Cheating Online Gamers

An anonymous submitter writes: "The NYT has an article - Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? - Just Ask Them. Hmmm.. Wireframe walls in Quake?"

Re:I hate cheaters!

[PerlGuru]

replace the www at the beginning of the link to the article with archive. this works for any story at NYT

read it here

[SiggyRadiation]

Do Cheaters Ever Prosper? Just Ask Them
By PETER WAYNER

HE Sims Online is a clean, well-lighted corner of the Internet where people work to build an elaborately decorated, chat-filled virtual world. But if playing by the rules in this realm isn't entertaining enough, there are after-hours joints where rogues and grifters gather to swap schemes for gaming the game and growing rich.

The chatter at TSOExtreme.com, for example, is a mix of simple tips for guiding the characters known as Sims and elaborate strategies for earning millions of the online currency known as simoleans. Recently much of the talk has centered on using extra software, known as a bot, to automate the most tiresome clicking so players can rack up hundreds of thousands of simoleans in their sleep.

One of the players engaging in this automated counterfeiting, a 29-year-old financial planner from Texas, said he did so without apology (although he did not want to be identified by name). "I think the bots actually level the playing field for people who have day jobs," he said. "When I play an online game, I can't be the best because there are some college kids out there spending 14 hours a day."

Web sites like TSOExtreme.com are a challenge for the rapidly growing world of interactive games. While breaking the rules or using secret "cheat codes" has always been an accepted, even treasured part of single-player games, new online games match competitors, often strangers, remotely, which changes the dynamic. No one likes to lose unfairly, and those who play by the rules often struggle against schemers who believe that all is fair in love and simulated war.

For their part, many of the cheats say that bending the game's rules is part of the fun. It is only a game, and when it becomes boring it is time to turn to the greater game of beating the system, they argue.

Brian Reynolds, a designer of a new online game, Rise of Nations, likes to joke that he was "the guy who put 'Cheat' on the main menu" when he developed games like Civilization II. A player could use the menu at any time to create new assets like warriors or defenses for a city.

In his new game, however, in which players meet and battle for ratings over the Internet, that option is gone. Mr. Reynolds and his team try to ensure that people who buy the game have a pleasant and balanced experience when battling others to dominate a virtual world. They fear that people would stop playing if those who cheated held all the power.

Haden Blackman, the producer at LucasArts responsible for Star Wars Galaxies, an online game now being tested by 5,000 users, said that preventing cheating was one of the biggest challenges of creating a virtual world.

One lesson the game industry learned the hard way is that dedicated cheats will rewrite software to give themselves an advantage. "There are a lot of great ideas we come up with and skip because there's going to be 1 percent who will abuse them," Mr. Blackman said.

Designers of the new Star Wars game initially planned to let players communicate in strange languages that would be translated by other players' computers, he said. But the developers soon realized that cheats would find a way to break into the hidden dictionary, gaining the ability to speak the various languages and negotiate with aliens from other planets - a skill that would normally develop only over time.

Bots like the ones discussed on TSOExtreme.com are just the beginning. Some players of games with a shooter, like Quake or Counter-Strike, have automated aiming tools that target an opponent more rapidly than the quickest of fingers.

Others reprogram their video cards to hide the elaborate textured walls in a game. All that is left is a wire-frame outline, allowing a player to see through walls and track those hiding behind them.

All of these techniques depend on users' having full control of the software running on their home machines. Adept programmers can rewrite the game or insert new instructi

Re:I hate cheaters!

[mirko]

somebaudysentme / somebaudysentme

We are several people entering this login/passwd each time some free reg has to occur.

Wallhackers and the honesty of surveillance

[ergo98]

I'm a fan of the game Urban Terror [urbanterror.net], a mod for Quake 3, and play online a fair bit (I usually run Visual Studio on one monitor, UT on the other: One good thing about being a rambo player in team survivor games is that I'm dead the majority of the time, and hence find it to actually be a remarkably productive time): While recently an anti-cheat tool, PunkBuster [evenbalance.com] was added to Q3 (and it is constantly updated), there is still a serious issue of cheaters, the most common among them being wallhackers. What is a wallhacker? Well it's what was mentioned in the summary: Wire frame worlds, allowing cheating players to view other players whereever they are on the map, obviously giving a pretty clear advantage.

