Ghost clients; one of the many hacked clients climbing up in popularity resulting in more and more players using. Over half of the top 200 players on the MCSG Leaderboards may use a ghost clients and all of them have not been caught. Ghost clients are the same as any hacked clients, just with a few tweaks to make a player using it look legit (at least depending on he/she uses it)
Before I go and discuss the actual topic which is moderators catching players using ghost clients, I will first go over a few questions and answers for moderators as well as normal players
What is a "ghost client"?
Ghost clients are hacked clients of course. However, they are designed to make a player look legit while playing. A great example is
Tenebrous12321 (Please do not flame/hate on him, he's honestly an amazing guy just making a few mistakes) The reason why I will be using Tene as an example is because he was one of the most famous players to previously use a ghost client and not get caught, even when recording. He's smooth aimbot in his videos before and has never been caught because a ghost client will make a player seem legit even while using it.
What is "smooth aimbot"?
Smooth aimbot is essentially aimbot, just smoother. That's basically a very easy way to explain it, however, with smooth aimbot, there is no sudden headsnap to a player. When the player using a ghost client has smooth aimbot enabled, once he/she engages in a fight, the player will lock onto the other player with their smooth aimbot. It will look as if that player is simply moving their mouse to hit the other player however with smooth aimbot, it will actually act as an assist to simply lock onto the other without the sudden headsnaps as I said before. Adding on, there is a reach/range option in most ghost clients enabling a player to hit another from 4 blocks or even up to 5.
Why can ghost clients bypass anti-cheats?
In terms of hacking and getting away with it, ghost clients are the best of course. Now the main reason why anti-cheats, except one, are not able to detect ghost clients is because there is no real way to detect players using smooth aimbot, triggerbot (depends on how one uses it), and range/reach as that could be easily disputed as ping. The only anti-cheat that is able to properly detect players using ghost clients would be Badlion's anticheat. I do not know how they are able to develop it to detect ghost clients, however, it definitely does their work done.
Why is ghost clients such an issue?
Minecraft is evolving, Optifine is evolving, PvP is evolving, everything around us is evolving including the things that we do not want to evolve which is hacked clients. Ghost clients will evolve more and more to the point where many players will know of it and easily download it just like it is optifine. With this in mind, many other major PvP Networks have been working on ways to fix this such as developing anti-cheats that could possibly detect ghost clients, training moderators to identify ghost clients, etc.
Now onto the main point; how can we punish players using ghost clients?
There is no certain way that we can punish players with a 100% guarantee that they are using a ghost clients (especially if they know how to use one), however, there are ways to possibly prevent this. I request that more Moderators, Sr. Moderators, possibly even Admins download one and learn how it works. A ghost client is not any regular hacked client previously mentioned, it's a client designed to bypass almost any anti-cheat by making you seem more of a skilled player. It's very hard to detect one of these, however, with proper training to a moderator, it can be apparent when a player may be using smooth aimbot, triggerbot, etc. Even if a player is recording and it seems like they are playing fair and square, they could still be using a ghost client as there is many ways to hide it even recording.
Anyways, I think this will definitely help, if you would like more details on what a ghost client looks like, I have recorded a video of me using Spooky-Caspar (one of the best and known ghost clients)
If you would like any further questions about ghost clients, feel free to ask in the comments below. I will try my best to answer these questions.
