Mega Hack is cheating

2024-02-11

Today is probably the first time I've talked about Geometry Dash on this blog, but it's about a topic I find quite interesting. But first, I should probably mention that I'm just as guilty of using cheats as everyone else, if not even more so. In 1.9 I would speed hack stuff, abuse glitches, and before that I would beat all the demons with secret ways, install modded APKs, and so forth. I say this, because I'm going to talk pretty negatively about cheats and cheaters, but I don't want to be a hypocrite so I thought I'd point this out.

History

While cheats have existed for much longer, they weren't really popular until late 2.0 or so when mgostIH introduced the Noclip cheat, or in other words around 2016. I'm sure Noclip had been done before this point. Notably speed hacking with Cheat Engine was very popular with players being exposed for it left and right, and going even further back Game Hacker on Android was used in the same way to verify and/or beat levels by modifying values at memory addresses. Levels such as ICE Carbon Diablo X were beaten illegitimately like this. It's possible players may have edited their save file then, too. Modified APKs of the game were popular, that would do things like give you unlimited stars, or unlock every icon. (often called "icon hack")

Although many don't know about it because of how trivial cheats are nowadays, RobTop tried to combat this by adding anti-cheat code to the game with the 2.1 update. At this time, he was still very much against cheats and the use of cheats which definitely makes sense. However, it was unsurprisingly quickly defeated and a 2.1 version of Noclip had been released. There were, of course, more cheats than just Noclip but it's the most well known one, apart from speed hacking. RobTop tried further in later updates, such as 2.113 but for the most part he had given up, probably because the leaderboard was already in shambles from various exploits, bugs (such as the VERY popular delete bug in 1.9) and the earlier aforementioned cheats. After all, he was busy working on 2.2, which was going to arrive soon and fix the community's concerns. Right?

Little did we know back then that update 2.2 was going to take another SIX years to release. No one in their right mind could've imagined that it would take that long to come out, considering even 1.8 to 1.9 and 2.0 to 2.1 were considered a long wait by players. Problem is, in those six years Geometry Dash got much, much more popular than it had ever been before. While people liked to joke that Geometry Dash was dying, in reality it was thriving most likely due to all of the creators who continued to push the limits. But in order to push limits, creators needed cheats to bypass the object limit and other things like that.

It doesn't help that around 1.9, or late 2014, it was discovered that some players had a much easier time beating difficult levels. Tight timings, straight fly and tight wave sections were significantly easier if you had a high refresh rate monitor. Back in 2014, players noticed that Riot had an easy time with sections like those and as a result they started investigating the reason for this. When the cause was actually discovered, many players went out and bought 144hz refresh rate monitors hoping to see a massive skill bump. Many years later, someone figured out that it was possible to run the game at a higher frame rate than the display's refresh rate, and so many new top players emerged. Despite the fact that the community was made aware of this as far back as 2015 if not 2014, RobTop failed to fix it in the 2.0 update, in the smaller 2.0 updates, in the 2.1 update AND even the many smaller 2.1 updates. And because all the new top demons such as Bloodbath, Athanatos and so on had challenging gameplay you pretty much had to have a high refresh rate monitor or FPS bypass to be able to keep up. And so, despite the demon list's skepticism, soon enough almost every good player not only had but depended on cheats.

As the years passed, more and more advanced cheats appeared. Mega Hack v5 appeared, one of the most influential cheats the game has ever seen, and later Absolute would release a paid version, Mega Hack v6.

Now, with the top players dependent on cheats and creators dependent on cheats, the community was accepting of cheats, and as a result RobTop pretty much had to accept it as well. After all, on one hand, it makes sense. He created this mess by failing to update his game.

The update finally releases

The long overdue update, 2.2 finally releases in December of 2023. Players were very excited, and for good reason. But here's the problem. Now that cheats have been normalized and even endorsed for over half a decade, many players haven't even played for long enough to remember a time when cheats were frowned upon. Many weren't ready to give their cheats up and instead tried to come up with an excuse as to why it's not cheating.

When 2.2 came out, when everyone should've been celebrating that the game got an update for the first time in nearly seven years, many players weren't satisfied with the fact that their favorite icons were locked behind in some cases very tough achievements. As such, Absolute updated his cheat yet again, Mega Hack v8 released and players started using the Icon Hack. It's not like icon hack wasn't used in earlier updates, but now players were genuinely frustrated that they weren't allowed to cheat anymore and actually had to work towards their achievements, even though as anyone who played before 2.1 would know, we old players had to do that as well. (though, in fairness, 2.2 has a LOT more icons and much more challenging achievements)

Stop cheating.

In general, it seems like that discussion has more or less settled down now and icon hack is pretty widely accepted. But, in my eyes, this is wrong. You see, the real reason that we had to resort to cheats is because Geometry Dash wasn't receiving any updates, and so we had to make the updates ourselves.

But now that Geometry Dash had received its largest update ever, and RobTop has acknowledged that 2.2 was way too big and ambitious and that he should make smaller updates instead. Now that Geometry Dash will (presumably) be getting updates at a more rapid pace, the argument that the game hasn't been updated for many years simply doesn't hold any weight. FPS bypass is no longer necessary, as the physics are consistent across all versions of the game no matter the player's hardware. Many of the quality of life changes have also already been implemented into the main game, such as 'Practice Mode Hack' and 'Show Hitboxes'. The arguments players used to cheat in 2017 simply don't hold up seven years later.

It is hard to put the blame on the players of today. After all, like I said most of them probably haven't even played this game without cheats. But you're still cheating, whether RobTop approves of your cheating or not is another story. All of these cheats disable the game's anti-cheat so by definition, you are cheating.

Conclusion

Conclusion then. To players who may be reading this, stop cheating. Or at the very least, accept that what you're doing is cheating. Also, note that despite what they say the demon list is not an authority, it's just a list of levels organized by players who see themselves as superior to everyone else. To RobTop, you should be more strict. When even popular YouTube content creators and the best players not only use a cheat but in some cases DEPEND on it, you've got a problem. You caused this. You failed to update your game for seven years, and as such your game has more cheaters than ever before. To the demon list, you endorse cheating. When RobTop made changes that you don't like (mainly involving the physics of the game), you propose abusing your authority by allowing top players to cheat in records, just because you aren't willing to leave behind the absolutely insane 360hz physics the game used to have. Whether this absolutely ridiculous policy actually went through, I don't know but it was proposed even before the release of the 2.2 update.

That's it for me, have a good day.

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