Free Web NovelChapter 158: Chapter 156: Boycotting Cheaters Is Everyone’s Responsibility
Zog was in his cabin in the Northern Domain.
Despite having enough Gold Coins to swim in, he never liked living in overly large houses.
When he was young, he saw a movie called *The Shining*, and it left him with a deep-seated fear of large, empty houses.
He felt like a pair of creepy twins could pop out from every corner of a big house.
Even as an adult, the thought gave him the creeps.
Two Dragons, two humans, and an Elf were gathered around the card table.
They were in the middle of a tense and exciting playtest of Ferin Chronicles.
Under the grand-sounding guise of quality assurance.
Since it was a multiplayer game with others present, Furin had reverted to her image of a dignified, mature woman.
However, her long legs under the table weren’t behaving, her toes dangling a high heel and swinging it back and forth.
’It must be a trick to distract me,’ Zog thought, remaining unmoved.
They had entered the final showdown. Zog was the Lord, and Furin was the Traitor.
The two Dragons had also made a bet: if Zog lost, he’d have to go back to the nest to sleep tonight. If he won, he could stay up and play games for a whole week.
"Attack," Zog said, playing an attack card against Furin.
"Defend." Furin countered the attack.
Zog used his Berserker character’s effect: when an attack is defended against, he could draw a card.
"I’ll attack again."
"How? Aren’t you only allowed to attack once per turn?" Furin asked.
"Because I have the Revolver equipped. There’s no limit to how many times I can attack each turn," Zog said, pointing to his equipment slot.
"Then I’ll activate my effect," Furin said.
Furin was playing a Legendary Illusionist character. Her unique effect was that when attacked, she could make a "draw check." If the drawn card wasn’t an action card, the attacker would take one point of damage and have to discard a card.
If it was an action card, the defender would take one point of damage and have to discard a card.
With that, she flipped over the top card of the deck.
It was an equipment card.
"Discard a card!" Furin said smugly.
Zog thought for a moment, then discarded the only defense card in his hand. He wanted to defeat Furin this turn.
"I’m attacking again."
"Defend."
"You still had a defense card? Why didn’t you use it before?" Zog was getting suspicious.
"Er... instinct," Furin said, not sounding very confident.
Zog drew another card. It was an attack action card.
"This is the final attack!"
"Activating effect check."
Furin flipped over a card from the deck again. It was another equipment card.
Zog lost his last point of health.
"Haha, you lose!" Furin said happily.
"Wait!" Zog quickly extended a claw. Given Furin’s prior conviction of using an Illusion Technique to swap tiles in mahjong, he poked at the check card.
But there was nothing wrong with it.
"Come on, back to the nest with me," Furin urged.
"Nooo, it’s not even nighttime yet!"
"ACHOO—" Just as Zog was in a "life-or-death" crisis, Saint El sneezed off to the side and said, as if casually, "Oh my, I seem to smell something strange."
A smell?
’That’s right, the smell!’
Zog immediately leaned over the action card he had just drawn and took a careful sniff. Sure enough, there was a fragrant scent.
He then checked his other action cards one by one.
They all had the same scent.
’This scent... It’s her perfume!’
Furin had used a time-honored cheater’s trick: marking the cards.
That’s why she sometimes chose to use her effect check and sometimes didn’t.
’And using perfume, no less. Is she trying to cosplay as Mai Kujaku or something?’
"You cheated!" Zog declared with an expression of righteous, impartial justice, as if he were disowning his own kin. "I’m going to stay up and play games for two weeks straight!"
He said it as if he were making some outrageous demand.
Ever since he got a girlfriend, this was the extent of Zog’s ambition.
"I was just doing it for your own good," Furin said, a little embarrassed. "Making you go back to the nest early... I just wanted you to get some rest..."
"Do you really think I can get any rest if I go back to the nest with you?" Zog’s voice was filled with a sob.
KNOCK KNOCK—
A knock on the door broke the slightly awkward atmosphere.
