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Comments: 203 +- Games: Infinity Ward Fights Against Modern Warfare 2 Cheaters on Tuesday December 01, @06:56AM
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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.
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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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, this says alot about the uproar over no dedicated servers:
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2009/11/gam_boycottfail_580-1258143415.jpg [blogcdn.com]
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That shot showed 833 members.
The game has sold how many copies so far?
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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: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?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what the press release says, but I see from the "Top Sellers" chart on the Steam portal that MW2 has already dropped to number 3 behind a bargain basement Mirror's Edge and a bundle of older THQ games w/ Red Faction Guerrilla.
Something tells me MW2 is not meeting Infinity Ward's expectations despite all the whistling past the graveyard. I'm sure it'll be a money maker, but god-willing, it will be a disappointment for them considering their willingness to crap in the face of the loyal customers
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That would make a nice sample image for the "Gallery of Wrong" in this article [encycloped...matica.com].
Re:VAC (Score:4, Informative)
PunkBuster is just as vulnerable to being bypassed and disabled as VAC is, so saying they should have used PunkBuster is a cop out.
Parent
Re:VAC (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know the specifics of it, but I was under the impression that the guys running punkbuster had more experience with the underlying platform.
Parent
Re:VAC (Score:5, Interesting)
But Punkbuster has its own issues. Many players were not able to play on Punkbuster-enabled servers in CoD4 because some driver or other bit of code caused an incompatibility.
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.
Parent
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"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
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wonder if something like this would work.
Add someone to a personal ignore list. The match making would have a negative weight for people in your ignore list and try to put you in a game with fewer of those people. If someone tries to join a game and 50% or more of those people have that person in their ignore lists, the match making won't put them in that game.
Make this list server side and reset after 2 months. Enough time for VAC to kick in. If someone gets voted a second time after the reset by the sa
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
They decided to use VAC instead of Punkbuster on the PC. Like many of their decisions, this one wasn't well thought out.
I personally feel that the only system I have seen so far with a reasonable rate of success is dedicated servers with some sort of permaban of accounts caught cheating. While by no means a perfect system; my personal experience (with TF2 as that is the only FPS game besides MW2 I have played over the last few years) was that I found a gaming site that ran servers for a variety of games. An extended group of people frequented those servers, creating a community of sorts, and I personally never had much probl
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, no (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically, Steam's VAC anti-cheat system is in place for abusers of the PC version, and this news is either proof that the setup is proving more efficient for catching cheaters, or proof that even with this arrangement Infinity Ward still can't get rid of the cheating problem.
Um, no. VAC2 is easily bypassed or disabled by most competent hack writers. They like to pretend that VAC is the holy grail of anti-cheats but it's just as vulnerable as PunkBuster or any of the league anti-cheats.
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Re:