Aimbot?. Or… was that guy really just that good?!

Bots should be on the endangered species list. I ‘happened’ upon a game the other day where someone was using an ‘AimBot’. Now, I’ve heard the ‘folklore’ and ‘tales’ and read articles about them but I’d never actually come across one.

For those who don’t know what one of these things is, it’s a ‘script’ that gives you aiming accuracy of up to 100%. Depending on what type you get hold of you can change the accuracy and many other aspects of the ‘bot’. Some are used as ‘stand-alone’s’; completely autonomous, they run around and shoot at anything that moves, others you use as an ‘add-on’ to your normal game play – they just make your aiming more accurate, you still have to move about and point the gun ( the classic shot through the back! – a player facing the wrong way to you when they shoot you).

The thing I find strange, aside from the obvious reasons, is why do people use these things? I know the usual ‘I always win at any cost’ type of thinking (one guy admitted as much to me once), or the ‘fun’ to be had at annoying players with 100% accuracy, but, I mean, what for?!?!. I always thought the point of these things was to have really good accuracy WITHOUT giving clues to the fact that you were using one…!!

All the guys I was fraggin with in this particular game ‘knew’ it was a aimbot. Distance rail shots weren’t what gave the game away, what did were the spawn point frags; the ‘bot’ camped on the central bounce pad facing the wrong way and fragged players spawning into the game behind it, it would turn, fire and frag, no aiming, lining up the shot, compensating for lag and player movement or the other fine tuning that you do instinctively in game. Bam!… bam!… bam!… 3…4….5 in perfect succession and each time on the opposite side to which the ‘bot’ was facing. I’ve come across guys with fast reflexes but this was just to fast, accurate and more importantly, far to frequent for it to have NOT been a bot – at the rate this guy was going he would have easily beat the current Q3A world champion.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a guy behind the bot.. he did make the odd comment and renamed ‘himself’ to ‘G’, but there are some clever ‘scripts’ out there that will do this for you. What we couldn’t figure out though, the server we were on was a ‘pure server’, how the hell was he able to use a bot on a pure server (which blocks anything that isn’t on the hosting server)?!?!. There were 8 of us and 6 were spectating! we were amazed and ‘pissed’ by the use of this bot. Eventually we all joined the game a teamed up on the guy, he got the message and we noted that his accuracy dropped and then he left the game.

I don’t know *sigh*. Personally I think they’re a waste of time, they don’t improve your game play and everybody knows when one is being used which kind of defeats the object of using one really, doesn’t it?

[addendum] mm….. I came across another suspect the other day that exhibited some of the ‘symptoms’ described above, but, and quite cleverly, his accuracy was applied to the machine-gun. This guy had c.90% hit rate. This in itself isn’t to bad but he did what the guy above did he would turn, and without aiming find his target fraggin them within a few shots, when spectating through ‘his’ eyes you could see how his crosshair kept locked onto his target in spite of his movements around the map (unless he ‘snapped’ it out of place by quickly turning around).

The weird thing is if you fire the machine-gun at a wall in front of you the dispersal pattern is quite broad – you don’t hit a single spot repeatedly, this guy was – with unnerving accuracy… maybe I’m being paranoid but getting fragged by the machine-gun when you’re on the other side of the map is highly suspicious, the dispersal pattern is to broad and general to get a complete frag without using a second weapon.

I think I’m being too paranoid…!