"I Think At Least 70% Cheated..." The F1 Esports Cheating Saga Continues 

Jimmy Broadbent, professional shed dweller turned irl racing driver turned investigative journalist.

As an experienced modder of the F1 game, I can say that it is so easy to mod the game in a way to give a performance improvement in a practically invisible way. Not only are we talking things such as 0.5% grip increases etc... we are talking; Better fuel consumption, Better tyre wear, Better tyre temperature working window, Bigger ERS battery Capacity, More ERS harvesting, More effective DRS, Less drag, Improved suspension, More grip on grass/marbles. All things that I have already modded (for videos) in the past and if I just improve any of those attributes by 0.5%+ or multiple attributes it will be visibly undetected.

I won't speak for smaller events, but when it comes to absolute top tier racing, they need to be LAN events on in-house computers. We're talking about teams with millions of dollars to spend, surely they can fly drivers out to LAN events. Doesn't even need to have spectators, just a standard competitive arena.

The bit about cheaters accusing other people who are faster of cheating rings true to me from the speedrunning world, with loads of examples like how the guy who exposed Dream of cheating in Minecraft was also cheating himself

This reminds me of what happened in the Trackmania community, when a massive anticheat system got introduced and A LOT of "pros" got busted cheating most of their WRs. Also, the fact that after decades spent developing this title Codemaster still doesn't have an anti-cheat to speak of is absolutely insane.

I'd take that 70% figure with a massive pinch of salt, personally. Having been in a game where cheating, and more importantly accusations of cheating, were commonplace at times due to poor cheat detection, what became very obvious is that people who cheat and make cheats have a tendancy, be it conscious or not, to overestimate the number of cheaters to justify what they do. On the plus side, now that Codemasters & EA have been told how the cheat works they don't have many excuses for not closing the exploit off.

Getting caught with your cheats and saying the game company is working with you on them, is the equivalent of "I don't smoke! I'm holding them for a friend, I swear!"

Man Raycevik's video about racing games are true, we really are 10 years behind everyone else when the biggest competition for the biggest brand in motorsport still has a trivial cheating issue

I’ve worked in TV sports/news for 25 years and you’re doing good work here. You’ve had this channel for years and id bet most/all viewers would say you’re honest and trustworthy, even if it’s just sim racing/Motorsports it matters! So you’re starting from a good foundation and thats what’s needed for investigative journalism. But in general you know the basics: multiple reliable sources, objectivity, accuracy. It’s also imperative that other people check your work before released. Someone could feel angry enough to get lawyers involved so always good to take the time and double check things!

A phonecall from his "people" after 10 or 20 attempts to contact would definitely be justified. After 1 attempt? That's panic.

The best part of this is that the F1 cheat basically works via a Race Condition.

Man im genuinely sad that post got deleted, honestly i really respect the creator of the mod for making the post. His replies/convos in the comments were super interesting and cleared up a lot of stuff for me. Also thanks Jimmy for recording at least part of the thread so it is not lost forever!

Jimmy please be careful reporting on this, you need to know the sources as anyone can lie and pretend to be anyone online. Really pleased you're making this known and keeping us all informed!

The most simple solution in my opinion is to do the same “screenshot” thing that they currently do, except compare to data on an official F1 server. Don’t just compare local data to earlier local data

Taking that at face value, 70% is shockingly high. Add the fact that cheating is ridiculously easy, you would think that EA/CM would put some effort in this. Given the money involved with e-sports they would have a vested interest in keeping it clean. I actually stopped playing a lot of online games years ago because people were constantly cheating and got sick of having to deal with them.

I think you hitting on the point regarding them "not wanting to pay for anti-cheating software" hits the nail on the head with EA. It's been an issue with their FIFA games forever. It always has and will come down to profits. They'll just churn out a new game year after year without genuine care of fixing major issues because people will pay for the new game.

