Intro

This year, a cheating scandal rocked the professional Counter-Strike: Global Offensive scene. Numerous pro players were caught cheating, with many more placed under suspicion. In an industry based on fair competition, cheating threatens the very foundation of esports: How can fans invest in a game when players can even cheat at live tournaments? Tournaments have tackled this problem with stricter restrictions on players at events. Riot Games, for example, now requires their League of Legends pro players to keep an unopened set of peripherals at the Riot studio, meaning that players have no chance to tamper with the devices and potentially install cheat software before a match. A software engineer from Los Angeles has a different solution—a simple piece of hardware between the mouse and computer.

David Titarenco has dedicated much of the past decade to combating cheating in esports, working on the Cyberathelete Amateur League (CAL) Anti-Cheat software, but now he’s developed something more concrete. The device, called Game:ref, interfaces the mouse, computer, and Internet and uses that data to verify whether the mouse movements the player makes match what the computer is producing. If they don’t, then there’s tampering on the player’s end.