Gamers Beware: 5 Hacks That Will Transform Your Playing Experience

Everyone’s a gamer these days, they say, though the evidence is highly contentious. Mobile gaming counts, they insist. Candy Crush is a game! And yes, that’s technically correct, but this sneakily vaults over the long-established connotations of being a gamer. Plenty of people take trains, but it doesn’t make them train spotters and spontaneously equip them with notebooks to record the timeliness of the 2:15 to Dagenham.

No, the word gamers conveys a level of obsession: not simply with winning, but with absorbing and mastering game mechanics. Gamers are dedicated. Sometimes they have legit credentials. They spend ludicrous sums on high-end systems to fractionally improve their performance (and shell out extra for RGB, because shiny lights definitely make you play better). And when they’re inclined to get devious in their efforts, they try to rig things to their benefit through sneaky hacks.

Some of the hacks we’re going to look at are perfectly innocuous. Others might give you a risky thrill, or drive you to a level of screen-smashing fury if deployed against you. That’s how it goes, I’m afraid. Here are five gaming hacks that can really flip the script:

Pointedly choking your internet connection

If you’re serious about multiplayer gaming, or even gaming in general (game downloads get bigger every year), then you’ll no doubt pay for unlimited broadband. Regardless of the speed on offer, every respectable ISP has such a tier on offer: even the Post Office, an ISP you might not have considered, has a deal that’s great for heavy broadband usage. That means you can download all day every day and not hit any limits. Great news!

Due to this, your reaction to this subheading might have been to wonder why you’d ever want to choke your connection. Well, firstly, we’re not talking about choking data limits — we’re talking about choking bandwidth, thus effectively choking speed. This is a multiplayer gaming hack for one simple reason: lag compensation, a system used to keep slower connections in sync.

The result of too much lag compensation is often a comical situation where the person with the laggiest connection gets to seemingly teleport around the map, landing headshots while being almost impossible to hit in response. If you choke your connection artificially (maybe just run a lot of torrents), you can become an unstoppable force of lag and cause all your foes to ragequit.

Hugely lowering your graphics settings

Yes, it’s nice to have pretty things to look at when you’re playing a game, but think for a second about how intrusive graphics can be. Add layers of HDR or bloom effects, throw in volumetric smoke, slap on some richly-detailed textures, and what happens? It gets much harder to clearly make out what you’re looking at (not very useful for gaming).

This is why some gaming pros put their graphics settings as low as possible (outside of resolution, of course). Instead of having to pick out their enemies in hazy lighting, they can clearly identify their blocky hitboxes and pick them off. Low graphics settings also help max out performance, something that helps overall (more on that next).

Switching to a high refresh rate display

The standard display refresh rate has been 60hz (or 59hz) for a long time, meaning that displays refresh 60 times each second. Given that the movie industry typically records movies in 24 frames per second, this might sound generous, but it’s really falling behind in gaming. How far behind? 120hz and 144hz displays are common, and more and more 240hz displays are coming out. Beyond that, manufacturers are even releasing 300hz gaming displays.

Such displays aren’t generally useful for console gaming, because consoles often have locked frame rates (typically 60fps or 30fps) and max out at 60fps regardless — but PC gaming is a different proposition. A powerful gaming rig with the right settings can hit 300fps in some games that are still competitive (Counter-Strike, for instance), and the difference is huge.

Look at it this way: if you were trying to hit an enemy at 60fps, it would take a 60th of a second to see them move. During that time, they’d progress five frames on a 300hz display with the horsepower to match. This gives you a significant edge over the competition, allowing you to react faster and aim more precisely.

Using a keyboard and mouse with consoles

Console developers want you to stick to the control schemes they created. Why won’t you just do that? It’s the polite and fair thing to do. Well, perhaps, but all’s fair in love and simulated war, and since you have the option of using a keyboard and mouse when playing console games, why shouldn’t you at least consider it?

The secret lies in USB adapter dongles. While you can’t just plug your mouse into a console and start using it, you can plug it into such a dongle and have its movement used to effectively simulate controller movements — here’s a list of viable dongles for the Xbox One, though some also work for other consoles. Janky, yes, but potentially very useful when you’re trying to get revenge on that 8-year-old who keeps spawn-killing you and calling you a boomer.

Getting some high-end headphones

How much does sound matter in a competitive game? You might not think it’s very significant. Maybe, like many others, you’re used to having music playing in the background to hype you up. And there’s nothing wrong with that, exactly, unless you’re trying to be the best at multiplayer gaming. This is because sound really matters. Really really matters.

Pick up a fantastic set of headphones with a wide soundstage, shut off the music, bump up the in-game volume, and listen. What can you hear? Footsteps advancing from down the corridor? A rifle being reloaded? There’s so much going on in the background if you pay attention to it, and it can give you an incredible edge over other players.

One warning, though: even though there’s nothing outright hacky about this hack, you will probably be accused of hacking when you turn around to gun down someone who was trying to sneak up behind you. Unless you think you’re going to get banned, just let them believe you’re using an aim-assist system. It’s likely to have funnier results.

If you really want to boost your performance in gaming (mostly multiplayer gaming) and you’re not hugely concerned about getting insulted (or possibly even banned for a couple of these), then think about using these hacks. And if some laggy foe keeps phasing through your bullets, don’t assume their internet connection is bad. They may simply have read this article.