10 funniest anti-cheat measures in games

If you have spent a few dozen hours playing competitive games online, chances are you’ve had one of your matches ruined by opponents wielding the equivalent of a lightsaber on a medieval game.

Cheaters suck because they remove the uncertainty that should always accompany video games. You just know you’re going to lose, likely in a humiliating manner. Luckily, game developers and players sometimes fight back and come up with hilarious anti-cheating mechanisms. Let’s look at some of the best.

Call Of Duty giving non-cheaters awesome perks to fight off cheaters

One of the most deservedly loathed cheats in gaming is the wallhack. It allows cheaters to see all matter of important stuff, be it drops or enemies, even when they should be safely hiding behind walls.

The makers of Call Of Duty brilliantly reversed this by coming up with an anti-cheat countermeasure that rendered all regular players completely invisible in the eyes of cheaters. Talk about the literal Predator becoming the prey, huh?

Call Of Duty also has cheaters shooting blanks

The other classic cheater that any honest player who’s ever indulged in some online gameplay is the aimbot. Even if you have the weakest weapon in the game, never missing a headshot will likely grant you a serious advantage against any well-equipped player.

Call Of Duty solved that by making every bullet shot out of a caught cheater’s gun dealing exactly 0 damage. This resulted in various YouTube videos of cheaters complaining that their weapons weren’t working even though they weren’t missing a single shot. How the turns have tabled.

Deadlock turns cheaters into frogs

Deadlock somehow already has a cheater issue, but this time Valve was ready for the war. It’s anti-cheating system will detect and ask non-cheaters if they want the cheaters to be banned right away, or turned into frogs for the remainder of the match – then banned. It’s a hilarious form of justice, and not even a new one. Turns out it began life as a mechanism that would’ve turned cheaters into chickens in Counter-Strike but it ended up never seeing the light of day. I’m guessing that all the years of cheater abuse in Valve games finally made the company go full on evil wizard.

Runescape’s botany bay

Similarly to Deadlock’s frog-ification, Runescape also allows players to judge cheaters. Unlike Deadlock, however, Runescape’s penalties are a bit harsher than just being turned into a cute lil green critter.

To allow players to arrive at the best-possible comeuppance, the makers of Runescape created Botany Bay. This is a very “special” place where players can judge and — more importantly — execute cheaters in the most gruesome of ways.

Tomb Raider 2’s trap code

Not all cheaters thrive in the online landscape. Back in the early days of the Tomb Raider series, the rumor that you could totally get Lara Croft to take off their clothes in the original game took the relatively tiny Internet by storm. By the release of Tomb Raider 2, many saw the surfacing of a cheat code that promised players could get the now even more detailed Lara Croft model naked. You could not.

performing the moves that would supposedly allow you to play “Nude Raider” would actually culminate in Lara exploding and sending dozens of body parts (still with their clothes on) flying across the screen.

Be warned that it still works in the remasters.

Fall Guys’ cheater island

Honestly, I believe justice should always be rehabilitative, not punitive. The good people at Mediatonic seems to agree as they developed not a bunch of contraptions even viler than those seen in a regular match of Fall Guys, but a resort just to accommodate cheaters.

On the cheater island, you could learn that cheating is wrong as you’re pitted against dozens of other cheaters, many of which who will possibly sport cheats capable of making yours feel puny.

Cheats that are too good to be true

Sometimes you just get to take matters into your own hands. That’s what Reddit user receiven did as he marketed a hot and revolutionary new Counter-Strike multi-cheat and got a lot of people to try it out.

This cheat, however, wasn’t just useless but even made users play worse as it got their POV stuck at a crooked angle. Cheaters wouldn’t have to worry much about this, though, as Steam wouldn’t take long to detect this software as something that could’ve only resulted from meddling with the code, and thus got thousands of would-be cheaters banned.

Rigged parachutes

Few things are more thrilling than coming to a game after having learned a new skill that no-one could anticipate. I’m assuming cheaters in Battle Royale games get one hell of a thrill as they witness their character descending from the plane into whatever BR island they’re about to make unfun for everyone else.

Call Of Duty made sure the thrill ends in an absolute anti climax, as the cheaters detected by Warzone would have their parachutes intentionally rigged to have them crater and die upon landing.

The Witcher 3’s biblically accurate cow angel

Witchers work for coin. Their code doesn’t much care for cruelty, but The Witcher 3’s game code sure does. Chances are you’ve played Witcher 3 without ever noticing this, and that’s great.

If you’re evil, however, and even if you haven’t used any sort of cheating software, you may already know what I’m talking about. Upon committing random – but certainly serious – high number of crimes against cows, the game will spawn the toughest monster in existence, a god-like cow protector capable and willing toy obliterate anyone trying to abuse the game’s economy via cow-murder.

Animal Crossing’s Resetti or “Mr Reset”

Savescumming isn’t even cheating software, but the practice of reloading until you have the desired outcome is frowned upon by many, including the people at Nintendo behind Animal Crossing.

Abusing the game’s save functionality by resetting too often will unleash the ire of Resetti, who will not kill you, nor rig your parachute, not summon a huge cow demon, but do the worst thing imaginable: continuously berate players for their behavior.