No one likes a cheater: Learn how to avoid them in ‘Among Us’
Among Us has presented itself as a kind escape in the year of hellfires & contagion. As we sit quarantined in our homes, losing all sense of place & time, Among Us is a sweet escape. Don’t get us wrong, there’s plenty of bloodshed, murder, deceit, what have you. But for an online game that works on the premise of social deduction, it also has its wholesome moments.
Played with four to ten players, the game is set in space & basically repurposes the ideas that carried the games of yore like wink murder. All aboard a spaceship, one of you is an impostor out to kill everyone & sabotage everything. The rest of the team is set out on tasks – think errands – like fixing electric wires, filling fuel tanks, emptying the garbage cans, among others.
Among Us has suddenly become one of the biggest games on PC & mobile, with a tally of over 85 million players in the last six months. The success was enormous enough to justify the creator, InnerSloth, abandoning their work on a sequel. Launched in 2018, the creators hadn’t fathomed the virality that it has currently reached.
It can be played with up to a maximum of 10 players. There can be potentially up to 3 impostors. The impostors try to win by sabotaging systems & killing every crewmate, while the crewmates aim to finish the tasks before the impostor is able to murder everyone. The crewmates can also win if they’re able to identify the impostor & vote him/her out in time.
Cheater, cheater: Players crooked as a barrel of fish hooks
In a recent discovery, it’s being pointed out that certain Among Us players are exploiting loopholes or using insidious hacks to gain an unfair advantage over the other players. How? The most obvious complaint pertains to people leaking information about the identity of the impostor, thereby taking away the entire fun from the chase.
To be more specific, players are now finding ways to communicate outside of the game room, divulging information on the impostor, or by having another user in the same lobby. Sometimes it’s made possible when two players are in cahoots with each other. Often, that leads to the reveal of the impostor even before they’ve committed any sabotage or murder. Talk about pulling down the vibe of the whole game.
Other cheating tactics include changes in the cool-down timers or the vision range of the players or impostors. When the vision range is modified, this essentially means that the killer can be spotted from a distance they hadn’t envisaged. The game gets rigged, in a way. Theories also suggest that players might be able to exploit other features to run faster than other players.
When the kill cooldown timer is changed for the impostor, it means that they’ll be able to kill faster than the other players are anticipating. If hackers are tampering with the game in this manner, it’d be harder to spot, but at the same time, it’d be a big killjoy.
After all, when you’re running for your life & completing tasks, all the while keeping an eye out for the evil one & battling any suspicion drawn toward you, it’s hard to keep track of the cooldown times with any measure of certainty or exactitude.
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For a lot of people, Among Us is the game they turn to as an escape from reality – the deceit that’s a part of the game is fun, but creating loopholes takes the fun out of it. We just hope that InnerSloth’s decision to keep working on the game translates into more & effective barriers to such loophole exploitation.
