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Is there a new cheating epidemic?
Some major game titles are now unplayable in the higher rankings because of cheating: CounterStrike, Call of Duty, Tarkov. This occurs to a comical degree
High school teachers say most essays are now written with AI
I can't speak to academic cheating with confidence, but I can about videogames. First, there are more opportunities as time passes as more and more players get into online games so the whole number is going to go up. This matters b/c these are all potential customers of the next part of the problem. Its never been easier to cheat at online games. Used to be, back on the 00s, it was much harder. You either needed to be a programmer yourself with knowledge of the game engine and build your own hacks, or you needed to know the right people or be part of fairly insular online communities, the Warez scene probably being the most prolific. There was a lot of overlap between the game cracking/piracy scene and the online game cheats scene, both of which were almost never just stumbled upon by normies. Now that much larger numbers of people play these very competitive games, they are large enough to constitute a customer base worth trying to get the attention of. People are also much more comfortable with paying over various apps now, so its much easier to sell to them. Prices are wildly variable with the specific game, but for anywhere from $10 to $200 you can get a download link to a fully contained .exe that you run with the game, there is a relatively user friendly interface, and you money buys not just the download of the exe, but also updates as the sellers of the cheat engines try to stay one step ahead of the game devs and other anti-cheat service providers like VAC. In addition, the people using the engines are much, much sloppier with using them, not even bothering to try to hide it most of the time. To accommodate this the same groups that sell the cheats also sell various ban-evasion packages, helping you make new accounts, teaching you how to use a VPN etc, or in many cases just selling you a pre-made, clean account to get right back at it. A few more infamous ones over the years have also had inside people at the game studio who would just remove the bans for money. Money changed everything with videogame cheating. I don't think any of this applies to online chess, which is its own strange world.
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