I have been gaming since 2001. Ever since we moved to the big city from the small town back home. Discovered online gaming around 2005. Gaming PCs, even gaming consoles. Lot of money spent on games.
I discovered cheating around 2012. What was possible. How fun it was – but cheating software the way they are – could never keep me undetected. Once I started cheating, I couldn’t play normally anymore. If gaming was an addictive drug that took as a pill, cheating in video games was like injecting the drug straight into my veins. No escape. A lot of money wasted down the drain. Cheating software the way it is – couldn’t keep me from getting detected and I always ended up banned. Monthly expenses to cheating software, re-purchasing the game licenses was expensive. Moved to DMA and a second PC to enable this. The amount of money spent here is in the hundreds. Moderate successes here – although game subscriptions and rebuying of accounts continued. Every time I did this, it added to the shame and guilt and made that judgemental voice in my head even stronger. Every time I bought an account it screamed at me that I’m a loser.
Lately, I have been more and more reckless in my cheating. Openly doing things that normally would be impossible. Although there was a fear of getting banned again – this time somehow I wanted it to happen. This time I wanted to get banned like I was under a spell and I wanted to get slapped to wake up. I knew that soon – very soon – I will be banned.
Today morning, it finally happened. I wasn’t able to login anymore and got confirmation of my ban in my email. This time however, there was no mad rush to buy another account. This time I felt relieved. I was thankful that it happened. Along with uninstalling this game, I uninstalled all other games and launchers from my PC. I will remove the DMA card and fuser set up and reformat the second PC. I won’t reset the RAID 0 yet – but will plan to start the windows 11 upgrade finally.
I am removing ‘gaming’ as an activity from life from today.
I’m sorry it took this long.. and I’m sorry I ruined the experience of other gamers. It was fun when I was not cheating. It became a chore when I cheated. Now, I am done. No more guilt and shame of cheating. Only regret. Regret of letting my fellow players down, regret of not being able to keep my friends that I made along the way and regret of all the money I wasted.
Bye video games. I have some real-life levelling up to do.