Cheating costs a lot of money. While cheaters have to pay for good private cheats, ESL had to spend €500,000 on the development of their new tool to catch them, Wire Anti-Cheat. The new tool is based on Anti-Virus technology. Putting this kind of money in the development was a big effort. We had to employ good coders, pay for a good scrum master and spend a lot of money on servers. Such an investment could have ruined ESL. Imagine if the investment would not have worked out and the new tool would not have been successful or we would have run out of money before we could finish the tool. But we were lucky, the people we employed are really good and they were willing to work hard to develop something revolutionary. What is the solution? Our new tool is like a cupboard. Just open it, add a new cheat to it and our tool will be able to detect it. It works similar to anti-virus software and can even detect cheats that have been modified a bit. How do people react to the cheat free environment? For each “bust wave” we pubhlish news in which we post a list of the cheaters we have detected and banned. Since the release of ESL Wire in September 2010, over 1000 cheaters have been busted. More and more games can now get Wire Anti-Cheat support. We started with the main titles such as CS 1.6 and we then we have added more and more games. When we add a game, we first have to collect cheats and add them to Wire. Once we have enough cheats, we can make WAC’s use mandatory for a game.
”Wire is the best!.“- funatrix
(http://www.esl.eu/eu/wire/news/153221/) Supporting us by paying for ESL Premium is not obligatory. People can decide for themselves whether they want to contribute a small amount of money each month (around €3). People who support our development get extra features. They can play more gathers and they have cups for only Premium users like themselves. Also if you want to play in our pro leagues such as the ESL Pro Series you have to have a Premium Account. We cannot allow professional gamers to play without Wire, and running a Pro Series is expensive. I have had feedback from other companies that even asked why we have not - 91 -