Cheaters more likely to hang out with other cheaters

Nobody likes cheaters in games, especially when it comes to online gaming – it just ruins the whole experience for non-cheaters playing the game. Some researchers wanted to find out more about this cheating community and decided to perform some research. According to a study of 12 million gamers on the Steam community – 700,000 are cheaters (5.8%). In addition to finding out how many cheaters there were, they discovered a number of interesting facts about cheaters.

Firstly, cheaters stick together. According to their data – cheaters are more likely to be friends with other cheaters. Apparently, cheating appears to be infectious as well. If you have a lot of friends who are cheaters, chances are high that you’ll end up being one of them in the future.

However, it appears that cheating has some severe consequences. In addition to being banned from game servers, it appears that when a person is newly labeled as a cheat – they tend to lose friends. For some reason, these cheaters will choose to cut themselves off from their friends. It wasn’t explained why they did it, but it is supposedly the behavior of a cheater.

From these studies, the researchers hope to use the structure of the network to predict the likelihood that a given player will become a cheat in the future. What do you think of this theory, is it true? Do you have a lot of friends who cheat while you don’t cheat at all?

[Image Credit]

George Wong
Categories: Gaming