The online landscape for fighting games is very interesting right now. With how good netplay and connections have become in this day and age, we’re seeing online used a lot more now for serious practice and even major tournament circuit competitions.
Unfortunately, we’ve also been seeing quite a bit of cheating going on in the latest AAA fighting games, and it’s looking like being able to identify who is actually cheating is becoming increasingly more difficult. In a new video from Broski, the content creator breaks down how he determined that an online Street Fighter 6 player was very likely cheating despite it not looking like they were on the surface.
Broski opens up his video by discussing a player that is seemingly from Russia whose name (which is also in Russian) translates to “International.” What originally made Broski suspicious is that this player happened to have two different characters in Legend rank in Europe, while only 18 players total from the region have achieved Legend status and this player in question was the only one to have two on the list.
The case got even more perplexing when Broski realized that International actually had replays online against players such as Fuudo, which would be very unlikely to happen if they were actually located in Russia (as Fuudo is one of the top Japanese players in Street Fighter 6). With all of that having been said, though, Broski watched the match against Fuudo and nothing demonstrated within this play really seemed to stand out as any form of cheating.
There’s quite a bit more to the lore here, but to keep things a bit more concise lets discuss what Broski found when looking at more of this player’s replays.
Upon very close examination, it does not appear that the cheater here is using anything as obvious as some of the previous tactics we’ve seen such as the one that allows a player to basically automatically Perfect Parry anything and everything. Instead, what they’re doing is much more sneaky and far harder to discern without really analyzing the footage.
Watching more of International play, we see that they never seem to jump at any point during a match except when a fireball is thrown at them. Not only are they jumping every time a fireball is thrown, but they’re jumping at the exact time when the projectile starts up, which gives them a free jump in punish essentially every time.
Looking further into things, there also seems to be something going on here with the player’s ability to whiff punish. While Broski doesn’t point this out, others in the comments of the video did, and I noticed myself that the player’s whiff punishes appear to be too on point to a suspicious degree.
What’s crazy about this whole thing is that if you’re just watching these replays without looking for this stuff, it could very easily pass as just a high level player who has strong reads and whiff punishes. It’s also still possible that this player isn’t cheating and that they’re just THAT good, though all the evidence here does seem to point to foul play being used.
What is likely going on here is that the player has some cheating scripts that they activated that make it so they jump every fireball right as it’s going to come out and one for automatic combos and confirms when they land a standing heavy punch (making the need for hit confirming completely unnecessary).
If that’s the case, then something like this is far more subtle than, say, a script that automatically counters every Drive Impact that comes your way, which makes spotting cheaters much more difficult. We can only hope that Capcom puts something into place to better deal with players who aren’t abiding by the rules, especially considering the number of major tournaments that tend to take place online these days.
Fortunately, Capcom did confirm back in December that they are going after cheaters in Street Fighter 6. The company is actively keeping an eye out for any offenders, so hopefully we see more crackdowns happen soon.
To see Broski’s full case and breakdown, be sure to check out the video below.