (project leader Tony Ray) prided themselves in being self-sufficient but they, like anyone else, probably wanted more praise for their efforts. PunkBuster wanted to be integrated into CS, but Valve turned them down. Punkbuster then halted Half-Life support.

PunkBuster brought anti-cheat to reality. It had 2 programs: the server-run version and the client side version. If both existed, they would interact and check the user for cheats and other exploits. This idea of anti-cheat wasn't completely sufficient because not everyone knew about it, so users were often kicked when it became required.

The empty space PunkBuster left was filled with cheats, and the community was once again totally exposed. In its shadow, CSGuard spawned. CSGuard, originally developed by OLO, was at this point the only hope the community really had. The design of CSGuard completely changed how cheats were detected. Only a server-side version was needed, and it searched every player's computer for given cheats. OLO updated CSGuard for a few months as cheats came out, but eventually he completely gave up.

Various other anti-cheats came out. Cheating-Death really impacted us all for a few weeks. It became famous after it reportedly stopped a new OGC version in under 24 hours. The community embraced the efforts. This anti-cheat used a completely different system as well. They didn't pride themselves in "detecting" cheats, but rather they stopped the cheats from being of any use. This also had the server and client versions. For a few weeks Cheating-Death really put OGC on hold, and all versions were successfully blocked—for a while.

After OLO stopped updating CSGuard, a group of server administrations, known as the United Admins, took control over of the project. They updated at a much faster pace, and really put the cheats on their tip-toes. Later, they changed the name to "HLGuard," and spread support to other mods. They were really the holy grail for all of us until the VAC came out.