People try all sorts of things to get an advantage in CSGO, PUBG, Fortnite, or any competitive game. But recently, I’ve been stuck watching one player’s gloriously low-rent efforts to improve their sniping.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku Australia.
It’s reminiscent of an old trick I remember being introduced to back in 2003. I was attending my first national competition for Counter-Strike, and one of the players — a Day of Defeat veteran — had a piece of blu-tak on his monitor. I asked why the hell they’d spoil their CRT screen like that, and the answer was simple: it gave them a crosshair for sniping.
Today, many monitor manufacturers have crosshairs implemented into their settings. But it’s not a universal feature, especially if you’re playing on a gaming laptop. So over on Tiktok, the @csgogoezhack channel has been posting various solutions to help their no-scoping problem.
I’m especially fond of their EA-sponsored “hack”:
There’s another version — and for Christ’s sake don’t do this with your own monitor — with a used lemon and a piece of clear adhesive tape:
Other astonishingly shitty solutions for the noscoping problem include a bent Q-tip, the end of a cucumber, a golf ball, duct tape, and my absolute favourite, a flossing stick.
Now there’s an caveat with all of this: the user is playing on matchmaked deathmatch servers, as seen from the UI at the top of the screen. There’s no footage of them doing it in a regular matchmaking game, let alone organised competition or even a “normal” third-party deathmatch server. (Australian deathmatch servers usually restrict sniper usage to those who have paid for access, although that’s a whole other deal.)
Still, it’s fun to see someone come up with creative, low-cost solutions to problems. And it’s nice to see a piece of hardware be as durable as the ASUS laptop, which has clearly survived several versions of markers and tape direct to the screen.
DISCUSSION
We did this back in the first Gears of War days, usually with dry erase marker or like a tiny chip of paper ripped off the corner of whatever was lying around, lick it and stick it.