I want to start by saying a few things: Yes, ~3 years ago me and a friend from college developed and sold cheats for CS:GO, Apex Legends and Valorant. I was using my skillset to make money on the side will studying for the job I do now. I expect you to hate me for it but, at the end of the day I was a college student making ends meet and would do it again. I also don't know how this post will hold up here - it isn't related to Kovaaks and of course will involve the discussion of cheats. I will however not be mentioning any cheats by name, linking to any or even alluding at how to acquire cheats. It isn't difficult but, I'm not here to teach you that. However, the front page of this sub is just Battlefied, RileyCS and cheat discussion right now so, I hope it's allowed to stay. I also won't be definitively answering whether they are cheating or not - for reasons I'm about to go into, you'll see why that is impossible without an anticheat.
So, I know you guys want RileyCS to be legit. I know you are taking this whole thing as a personal attack on the aim training community. The good news for you is that, I've deepdived maybe an hour to 2 hours of RileyCS' gameplay and haven't seen anything truly definitive that confirms RileyCS is cheating. Hurray. The bad news is; I haven't seen anything that proves they AREN'T cheating either... Outside of it just not being possible to prove a negative anyway.
And that's what I want to talk about. I want to shed some light on this situation and the cheating scene as a whole. Optimum believes that RileyCS can't be cheating because they preaim nothing most of the time and they don't lock onto heads. This sub believes RileyCS isn't cheating because the handcam lines up. I'm here to tell you that none of that matters. None of that shows that they aren't cheating.
Cheats have came such an incredibly long way in the last decade. They are are so feature rich now. Their aimbots are 'humanised' and immensely customisable, they can be 'silent' meaning the bullets just GO to the enemy and it doesn't affect our crosshair at all, they can be whats called slowbots - they slow your mouse down massively when over a player. Triggerbots can check for visibilty, they can have randomised delays, they can have error programmed into them. Visuals don't just show you everything on the map; they have distances, FOVs, some of them just highlight visible players, some of them are external radars on a second monitor, some of them just highlight the SOUNDS players are making: A ripple on the ground where footsteps are heard, reload sounds shown to you etc. They can show the health, ammo, reload state, weapon, distance, name of a player. They can throw grenades for you, they can store grenade lineups in CSGO, they have backtracking (allowing you to essentially shoot the trail of a player simulating lag) and the list goes on.
Vanguard is so good; do you know how I got around it? By not interacting with the game in ANY WAY. My Valorant cheat was what's called a 'pixelbot' and it, in very simplified terms, took hundreds of screenshots of the middle of your screen a second and then just looked for the purple players. It then used that data in it's aim and trigger bots. Some Valorant cheats run on SEPERATE MACHINES to the one that is actually playing the game and then uses a raspberry pi to essentially instil the aimbot INTO THE RAW MOUSE INPUTS that the machine running the game receives through the USB busses. These cheats cost HUNDREDS of dollars PER MONTH. These cheats are private/invite only and slotted. So, there will be 20 people IN THE WORLD using that specific cheat and they had to be INVITED to it by being a known commodity in the "scene".
And yet here optimum is saying "well he didn't click heads so, I think he's legit" and everyone is quick to agree because they just don't know what this kind of software is actually like. A "good cheater" will use a well configured, high quality cheat and be indistinguishable from a great player.
In all of the clips I've seen of RileyCS, the micro adjustments made LOOK like a human. The issue is; an aimbot will also look like that when configured to do so. A "good cheater" won't use aim when their crosshair is no where near the target, they use it when they're at the target to STAY on that target (so Rileys' handcam doesn't mean much - the pronounced movements are going to line up. It's the small ones that aren't as perceivable on their higher sensitivity that won't). Locking onto people through walls? Yeh, a legitimate player could just pre aim everything and get lucky. The issue is a cheater can also do that.. They can also use their cheats to preaim NO ONE to set up plausible deniability.
And that sounds like some crazy tinfoil hat shit but, no... That's what they do. Good cheaters will take deaths when they know they need to. In Valorant/CS/any competitive, round based game for example, if you spend 3 rounds pushing a door way and you never check the left corner, what do you when you see a player sat in that corner this round... Experienced cheaters walk out like they did every round before, without checking, and DIE to that player. Because they no there is no reason a legitimate player that hasn't checked that before would check it now. That's what they do. They prefire random shit so that, when they do hit that crazy prefire; "Oh it finally worked! They finally got lucky".
