Last week I wrote about how worries over a player’s alleged cheats were causing a stir in the eSports community for Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege, while arguing that cheating remains one of the greatest hurdles for eSports as it strives for legitimacy. This week, another episode illustrated just how prevalent the problem might be. After five years, developer Valve at last figured out how to detect the LMAOBOX cheat for its arena shooter Team Fortress 2, and after an update last night, almost 170 players in the game’s UGC eSports league found themselves banned. The bulk of the bans appear to affect players who used LMAOBOX between March 28 and April 11, but some players are reporting that they’re locked out of the game even though they haven’t used it in months.
But that small number doesn’t even count the thousands of other affected players, many of whom took to the Team Fortress 2 subreddit to express their anger and frustration. Valve was always decently thorough at getting rid of users of the free version of the cheat, but it was the premium version that caused the most trouble. I mean, just look at this list of features. Automatic aims, automatic backstabs, forced melee criticals, the ability to show all enemy players on the in-game radar, the ability to steal the names of other players, target locks, and even the ability to avoid shooting your Steam friends. All for just 20 bucks. It’s amazing anyone bothered to play Team Fortress 2 at all after LMAOBOX became popular. Here it is in action:
Videos by VICE
Apparently the ban came about through the efforts of a player known as Miggy. A few days ago, Miggy emailed Valve after finding the source code for LMAOBOX on a forum via a Github link, linked it, and related that he’d been told it wasn’t listed in Valve Anti-Cheat (or VAC), the program Valve users to sniff out LMAOBOX and similar offenders. And boom, that was that. Somewhat hilariously, a huge percentage of the affected players tend to play snipers as their main characters—a class that’s much less likely to be discovered cheating by mere observation.
Among the affected UGC eSports players was “Vlad,” a well-known player from Platinum- and Gold-ranking teams who claims he hadn’t used LMAOBOX since 2015. In a post on the UGC forums, Vlad explained his reasons for using the hack in the first place.
“So, back in [Season] 17, [another player, F]lare showed me lmaobox on his private server, and, this kind of piqued my interest. Something to make you good really quick? Sounds good. Now, I bought lmaobox premium after having looked around a bit, and I messed around with it. I got more and more cocky in using in on a non alt, and then started messing around in pubs for a bit,” he said. “I used it in s17, because I was really not as good at that point. I wanted to be good, and that was the best way to do it. Now, I know there is no reason for any of you to believe me, but it doesn’t really matter honestly. I haven’t used it since S17, so I’m impressed they backlogged it that long. Well, I deserve the VAC and I deserve the league ban I’m going to get for it, but I will say that I did not cheat in any way during season 18.”
Initially, word got around that the creator of LMAOBOX had conceded defeat, after a statement went up on the UnknownCheats forum.
“hey since this cheat is having some vac problems, im going to release it to the public,” the post from the ostensible creator said. “this marks the end of the lmaobox project; I hope everyone enjoyed it.”
But that may not be the truth. In a delicious display of irony, a Reddit post claims that the PC of the creator of LMAOBOX allegedly has been hacked, and thus someone else wrote the post. Work on LMAOBOX is therefore merely “paused.” As the writer for the Reddit post says, “for a person who makes high tier hacks – that’s a pretty stupid way to fall foul.”
LMAO, indeed.