I used to work in the gaming industry and every number we got indicated 10% of the userbase of most online games were cheating/willing to pay for cheats. The numbers came from criminal investigations, registered users to forums where you had to pay to get an invite, manual tests on servers (discord wasn't a thing back then). Most of those games were shooters and RTS games, but I don't see when it was 10% across the board, it would be any different in simracing. It's the reason I quit most multiplayer games except for iracing, as the risk of losing your account there and the matchmaking made it so I didn't have to deal with cheaters if they exist.

Although I agree with the approach that anyone should be considered innocent until proven guilty, it is funny that like 3 or 4 days ago there was a screenshot of some timetrial leaderboard and Ronhaar was ahead of the cheats promo account by a couple hundredths. I would not consider it a direct proof of anything but on the other hand it would be a really impressive demonstration of skill or a weird coincidence.

It feels like E-Sports is like cycling was in the 90's while the big events may be 'clean-ish' qualifying and a number of other events are 'charged' or less enforced allowing cheats to be run. As always thanks for the great content Jimmy

I appreciate the hell out of you digging into this. It's not your usual content, but it's important for the future of sim racing and you're doing a great job of getting down to the facts

How does anyone get away with cheating in professional and official F1 esports?

I think the biggest issue is like the one in TrackMania: theonly way to "prove" no cheating is input records and replaying them on a "vanilla" game. Turns out over half of the WR in TrackMania were cheated. That cheat was even easier; the game was ran at lower speeds to make it easier to react and optimize, then the recording was sped up.

If Codemasters is as committed to combating cheaters as they were at adding interesting stuff to F1 22, I can see why it sounds like we're just scratching the surface.

I find the lackluster anti-cheat measures from a company called Codemasters to be quite ironic at least.

For someone to suggest that 70% of esports drivers cheat or have cheated is a horrendous accusation, completely baseless and unbelievably disrespectful. I've said it a few times whether on twitch or twitter but we are getting to a stage now where many drivers who have done absolutely nothing but dedicate themselves for years to get to the level we are at are being discredited with this BS. When we give it everything and push ourselves to be competitive in these championships just for our integrities to be questioned is pretty damn depressing. This needs to be resolved. Hopefully going forward into the future action will be taken to prevent this stuff from spiralling any further.

During the event, you could load stuff over the wheel for instance. If you use your own.

Client side authentication is always going to have backdoors. I cant believe that CM and EA don't have a server side version of this authentication.

keep doing this please the only way is to embarass EA into doing something about it

"I'm not really a journalist..." You covered a story that you felt needed coverage, you qualified your opinions as such, and you pointed out the facts. You also attempted to reach out to get testimony from some of those directly involved, and barring that, you disclosed your journey into doing so. You used examples, cited sources, and explained the issue in detail. You are a journalist. Excellent vid, m9.5.

Imagine you're watching a F1 esport race and suddenly the P2 car fires a red shell at the P1 car and it just explodes. That's the kind of cheating I want to see.

Cheating in sim racing as a whole seems to be getting worse by the day. 3 days ago I was in an open Assetto Corsa lobby racing MX5 cup cars Vallelunga, and we had someone join the lobby and go 6 seconds faster than me and the other top 2 guys in qulifying. He insisted he was not cheating, turned the cheats off, then 3 laps into the race, passed almost everyone on the straights with what seemed like a 200hp difference. I know its not the same as Esports, but it shows that some people cant handle loosing, regardless of what level they are at. Things like this are completely ruining sim racing for those of us that value fair racing, and I feel like its only a matter of time until sim racing is viewed as unattractive to the masses because of it. Thank you for this series of videos Jimmer. Someone has to talk about it.

I can't believe that I'm actually happy that GT7 is console only and always online. Really cuts out the cheating by a lot

This situation is very similar to PUBG cheating scandal. One of the team was first exposed of cheating but later they found out most of the players were also cheating. In a game with large number of players at the same time its incredibly hard to notice cheating because and if one of the players is cheating in such a competitive environment you best believe most of them are cheating.

As someone that used to deal with a lot of cheating on iR, before iR got 'big', this is exceptionally scary for the sim racing community....

Man. If 70% were cheaters, that puts even myself into Esports contention if that 70% suddenly got banned.