"Boss, Mr. Bane says there might be cheating in the auto chess duo queue ranked event."
said Assistant Zor from outside the door.
’Did they find out about the time I secretly changed the probabilities for myself in the backend?’ was Zog’s first thought.
A couple of dragons cut from the same cloth.
’No, that’s impossible. I didn’t even play in the duo queue ranked event.’
’Besides, I only did it once, and that was during the internal beta test, just to have some fun with a fully-built-out lineup.’
’Phew, I scared myself there for a second.’
Zog went and opened the door. "What’s going on? How did Bane find out someone was cheating?"
"The same account beat him three times in a row," the assistant replied.
"That’s not... I mean, beating him three times in a row sounds pretty normal." Zog almost laughed.
It wasn’t that he looked down on Bane, but given Bane’s skill level—forcing the same lineup every game and often tilting while rolling for units—even Zog could beat him many games in a row.
You can’t blame the road for being bumpy when you’re the one who can’t walk straight.
"But he said his teammate in duo queue was Toto," the assistant added.
"Who?"
A moment later, Zog was face-to-face with an indignant Bane and Toto.
They were angry for different reasons. Bane was mad because he wasn’t going to get the one-day ranked champion title.
The account in question was already hundreds of points ahead of second place on the leaderboard, and the gap was only widening.
Toto, on the other hand, was starting to doubt her own skills. What if that person really was better than her?
’Wouldn’t that make me a clown for coming here to complain?’
Although she was a Half-Elf who’d do anything for money and had very few scruples, she had her pride in one thing.
And that was gaming.
In all her decades, this was the first time she’d found something she was truly talented at. Combined with her insane level of grinding, it had earned her her current status in the gaming world. She wanted to protect her title as number one. freewebnσvel.cѳm
So she had to take a gamble—a gamble that her opponent was a cheater.
"Give me the match ID. I’ll have the operations department look up the game records," Zog said immediately.
It was better to believe it and be wrong than to dismiss it and be right. Besides, anyone who could beat Toto was, indeed, very likely to be cheating.
After all, this Half-Elf was the most absurdly skilled gamer Zog had ever seen.
He would call her "half a step into the realm of TAS."
That is, using third-party tools to perform frame-perfect inputs.
Toto had reached that level all on her own.
The game record was sent over quickly. It was a feature that hadn’t been officially released to players yet.
The backend would record player actions and key moments, then use that data to reconstruct a replay of the match.
The Red Dragon, Dwarf, and Half-Elf huddled together, watching the replay of the most suspicious match with rapt attention.
They paid special attention to the last round, where the opponent’s entire board repositioned to dodge Toto’s whirlwind ability.
The replay was played frame by frame.
In the very last second, every one of the player’s pieces on the board began to move. The actions all started on the exact same frame.
"A script! That’s definitely a script!"
Zog said with absolute certainty.
’Feilin doesn’t have Heart Stealers, so what, is he using tentacles to move all his pieces at once?!’
"What’s a script?" Toto asked, confused.
"Er, it’s a type of cheating method, basically."
Although Zog respected all kinds of gamers, his opinion of people who used cheats in PvP games had always been that they deserved to sit at the same table as dogs.
’No, that’s an insult to dogs.’
The next step was simple: find this script-user and figure out where the cheat came from.
Zog had no intention of letting his own game’s environment be ruined by cheats. He’d seen plenty of games go down that path before.
Cheats drive away normal players, and then the cheaters, having no one left to stomp on, quit as well.
In the end, the only outcome for the game is to be shut down.
However, although the game consoles had a location-tracking function, the tech team checked and found that this person wasn’t playing on a console, but was using Illusion Mimicry.
While that could also be tracked, it was more troublesome. It couldn’t pinpoint an exact location, only a general area, which would take a lot of time.
Just then, Zog noticed a somewhat familiar account name—the account of the cheater’s duo partner.
"Little Girl Who Dreams of Getting into Repin," Zog read the account name word by word. "How is it you again?"
