OpTic India player reveals his cheating story

Scandals in CS:GO can be extremely damaging to the community and they bring lots of public attention to esports from the outside world, and not for good reason.

Recently, a player called forsaken, who played for OpTic India, was caught cheating live during a LAN tournament. It was the eXTREMESLAND Asia Finals, and nobody had a clue until one of the event admins caught on. As a result of the event, all players in the OpTic India team had their name tarnished and the Indian CS:GO scene, which had only recently started to stand up on its own two feet, has been under the spotlight.

The exact moment when admins at #eXTREMESLAND2018 caught forsaken and he attempted to delete the hack pic.twitter.com/rZG7aYBdbD — CSGO2ASIA (@CSGO2ASIA) October 19, 2018

In an interview with AFKgaming, an Indian esports outlet, forsaken gave some stunning details about his experience with cheating in CS:GO.

What forsaken had to say about getting caught cheating

First off, forsaken started his interview by saying sorry to his teammates and his managers. He made it abundantly clear that nobody in OpTic India knew that he was cheating and nobody else should be to blame.

When asked why he did it, forsaken revealed that he did not trust his own aiming ability. He said he had confidence in his game knowledge but he wanted to win every game he could so he took to cheating.

In the video that went viral, it looked as if forsaken tried to fight the admin in an attempt to delete any evidence of the hack. forsaken revealed that the admin wanted to view his PC and after alt-tabbing, the admin saw the hack running in the background. In a panic, forsaken attempted to close the hacks before the admin saw, but as the video shows, he was unsuccessful.

When asked if forsaken would do anything differently if he went back in time, he mentioned that he’d probably never have picked up Counter Strike in the first place. According to forsaken, ‘Nothing good has happened to me’ since the day he started playing Counter Strike.

As you’d expect, many larger outlets caught onto this story and reported on it, which caused a lot of conversation across the internet. When those outside of the esports community see that a player has cheated or a team has fixed a match, it paints a picture that esports is like the wild, wild west of real sports and it makes it harder for those around us to take the esports community seriously. Obviously, this can only be damaging as far as potential outside investments go. And for everybody else in the community, it raises doubts. If forsaken can almost get away with cheating during a LAN, can anybody else do it?

Are any of the pros in the top ten teams cheating? Let’s hope not. Obviously, many larger events have much stricter rules when it comes to what peripherals or programs they can run on LAN PCs.

But for events in grassroots communities, like in India for example, event organizers may not have the resources or man power to watch out for such activities.

What are your thoughts on this story? Are you surprised this happened?