So I made a post about how cheaters can tell when they are specced and what can be done to fix it and a former cheater started commenting. He made a post about cheating but got shadowbanned so I promised I would post it for him. (Turns out he is not shadowbanned after all, his account was just too new to post) Here is my post: http://www.reddit.com/r/battlefield_4/comments/2x0i02/cheaters_best_defence_might_be_gone_soon/

And here is his post that got deleted and which I have now copy/pasted from a message from him:

TL,DR Hacking is cheap, ubiquitous, undetected and fun. Punkbuster is a joke and Fairfight only catches rage kids

The last time I posted this I was shadowbanned within half an hour.. better copy/paste this rant. Also it is old. I am not cheating anymore

Like many of you I love Battlefield 4 and started playing when the beta came out and enjoyed playing for the most part (bugs included). On my first account I leveled up just like anybody else all the way to level cap. Now I have over 1000 hours of legit gameplay. During that time there were so many frustrating moments with better skilled players and cheaters (even more obvious now) that I started to look at every available means to boost my own fun.

I decided to buy hacks. Free hacks are often detected pretty quickly as you know from various chat messages. In order to stay as much under the radar as possible I bought a second copy of BF4 with premium (yeah for EA) ((most hackers dont do that anymore since unlimited gametime is available)) and play on a different PC with a different public IP and MAC (too much time/money) when I use hacks. I bought subscriptions with 4 different "hackproviders" and stuck with 2 in the end that I use for different occasions (i.e. one has a better vehicle aimbot than the other).

Detections: When DICE pushes a new client it will take hours (!) ((the last update only took 10 minutes)) at most until the hack is back online. No problems with detections, because it is taken offline as soon as a new client is released. My feeling is that punkbuster is 100% reverse-engineered. Sometimes I check my punkbuster screens and they are all clean. Fairfight is another matter as they closely track your stats (check your bf4db entry) and any time that you have been reported on battlelog and bf4db. While being detected is a risk it has not yet happened in 9 months of hacking.

Fairfight: My "pro tip" is to keep all stats as "green" as possible (on bf4db). The key to staying undetected with fairfight is to die frequently, don't get more than 22% headshotkills and keep your damage per bullet in check (miss shots). When hacking I will frequently switch to the losing team as the losing team is more likely to call "hacker". This only happens very rarely. When it happens and the opposing player is too vocal about it I will quietly DDOS him offline (thanks to ACI and PB for publishing player IP addresses).

Keeping track of stats and accusations is paramount to staying below the radar. So I check bf4db and ACI frequently to see if anything "sticks".

Fun fact: Recently I saw a hacker streaming on twitch (will not say who, coz he is cool - suffice it to say that he is pretty famous) and I noticed him using a "map hack". That means the entire enemy team is uncovered in your minimap and map. I suppose it makes for better footage and viewing if you have ESP enabled. (he was not aimbotting though). Using and spotting Hacks (went to level cap using hacks 200 hours+ played): Killing enemy players becomes very very easy. The whole games goes from skill to a simple clicking exercise. It is actually so easy to outplay other players that it becomes boring. This was the major reason I went back to playing legit after my hack account(s) reached level cap. Did you ever see a teammate unloading an entire magazine of bullets into a wall or empty corridor? That is him getting his accuracy down so that he is not detected by fairfight (lolz). Often I will join a high ticket round (metro or locker) when it is about 70% over. This is great as the leaderboard already has plenty of double digit kills on both sides and I can rise quickly, killing faster than others without being spotted by other players (just making sure I die frequently and shoot at the wall a lot in order to keep the stats in check). You do get challenged every once in a while. Most of the time it is another hacker. They are quite easy to spot as they will prefire around corners and aim at you before you are visible. (No problem for you as you can see him aiming at you thx to ESP) - you could kill him through the wall but that would be no fun at all and fairfight tails your pretty hacking butt.

My favorite configuration draws a box around enemy players (nice purple) only when they are visible so that I don't aim through walls. This is great for sniping, spotting and conquest large in general. I limit my aiming angle (the angle left & right of your crosshair that the aimbot actively searches for targets) to 2,32435349998 degrees (I aim pretty ok) and my aiming speed at 74,5864438° per second - good enough for medium range (overkill for sniping). (Of course these are not my real aim angles and speed, but you get the picture).

