"I had to choose the wrong path".
Former OpTic India player Nikhil “forsaken” Kumawat has broken his silence on the cheating scandal he was involved in during the eXTREMESLAND Asia Finals.
OpTic India were playing in their second match of the tournament when the game was paused. Kumawat’s PC had been flagged up by the tournament’s anti-cheat platform. It didn’t take long for admins to find cheating software running in Kumawat’s system and OpTic India were immediately disqualified from the competition.
Kumawat was sent on the next flight home, and it was soon after that OpTic India released the whole roster.
In an interview with AFK Gaming, Kumawat issued an apology for his actions and detailed why he turned to cheating software in the first place.
“I am extremely sorry to my teammates, OpTic management and the people who always put their trust in me over the facts. I feel guilty of stealing away the opportunities from my teammates. Each one was extremely talented and I have jeopardize their chances of being where they deserve.”
“There was no pressure from anywhere, it was all me who wanted to win every game, wanted to be perfect in every aspect of the game.”
“I was confident in my decisions, I was confident in understanding of the game etc but was never confident in my aim so to compensate that lack of confidence in aim I had to choose the wrong path.”
Reinforcing OpTic chief Jesal Parekh’s denial that the rest of the team had any knowledge of Kumawat’s cheating software, he goes on to say that no one in the team, manager, coach or otherwise were aware.
“Noone in my team had any idea of me using any external programme including my teammates, coach and manager. Because of the hack being not too blatant (as people think it might be) no one in my team or people standing behind us (coach or manager etc) had any idea I was using anything. It gave me a slight advantage over my natural aiming so it was almost negligible to be observed by people around me.”
“I did use hacks inside the bootcamp but it was impossible for them to know. As I already said it only gave me a slight advantage in terms of accuracy, precision and better registry of bullets so it was not visible to people observing me outside the game.”
When asked if he would do anything differently, Kumawat expressed regret at devoting his life to the game.
“I would probably delete the day when I first played counterstrike on. Nothing good has happened to me since the day I started playing this game.”
“I gave everything away for the game, I always put this game above everything else and today I realize what I have lost. One thing I always put everything above on and I cheated it. I lost everything when put CS above everything n today I lost CS too.”
This cheating scandal has rocked the competitive CS:GO community and it’s likely that more details will emerge soon. There’s no doubt that future tournaments, no matter how big or small, will also begin tightening their anti-cheat measures to prevent this from happening again.
