COD4 Grinding and Suspicions

Still grinding my way up the ranks in COD4 multiplayer. (It is just like grinding in an MMO… with all the hacks and snipers and campers, it’s getting pretty tedious, but I’m determined to get to rank 55 before I quit.) I’m playing mostly Domination and Headquarters games now, which are kind of refreshing twists on the Capture-The-Flag genre.

I’ve seen a lot of suspicious behavior on Punkbuster-enabled servers. I don’t want to say that they’re all “hax,” but I’ve been around online gaming for a long enough time to know what’s humanly possible and what isn’t — even the best players I’ve ever seen still looked human, and it made logical sense when they killed you. There is always the luck factor but when you see these things frequently from a particular player, combined with all the Google hits for “cod4 hacks,” it makes you wonder. Here are some things I’ve seen:

• Guns that have zero recoil. Not just low recoil, but zero recoil. When I get to rank 55 I’ll be able to look at all the guns and tell for sure if this is a hack or not. 
• People that shoot through smoke and walls. Not just your normal random spraying of bullets either, but tracking you as you move. There are times when you can guess where people will be, and I’ve occasionally hit people by luck or accident through a wall, but when you see someone tracking a target behind smoke and walls, it’s hard not to think they’ve got help.
• People that aim precisely at multiple consecutive targets very quickly. It looks like a wrist-flick from one target to the next… not instantaneous, but fast. I can buy two in a row, but three or four is stretching credibility. It’s the kind of behavior you’d program into an aim bot that you wanted to pass for human.
• People whose target crosshair remains fixed dead center on their target no matter how the shooter or the target moves. That’s not normal. Usually the reticule wavers, and a lot of players sort of wave it left and right across the target. I saw one guy that seemed to fix on a point somewhere around the knees, which I presume was to hit the target regardless of whether he is standing, kneeling, or prone. Maybe that was just his style.. or maybe not.
• Some pretty amazing multiple sniper shots at moving targets. I can’t say for sure that this requires assistance, because I suck pretty bad at sniping myself, but it’s awfully suspicious especially when you take server lag into account.
• People who can somehow see you well enough to kill you at a distance, but when you look at the KillCam you can barely see yourself amongst the environment. Makes you wonder if they’ve altered their models so you appear brightly colored or something on their end.
• People who seem to be expecting you to walk around a corner even though they shouldn’t have been able to see you. I don’t play with headphones or the volume very loud so maybe they’re just hearing footsteps that I can’t hear… maybe.

There is one other (I think) network-related quirk in COD4 that is very annoying. Frequently, I’ll come across someone unexpectedly and shoot them in the face two or three times, and then somehow get killed anyway. Then when I see it played back on the KillCam from the other guy’s perspective, I see that I didn’t fire at all and I look like I’m just standing there like a dummy. It’s like my shots don’t get registered by the server, even though on my client side I clearly fired and heard the gunshots and saw them hit the other guy. I’d much rather have more lag if that’s the trade-off for snappy client response. What I see on my screen should be at least somewhat close to what really happened.

Related

• CoD4 Compromised
• CoD4 Multiplayer