Well fuck. I’ve pre-ordered my copy of Medal of Honor from Steam on the 18th in order to get into the beta that starts on the 21st. Steam offered the early beta from 17, but that would’ve required owning their Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and I only have the boxed version, so fuck them. It was only later that I found out there were other ways to get into the early beta but by then I was like “fuck it, I’ll wait”.
Anyhow, I started reading the Steam forums to see the feedback. I saw someone posting that he came across some cheaters. I was sceptical at first, thought he was just simply bad at the game or someone found a bug, but a cheat, certainly impossible. Then I started seeing screenshots of cheats and I was shocked. Seriously, someone took the time to make a full-featured cheat for a beta?
To all of you out there that got here googling for a cheat for the beta, I would like to thank you for finding a whole new level to ruin the game for others. How is this different you ask? Well you are hurting the game even before it’s launched. By doing your filthy thing for whatever reason you might have, people are cancelling their pre-orders. If you check the Steam forum, you will even find a how-to on getting a refund on the game and I never thought I’d see Steam give refunds. But here we are, thanks to you.
And why does it matter? You might think, “who cares, they will just put out an anti-cheat for the beta too”. Oh no my friend, this shit will not fly. No company will spend money or resources to protect a beta from you cheating scum. What will happen is they will notice that people, who would normally die to get early access to anything, give feedback and even tolerate the shortcomings of a beta, are now faced with cheaters and turning away from the product before it’s even released. What the company will do is they will never release a beta for the PC ever again, because it’s simply bad business for them.
We are living in a world where a PC game is a luxury, we can’t really afford to piss off publishers if we wanna get our shitty console ports from a few games to enjoy on our platform.
Of course we can live without betas or demos, but smart people usually like to try before they buy. Also, the beta allows the gamers to give feedback to the developer, and a bug found and reported during a beta is much more likely to get fixed in the final version, than a bug found after the release, since by then 90% of the coders get assigned to different projects.
I still have a full day till I can try the beta myself, but I’m already scared of what I’ll might find. I never really bothered to wonder why cheaters cheat, but I seriously have no clue what joy does someone get out of aimbotting in a wonky beta. The game is broken to begin with for crying out loud!