The point, that he's stating about "If you accuse someone of cheating, just because he beats you, then you would have to be cheating yourself" is ABSOLUTELY massively accurate. Think about it. You'll HAVE to have an ego the size of jupiter to think you are automatically better than someone you don't otherwise know.

Like I said in the previous video, probably everyone uses it to a certain degree. It reminds me so much of the doping drama in the previous decades where most don't want to use it but you have to if you want to have chance to win.

I love it how, in AC, there is a checksum that checks values of the files of the incoming user to the files stored on the server. So, unless everyone is cheating because they are all running the same cheat, no one is. Simple.

Jimmer is now the Coffeezilla of sim racing. Great unbiased reporting

Exactly the same is currently happening in Escape from Tarkov, and I suspect almost all other multiplayer games.

reminds me of the situation with escape from tarkov right now.... one of their developers unanimously came out and basically gave a five point list of how cheating could be almost completely stopped but of course they're never going to do that

It's a part of a broader problem with online gaming in general. If you're so inclined just do a simple search for cheats or hacks for online games and if even half of them are legitimate it paints a grim picture. And those are just public operating in broad daylight sites, i'm sure there are privately made ones as well.

As a gta player 70% are rookie numbers

Imagine Jimmer become the GOAT because he doesn't hack bur everybody else does.

Jimmy Broadbent: Praga Cup Champion, iRacing Le Mans and Daytona winner, Racing Organization Founder, Award-winning Streamer, and now, Sim Racing Investigative Journalist

Hey Jimmer. Do you have similar concerns about your Team87 competition at all? It's such a great initiative, it would be a shame if the competition was distorted in the same way as seems to be happening in esports.

9:16 the logic is actually reasonable. If you yourself do not think that the time is possible, than how did you get it?

The only way to make this fair is to provide the same equipment via a 3rd party at the time of the event. So every machine is exactly the same (minus the config for each driver's preferences). But that would cost money and they are too busy making it. lol

Jimmer becoming the @coffeezilla of esports scandals!

All that would need to be done is have a program that checks the values against the server every time someone joins, or hell, every half second while they are joined. And obviously have a redundancy from the server that checks if the person's anti-cheat is turned on. If the server detects that it isn't turned on, immediate boot.

Not watched yet, but just to note: take absolutely everything the guy said on Reddit with a massive grain of salt. There's no doubt that he's what most developers would call "a script kiddie": someone with little knowledge, but enough bruteforce time and searched forum threads to have picked up how to do the basics. As such he actually has absolutely no idea how much people cheat in F1 esports, and very little idea what issues exist and are exploited by other cheats that are out there (and as such, also has no idea how the situation should be fixed). The people who are actually capable at producing cheats & know all about this stuff turn it into their full-time jobs: they don't give cheats or info out for free.

I would love to have this Modder change the mod in the middle of a Esport event to make it obvious that people are cheating. Like in real F1 when they realised that teams were detecting the signal sent to the starting lights before they went off and not doing starts properly, so they sent the signal without the lights going off and caught the teams cheating.

From shed dweller to RU-vidr to racecar driver, and now investigative journalist. He’s growing up so fast!

trackmania had a similar incident were a guy who was very vocal on forums about cheating ended up cheating himself to get world record times on multiple tracks by slowing down the ingame speed and basically playing in slowmotion.

I really hope we don’t find out that for some reason there are sanctioned cheaters! Money corrupts and who knows who could benefit from a cheater

The thinking it's not possible to go faster is understandable, I'm normally around 1-2 seconds off of alien pace on iracing, and it baffles me how they get the time outta the car like they do. So I can understand that same viewpoint, when you genuinely are one of the fastest, and all of a sudden you're being beaten by a tenth or two, I imagine the mindset is probably amplified tbf

Surly creating an Anti Cheat should not be that hard if the physics are deterministic. Run the physic calculation on the server and compare them with the client. If they dont Match, someone has changen values.