So what does this have to do with the honesty of surveillance? Well in team survivor when you die you can ghost other players as they move around the map, and it tends to be that wallhackers are discovered quite quickly--Their behaviour and actions in the game do not correlate with the information that they should be visually receiving (from what we can see ghosting them). Usually this quickly leads to cries of cheater and a vote to kick the offending player.

ESR has a good essay on game cheating

[Dr. Manhattan]

The Case of the Quake Cheats [catb.org].

I'm working, in my copious spare time, on a cheat-resistant comm library. Someone is sure to beat me to it.

Re:Wireframes?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why anti-cheat systems like Punkbuster look at more than just the game binaries and additionally allow server-triggered screenshots. The latter is optional, but when the game goes beyond casual deathmatch, ladders may require that it's enabled.

Re:Hell...

[GeckoFood]

...so Linux is insecure?

It can be, if the gamers in question are always logged on as root instead of setting up a user account with normal user access...

World + Models should be rendered in 1 pass.

[Otis_INF]

Now, the worlds in most FPS games are rendered first, then the models and other entities are rendered, using clipping /depth buffer info of the world. A lot of engines use 2 different render routines to do this: the world is mostly static and uses a different routine than the model renderer.

THe result is, that when you 'patch' the world renderer so that it f.e. renders wireframes instead of solid polys (in OpenGL based engines this is 'not that hard', you just change the value passed to glBegin()) the models still are rendered solid, plus because most renderers for models rely on the depthbuffer filled during the world rendering, the models close to corners are fully rendered, since the depthbuffer is empty. So you can easily 'see' the models close to corners. If you also 'patch' the model renderer for not doing world clipping, you will see ALL models rendered in your window.

This can't be done if the world + models use a single render routine, i.e.: model polygons and world polygons are packed together as THE set of polygons to render, then the single render routine will eat these single pack of polys to render. If you patch the routine for wireframing, you will see the models also wireframed, if you patch out the world clipping, you will get the complete world in your window, not what you want.

I think in future game engines there will be a merger between world + model polygon sets, because worlds are more and more modfyable in game by the player, which in the end requires that the modifyable parts are 'models' too. However games based on the current crop of quake * engines will keep on suffering from this.

Re:Consoles

[Hakubi_Washu]

Possibly not... Many "modern" cheats don't change files on your disk(s) at all, because simple checksums can prevent this. Instead they modify values in your RAM directly, which is more nitty-gritty, but harder to prevent. And: This is possible on consoles too, as they have RAM as well (For the PlayStation there are a lot of "Modules" that are inserted into it's serial port, another way is to load a CD with "malicious" code before loading the game...)

Re:PunkBuster

[scalis]

PunkBuster is just another piece of software. What stops it from being hacked just like the game?

You are right and Punkbuster has been circumvented and hacked in the past.
The difference however is that the company that developed the game seldom provide a good way to stop new cheats fast. PunkBuster provides protection against cheats, and does ONLY that while the developing companies might very well have moved on to different projects and so on...

Re:Sometimes it's OK, sometimes not

[Dr. Manhattan]

Midwest US has a game called "Euchre"; the dealer has a slight statistical advantage. The deal is supposed to rotate with each hand, but sometimes players will work to "steal the deal" by skipping opponents and passing the deal on to their teammate. Considering it's usually played at parties with a lot of conversation and such, it can be easy for someone to forget that it's their turn to deal.

Generally the game is declared void if someone's caught after stealing the deal; but if you catch them before, you might continue with the game, wondering if you missed one before...

It is already being done

[doublem]

Gameshark

Codebreaker

There are others, but they do the same thing.

Boot form the CD. Select the cheats. Boot the game. The cheat program runs in memory changing values for you so you have lots of cash, lots of lives and so on.

Re:I hate cheaters!

[misterhaan]

even better is to set up your computer to route requests that are trying to go to www.nytimes.com to the archive instead. the ip of archive.nytimes.com is 199.239.136.212

windows users can find a file named hosts (no extension) under system32/drivers/etc and add the following line to automatically go to archive.nytimes.com instead of www.nytimes.com: 199.239.136.212 www.nytimes.com

Re:I hate cheaters!

[john_lewmanny]

or read from other [com.com] sources [businessweek.com].