Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters 203
Faithbleed writes "IW's Robert Bowling reports on his twitter account that Infinity Ward is giving 2,500 Modern Warfare 2 cheaters the boot. The news comes as the war between IW and MW2's fans rages over the decision to go with IWnet hosting instead of dedicated servers. Unhappy players were quick to come up with hacks that would allow their own servers and various other changes."
Despite the dedicated-server complaints, Modern Warfare 2 has sold ridiculously well.
VAC (Score:3, Insightful)
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
Re:Oh, AGAIN? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Oh, AGAIN? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's because, on the PC, you can't, without shifting everything server side.
Even then by the time we have the resources to shift everything server side we'll probably also have the resources client side on the PC to do in game pattern matching and have cheats that just match images sent to the client and respond to automatically aim at them or similar.
The idea of cheat free gaming on the PC is a fantasy, it can't happen, it's not a suitable platform for such endeavours.
Similarly though, I'd never want to see rid of the PC because it's openness is important in other areas. The issue here is that the PC's biggest advantage is also it's biggest disadvantage for things like online gaming.
I'm sure developers understand this, that if you want to deal with cheating then cat and mouse is the only way, at best you can just play whack-a-mole with the worst hacks. Perhaps the biggest improvement for the likes of Blizzard is that people need accounts to play their game, and if they do play whack-a-mole they can at least ban accounts and convince players not to cheat based on them possibly losing hundreds of hours of investment in the game.
Re:Barely a start (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:VAC (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus most of them bought the game anyways I'm sure.
I've just come to the conclusion I'm the only person on the planet who stuck to my guns and didn't buy this game.
Re:Barely a start (Score:5, Insightful)
Got to say this is so to the point.
Many time I've made some good clean kills followed by a lot of "OMFG nice wall hack/Aim bot/cheating...." and I'm not even that good.
There are far more competent player out there make far more constant kills than me and its not cheating, Its just good reflexes and hard work.
My comment is to just get over yourself and have fun.
Re:Stats (Score:2, Insightful)
I don't believe pirates are likely to even be playing multiplayer in the first place. Everything is tied into Steam this time around, even for those who bought the box off the shelf.
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Re:VAC (Score:5, Insightful)
From most of the comments I've read about this game and the uproar about it, most people now consider "Pirating with Righteousness" the no-lose alternative to boycotting. It is understandable. I mean, how can we expect some one to live without something so vital to their very survival? It would be like boycotting food! I'm pretty sure there aren't even any other FPS games out there available so what are they going to do?
Re:Barely a start (Score:2, Insightful)
I've seen the videos of aimbots and the ability to see players' positions through walls.
As far as aimbots go, It's genuinely hard to tell if somebody is using one most of the time. Even my noob ass has pulled off some pretty unbelievable shots. If you're decent enough to get some of the better kill streaks, you can easily rack up a large amount of kills.
As far as wall hacks go, I HAVE had several experiences where opposing players have been practically supernatural.
In addition, I've had times where I'll plant 3 rounds square in the chest of an enemy without recording a single hit. It could be lag or extreme horrible luck, but my aim was spot on.
Even if IW manages to ban every hacker in existence, there will always be some very skilled players out there. It would be nice to know that some of the most severe beatings my team has received could be attributed to cheating, though.
It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well... (Score:5, Insightful)
While it outsold MW1, MW2's PC port sold a paltry 3% of total MW2 sales - I believe that says quite a lot about it.
Frankly, I'm fairly sure that's what they're going for - Cripple the experience on the platform that's easiest to pirate for, and encourage people to move to the locked-down platforms (360, PS3). At least, that's what it looks like to me. There's more money in the console versions, and the numbers pretty much scream as much. I can hear it now - "Why bother with the PC this time around? It only sold 3% last time and look at the piracy! Just focus on the 360/PS3". I wouldn't really even give a damn if not for the fact that controllers are absolutely worthless to me as far as first-person shooters go.
Re:Barely a start (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, "That guy" is at least one third of the gaming populace, with a large overlap with the "Rage quitters" group.
I agree totally though. I semi-regularly get accused of hacking for some of the stuff I manage to pull off, and I don't even feel that it's really that special. But, it's the internet. And, no-one could POSSIBLY be better than THAT GUY at ... so if they beat him, they MUST be hacking, right?
Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well... (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the people making the decisions have probably never held a controller, let alone attempted to play an FPS with one.
Re:Oh, AGAIN? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's not that simple.
Even if you don't give up control of the server you cannot protect against many different cheats. Player locations have to be sent even when they're behind a wall or whatever because otherwise they pop awkwardly into view. Models/art assets can still be hacked on the client to be more visible and similar regardless- even if they're not stored locally and sent every game session they can be modified in memory by a determined cheater.
Aimbots are always going to be possible because you can still alter the executable in asssembly. A guy known as nopcode did this as far back as Quake III writing an aimbot directly into the Quake III executable.
No amount of CRC checks, encryption can protect because the cheater always knows what CRCs are expected, and the encryption keys are always used by the client to decrypt content or commands so that they can be used by the client to render and so forth in the first place.
At best on a logical level you can eliminate cheating by severely limiting your game's design, but that's really not a solution- especially when closed platforms like consoles don't have to. There is no solution to the problem that on an open platform, whatever the client has access to, the cheater has access to and can modify it or use that data outside it's intended purposes to give themselves an advantage too.
Re:VAC (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Barely a start (Score:1, Insightful)
One in three? Yeah right. You're just not as good as the teenagers who live that game.
Re:VAC (Score:3, Insightful)
"Really, any anti-cheat will eventually be defeatable. The bigger issue is that since IW is running all the servers you have to depend on them to remove any cheaters, rather than being able to play on a server with a good team of admins keeping them away. It's possible IW will do an even better job of this, but I think it's that choice that people want."
This is key, really on the PC the best option would've been to include an XBox live style setup so you can select a player as a player you wish to avoid in future. What happens then is when you start matchmaking it wont matchmake you with these players. If people cheat they will soon find a lack of people playing with them. If the feedback is sent to IW, then it'd be a good indicator for who to check for cheating to give account bans too as well, if someone has 500 players blacklisting them then it'd suggest there's probably something there to check out.
Re:VAC (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:VAC (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:It didn't exactly sell ridiculously well... (Score:3, Insightful)
On the contrary, I would assume most of the junior management played Halo 1 in their frat houses all the time. Probably plenty of middle managers played Halo 1 in their off time while working on their MBAs. It wouldn't surprise me if most of them played a good bit of Halo 2 as well. Which would explain a lot regarding the recent turn towards console-based FPSes.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)