As if they would ban 70% drivers it would kill of every sponsorship and fans

I'm here for Jimmy's slow transition into an investigative journalist

In cs there was a case of a cheater uploading through his personal mouse.

What I hate the most about this discussion is that Codemasters will probably just slap some well-known anti-cheat like Battleye or whatever would be relevant for the F1 game and call it a day. And so will the community thinking that if the game shows a "Battleye" icon to you during the loadscreen then it's surely impossible to cheat On the other side of the spectrum you have developers of games like The Cycle: Frontier who, when the cheating became rampant, put up walls on walls upon walls of different anti-cheats. Ones they tell you they use and ones they don't. Along with other counter-measures like a ranking system it worked, but that's because they genuinely cared to get on top of that situation and hired people specializing in this field Codemasters have already proven they don't give two shits. Words and declarations don't matter, actions do - and we see the whole extent of their actions laid out right in front of us. It is 2023 and their EXTREMELY COMPETITIVE game series supported by the official F1 has an anti-cheat measure so useless you can sum up how it works in a single short paragraph. That's how much they care. I really hope people will surprise me and not just take Battleye as THE answer to the problem, because to truly make codemasters invest into this enough to make cheating actually hard they will need A LOT of pushing from the community. After all they haven't even acknowledged the problem yet as their precious little image is too much of a priority for them to as much as mention that cheating in their games is possible and they are actually working on it, hiring specialists for example I want the reality to prove me wrong but I really worry that once cheating in the next F1 games becomes just a tiny bit harder than literally typing "f1 22 grip hack" into Google people will call it a day, because now you need to go to the 2nd page of google results or even join a discord server with thousands of cheaters there(often paying ones) - like Rust has for example. As as far as I know Rust devs put in some anti-cheater work in, yet it's still fairly common to see them there Battleye or an equivalent would be a step in the right direction, but it won't cut it.

In COD when I used to play comps a while back (quite a while back like 10-15 years) there was a thing called Punk Buster that would pick up on hacks/cheats and it worked really well, and the cheats in COD at the time were super easy to code, it absolutely can be done.

randomcallsign here: maybe

I've been thinking this for a long time but I'm glad more people are starting to come round to the idea that this is happening! And to think people are winning money through this exploit is crazy great video Jimmy 💯

The guy from reddit was a troll. In case you did not figure it out yourself. He knows nothing about cheating, programming, etc

Keep pushing Jimmy. These questions need to be asked, and nobody else seems willing to do it

This should automatically make anyone not cheating feel faster than they were

There's one more thing i don't understand. If the Cheats are directly thrown into the game files, why don't the racing leagues (like PSGL) make a rule that you HAVE to Stream your POV to either Twitch (if they're streamers) or to a guy monitoring on Discord. Obviously screen share on Discord, not only the game. Then after the Race the drivers have to leak the game files immediately without hiding scenes or censoring stuff. edit: i wrote this comment halfway through the video and that idea was mentioned towards the end. My point still stands. Looking forward to LAN Events to get some clarity through all this bullshit

I would hesitate to take this cheat creator's word. Cheaters tend to jump through a lot of hoops to justify their cheat usage, so something like the "70% of the pros might have cheated" line is a red flag to me. Even if I also think there's a cheating problem in racing games.

I'm just here for the drama. I don't own a sim setup or any sim racing games (no money), but I am invested to see how this will end and unravel. Keep us updated.

3:50 This only applies to public cheats. Anything a person is using in a serrious comp environment is going to be a paid for, private or semi-private cheat, which absolutely do store user info about everyone who uses them. You'd be surprised how often pro's from all games get blackmailed.

The sheer happiness I feel whenever my hatred of Formula 1 and F1 Esports is validated. It's so good knowing I was always right lol.

I've worked on anti-cheating technology for Electronic Arts. Any game downloaded to the PC can be modded unless you use the best technology from a company like Denuvo that we used to stop piracy on FIFA 16. It's pricey to use so game companies avoid using it. They want to sell games. From what we could see in the data, at least 50% of top players in any game cheat when there's money and pride involved.