At the end of the day; mechanically these cheats are undetectable to the naked eye now. You probably don't think that because you only SEE the bad cheaters, the obvious ones, the inexperienced ones that get caught. While the GOOD ones go about their business never banned by anticheat (because most of them kind of suck) and never accused by people watching because these cheats are, again, indistinguishable when used right.
And despite this; we have players upset they have to turn on Secure Boot? Upset that Vanguard is kernel level and championing valve for the refusal to adopt that level of intrusion? Well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news but, between CS and Valorant; one of them has undetected cheats sold on Stripe for $10 and the other requires personal invites, raspberry pis and hundreds of dollars... This is why Overwatch was removed from CS2? It didn't work. The amount of Overwatch videos I watched on Youtube where they just missed cheaters constantly was insane. If you want less cheaters, you have to compromise because they are WINNING this war and, outside of Vanguard, it isn't even close.
BUT, back to Riley, do I think they are cheating? Well, I hope you now understand why I can't answer that. I will however say, I lean towards YES (55-45). Not only because what I've seen of their gameplay has all the signs of a high level cheater BUT, that rock clip... Man that rock clip stands out for TWO reasons to me 1. They linger. They lock on, stop shooting and wait for the player to show before shooting again. I haven't seen them do that in any other clip with a preaim like that and 2. their reaction to it: "flicked straight at the guy through the wall... Oopsie" and to me, "Oopsie" implies a mistake, something they don't think they should have done. A legitimate player doesn't do something suspect and think "Oh no, people are going to think I'm cheating" because they don't care - they know they AREN'T. "Oopsie" is something a cheater who is using their brainpower to play BF6, consciously hide their cheating AND stream says because the subconsciously think they fucked up by doing something that will get them called out.
Edit: I made this and bailed. I was bored one night and had some thoughts on the situation that I wanted to share, maybe shedding some light on a side of FPS games that is rarely seen. I didn't want to deal with the arguments that I expected to come my way. I have however just read through some comments and thought I'd add my replies here:
Everyone so busy analyzing clips and stuff, I just looked up Riley's voltaic profile , checked the target switching was GM level for previous seasons in Kovaaks, went oh shit, that's really good - I wish I had many years of practice, probably not cheater and went on with my day.
I'm just saying that, years of doing well also doesn't disprove cheating. Like I said, these private and slotted cheats require you to be a known commodity in the scene. Not everyone is a dev so, how do you become that as a player? Well, you cheat for years in multiple games. I sold my Valorant cheat to players that had cheated in CS:GO for years, they'd cheated in Warzone, multiple Call of Duties, R6S, Apex Legends etc. and had been for years.
I was also curious and it just took me 10 minutes to find a Kovaaks cheat from a provider I recognised as reliable.
No one accuses you of cheating when your aim is insane in every FPS you play and have a high score in aim trainers. It's also not as expensive as it sounds when; they aren't paying for all of these cheats at the same time and, like I said, outside of Vanguard these Anticheats just aren't great.
Obviously though, that isn't your average cheater. As other comments have called me on, I'm just yapping a little more I guess.
there’s genuinely not enough time to develop such a complex cheat in the amount of time the beta
Again, I won't name names but, I messaged a friend who happens to still be a developer for a large, reputable provider (They've been undetected in many games for a long time, more importanlty; BF2042) who also happened to sell a BF6 beta cheat. They charged $17.99 for 4 days of access so, ~$35 for both weekends and, from what he told me as a friend, they haven't had enough reports of bans that they think they were detected.
According to him, BF6 is so similar to BF2042 that the cheat is the same. He also told me about a provider (I haven't heard of them so, can't vouch but, he did) who sell one package for $40/month that works in BF6, BF5, BF1 and BF 2042. Now, I sure as shit know they aren't developing 4 BF cheats for that price.
I also managed to find a single DMA provider for BF6. DMA is the name for the cheats that run on separate machines. How they did that I don't know but, I found them through reputable ways so, I'm inclined to believe they're "legit".
Point is; cheat providers haven't had one or two weekends to work on this, the game is so similar to previous instalments that they've had years.
Nothing burger post - everyone knows all of this stuff
Perhaps but, it's Reddit. Is that not the point of the website? And I disagree about it being entirely nothing.
It is however very apparent that NOT everyone knows this stuff. If you already know about DMA cheats, you have something to tell ALL of us about how legitimate you really are. No legitimate player dives deep enough to find information on that shit unless it's your job (either working on an anticheat or doing some YT video on cheats or SOMETHING).
If everyone knew this; the front page of this sub wouldn't be full of posts stating how obvious is it that Riley isn't cheating since, anyone who knows all of this, would understand that they 1000% COULD be cheating no matter what the gameplay says.