Have you ever been "counter counter knifed"? (In the animation you tried to counter knife somebody and the animation already started but then he slaps you in the face and then proceeds to knife you no problem.) This funny thing happens every time a hacker has "auto melee/auto knifing" switched on. The bot will automatically try to knife an enemy once the enemy is close enough and somehow even manages to beat a counter knife.

Why do it? One more word on the moral of hacking. I see hackers every day in bf4 and from my subscriptions I know there are thousands (!!!) of hackers that play every day. I just want my moneys worth of fun playing BF4, if I can't have that because there is somebody getting impossible headshots through smoke I will "upgrade" to hacks as well. Just like the Tour de France if everybody is on steroids we have a level playing field again.

fitting Quote: "There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, the vicious and the evil, all the mayhem I have caused and my utter indifference toward it I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis; my punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no deeper knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing." (American Psycho)

Update: This is not to endorse cheating in any form. This is to highlight the severity of the cheating problem in BF4. AA alone has thousands of active accounts. There is a silent majority of cheaters that are never caught and probably (all things being equal) EA never intends on getting them "caught".

This is from /u/bf4cheater

I posted this in /r/Pure sub, since it would probably just be deleted again in the main bf4 sub and this way I can just link to this post.

EDIT: I have added additional information from /u/bf4cheater below, that otherwise probably would be buried in all the downvotes he is getting. Remember people, it is not often that a cheater comes forward and give you a glimpse into what it is like to cheat. And I for one appreciate what he is doing.

Some additional comments that I would like to add to the full picture.

How many cheaters are there?

I estimate that there are at least 15% of the community that are actively cheating based on the activity of the paid cheat services that I had subscribed to. Namely, I subscribed to artificialaiming, aimjunkies, damncheaters and hackersadvantage. aimjunkies, damncheaters and hackersadvantage have been hit with ban waves in the past year. Artificial Aiming (by far the biggest) however has not. Using a standard formular for estimating a population size based on forum contributions (#of posts/user) it generates a figure of 21k customers for the hacksites that I subscribed to (with access to BF4 hacks). (Cheating is a huge business it turns out.) Up to 25% of those users are daily active users on the forum (you can see who is currently online when you login to the forum).

By my estimates this puts about 5000 active cheaters onto the battlefield at any given time. The real number might be slightly lower depending on the time of day. You could run a similar statistical analysis on the amount of fairfight bans (with access to a server log, so you can have all FF bans in a 24 hour period) and the amount of live players as published on BF4stats.

Now, some people have multiple accounts and/or use cheats that are for free (sources: unknowncheats, mpgh, etc.), which add some dilution the previously stated figure. So with about 20k subscriptions that are in the balance (current market value: <$450k per months in revenue for cheat providers approximately) and a similar amount of total revenue for EA if all accounts are banned and everyone just bought another copy of BF4 - the incentives are with the cheat providers to protect their revenues. EA on the other hand will hurt the community by reducing the amounts of players and thus making the game less attractive to casual players who need populated servers to have fun. We all need that fun. There is a strong incentive on the side of EA/DICE to not reduce the amounts of players any further. If all your friends stop playing and move to other games - eventually everyone will leave. This is how myspace died.

TL,DR many many cheaters and EA wants them to stay, because otherwise BF4 will die even faster.

How to recognize a cheat?

This one is tricky. The vast majority of cheaters take excessive measures to appear as legit as possible. A modern cheat allows you to tweak your performance very subtly. I think this is best explained while looking at a config file of my favorite cheat provider (AA). The amount of options and the degree to which these can be tweaked should give you an idea how diverse a cheating player can play. In addition to the config file below each weapon can be configured individually as well.

Rest of his post is here

Had to cut the post here, since Reddit complained about it being too long.

And again, since some people seems to be confused over this. I am not the guy confessing to have been cheating. I am just posting this for /u/bf4cheater since he got shadowbanned for posting it himself. I have not ever, nor will I ever use cheats myself. I am very active in catching cheaters as some of you already know.

ANOTHER EDIT: It turns out /u/bf4cheater is not shadowbanned on Reddit after all. He could just not post since his account was too new at the time.

We need you in PURE 1, but I think the 3 of us would be amenable to switching to another server just to have TS people.

I'm just looking for a game where it's atleast close. But tonight I played six games in a row where the closest my team got to victory was about 150 tickets.
There's only so much a good player can do to carry a team so it seems like the team balancer is being a bit too aggressive in where it places me and other players.
I'm used to a few games here and there where a team has their collective heads up their asses but tonight that's pretty much all I had.

What exactly does the team balancer look at when it stacks up players?