In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the absolute lowest strata of the community is occupied by cheaters. No matter the game, we all know the pain of going up against an obvious cheater: that person who makes the lives of other players a misery, and griefs them just for kicks. This isn't like being at the whim of some hacker who shows off by messing with the game—you're at the mercy of the weasels who bought or subscribed to their script to "win."

It is that shared hatred of cheaters that Valve taps into with Overwatch, its new crowdsourced anti-cheating tool. Overwatch, which lets experienced players like myself ban other players, works so well because we know what it's like to be on the receiving end of a wall-hacking charlatan. We know that a competitive match of CS:GO is on average a 45-minute commitment, and we know that abandoning it will result in punishment from teammates and game alike. We know that if we can keep CS:GO free of cheaters, the game—and the community—will be all the better for it.

The Overwatch

As the competitive first-person-shooter (it had over nine million unique players last month) CS:GO naturally attracts cheaters. Valve's solution is a simple one: let the players police themselves. The Overwatch gives "qualified" players—those that that have fulfilled certain criteria, such as a minimum rank and a minimum number of games—to take on the ultimate counter-terrorist role and strike the ban-hammer down on those that see through walls, or auto-aim their way to a string of unbelievable headshots. Putting the power to rid the game of cheaters in the hands of those who, by and large, are competitive-minded and thus inclined to hate those that break the rules, has proven to be a smart decision, even if it didn't always seem like it.

The CS:GO community has had an unfortunate, and not entirely undeserved, reputation for being absurdly elitist and toxic. And yet, cheaters are always spoken of as the lowest of the low on Gabe's green Earth. Because they are. This is not an incidental part of the Overwatch's appeal, but the foundation for it.

The Overwatch has the unmistakable bite of justice to it, though, thanks to a quasi-legal process that asks "Investigators" to "download the evidence," and pore over computer-edited highlights reel of around eight rounds from the perspective of a player accused of cheating or griefing by others. For the purposes of this replay teammates' names are changed, anonymity being an essential part of the process, but the killer touch is that the player under investigation is known only as "The Suspect." Vengeance against those who may have inadvertently annoyed an Investigator is kept to a minimum.

The Overwatch's first big attraction to me, as a Counter-Strike player of many years, was helping to nail some cheaters. It offered a chance for retributive scale-balancing of the greatest sort in the only language cheaters understand: the holy hand-grenade of the VAC-ban. For decent gamers, those who work hard for every frag and play fair, the VAC-ban is our angel of justice, the laser-targeted nuclear option aimed at the heart of scum city.

Named after Valve Anti-Cheat, the company's own proprietary cheat-detection software, VAC bans can take the from of anything from a temporary suspension to a lifetime ban, which locks the accounts of proven cheaters and all that exists therein: your achievements, your tradable vanity items, your library of purchased games—everything. VAC bans are almost never reversed. Cheaters may be able to set up other accounts, but they'll be starting from scratch and buying everything again—which rather takes the shine off of cheating in the first place.

My relish here may seem a bit Old Testament, but let's remember that videogames are entertainment, and cheating isn't just a perpetual drag for the vast majority of players but also a waste of their time. In Counter-Strike a player who cheats ruins the match for ten people, and no-one gets that time back.

A good cheater is a good actor

The minimum rank for an Overwatch Investigator is Gold Nova, which ensures a baseline knowledge of the fundamentals, but the players you watch can be of any rank—and some of the most entertaining videos are of raging Silver rankers. Sometimes I watch a match where absolutely everyone's terrible, and a better player has been reported out of pure jealousy. In others I find myself simply learning new techniques and approaches, because a proportion of reports involve very good players who've wrecked their opponents legitimately.

There are also a healthy chunk of cheaters, and some just don't care about showing it. I've watched replays where a player tracked opponents through the walls at the start of every round, and then ran around hunting them with perfect headshots from a Desert Eagle. I've seen others where players follow an unseen opponent with their crosshair and pre-fire as they turn the corner for an instant kill. A favourite is the jumping headshot with a SSG-08; they're perfectly achievable in-game, but start to look pretty suspicious when a player's racking up Aces with them. These cheaters are great, because they're idiots, and so sweet justice is easy to serve.

The rules of Overwatch Overwatch Investigators look for evidence of Aim Assistance, Vision Assistance, or External Assistance. Aim Assistance is any kind of hack that jerks the crosshair over visible targets and/or automatically fires your weapon. Vision Assistance takes the form of wallhacks that let players see opponents "through" the map, while External Assistance is stuff totally outside of normal parameters like a Terrorist flying across the map. A fourth category, Griefing, is considered a minor offence in context, and players found culpable receive cool downs rather than account bans.

You soon learn of the little things to watch out for: the frequent pauses in movement where a player could be checking their cheat's parameters or toggling them on and off; the players with suspiciously fast combinations of crosshair-jerk, shooting, and weapon-cycling to shave a few milliseconds off the next shot, which they never mess up even in crazy situations; the silly mistakes like sprinting through a defence site when they know the terrorists aren't coming, and hunkering down when they are.

These people are nothing, however, next to the real monsters: the clever cheaters. All CS:GO cheats can be turned off, meaning that smarter cheaters use their software to gain an advantage when needed, but play normally for the most part. This combined with the surety demanded by the Overwatch system creates a small slice of cases where you're convinced the player's hacking, but you can't say for sure—and if there's any doubt, you have to let it slide.

These are the defining decisions of a great Investigator, because the best CS:GO players can perform feats far beyond myself and most others. They respond to team communication (which you can't hear), and are much sharper with in-game audio cues like footsteps and using the game's tools in clever ways. When you see someone toss a smoke grenade into a crowded room and then rush it and eviscerate the blinded enemy team by firing through the gas, is that a wallhack or did they hear something and make a big play?

One CS:GO cheater who had logged over 250 hours without being caught gave PC Gamer some advice: "Play like you're not hacking. Play as you would normally, only you're able to see through walls. Act."

That last little word is a barb to the heart of an Overwatch Investigator, because some cheaters are good at acting. You see what looks like a wallhack, but then no hint in the remainder of the attack. In a clutch situation someone pulls off an amazing triple with crazy reflexes, but there's nothing else strange in those eight rounds. Even if something looks bad in isolation, anyone can get lucky during a match, and if there's nothing else suspicious...

Sometimes bad people get away with things. A hatred of cheaters goes hand-in-hand with sympathy for players who are falsely accused, which in CS:GO happens a lot. Often players start calling "hacks" for no other reason than they think it's funny. Never being wrong is more important than always being right.