This video made me feel awesome! I thought I was just a slow simracer, but it turns out everyone else is cheating!

You know they're cheating when the cars do a little wiggle

Having worked at multiple video game companies, the possibility of Alvaro being tasked by a security/game dev team and the esports team not being aware does not surprise me at all

The old motor sports saying. “He must be cheating, because I’m cheating like a bastard and he’s beating me”

I watch a fair amount of F1 esports and league races and I always found it suspicious that almost anybody that drove a Mclaren was faster than Jarno

Cheating in most multiplayer games is an epidemic.

lets go when ur feeling down blonde jimmer posts

All you need to do is check lap times for known tracks and see that people are posting ridiculously fast times which are simply impossible without modding the game and adding all kinds of traction control or driver aids. Being a minute or more faster than the known lap record for Nordschliefe or similar tracks is a big of a giveaway.

Would be interesting to see if the modder could come up with something implemented into the cheats to catch out cheaters like dude did with cs:go 🤞🤣

Ea would be foolish not to add antichrist they even have it for fifa so surely it's not too difficult and expensive

while the cheats sounded straightfoward with the simple bypass, im 100% positive that they still took a massive amount of time to develop due to the fact that you would have to somehow figure out that whole "screenshot" thing in the first place. The modder likely says this is easy because the cheats work on older titles, as the bypass was already known. also the modder saying that an anticheat is easy to implement is a *disturbingly* naive take.

Developers put cheats in. Or else it wouldn't be a thing at all. But for a competition, it's wrong. To solve it, have everyone in the same location.

If everyone is cheating then noone is cheating

Its all games that have online competitions. The companies do not want to stop the cheaters because most of them are streamers, or people who are gonna bring eyes to the product they are selling.

Ah shit here we go again

When it comes to cheating while at a LAN or anything in that direction i can say there has been several cases throughout gaming, one of them being a person hiding cheats with the Word.exe name and icon, he was cheating while doing a CS tournament, could try dig up other cases easily, but this is one i remember from the top of my head at the moment

the problem is the game itself, the cheats fixes the ridiculous "realism" that made it unplayable

I feel like more people need to be slapped in public by their mothers....

Who gives a damn if he is 17, dude is playing for money, sponsorships, and more. It's unfair to the people not cheating

This is as engrossing as when DarkViperAU did a 14 page essay into multiple videos about react content.

It's never cool for anyone to use cheats in any games.

Imagine if the game were updated to randomly refresh the local grip values from the server at some point mid-race. Crossing the start/finish would be a good spot for the changeover. See what percentage of the field suddenly starts crashing on turn one. Suppose you could do it at a pit stop if you wanted it to be a little less obvious.

The fact they dont use cockpit view i consider cheating and how its not compulsory is pathetic from the organsiers. A simulation should be as close as you can get to being real. Allowing the above cockpit cam is as stupid as the decisions we see from the FIA every race weekend.

Taking away their income is the best anti-cheat (making) tactic I've ever seen. What a complete chad!

I'm torn between 2 sides here : - on the one hand if as soon as you're beaten you yell cheater, that kind of means that you thought your time was genuinely impossible to beat, thus cheating yourself. - to race at this level you have to have some ego ... And in the heat of the news of learning you were beaten the "he's probably a cheater" reflex is very likely come up

If I'm a sponsor of this stuff, I'm getting out as soon as possible. I would not want to be involved in any sort of eSports competition where the viewership metrics don't make sense, most of the participants cheated their way in, and organizers never implemented any sort of anti-cheat software. I would also be telling my CEO friends to stay far away and to not get caught up in this stuff either.

Programmer here - The modder isn't lying when he says it would be pretty easy for EA/codies to update the game to stop the cheating. Instead of taking two snapshots and comparing them, they could provide the game with a snapshot to compare to when accessing online lobbies. However, that won't happen because the 99% of the programmers at the studio are currently occupied with F1 23, so any changes will simply be added into that game instead. The later part of any game project is incredibly programmer heavy compared to the first 80%, so it's likely this news just came a few weeks too late for a hotfix to be implemented.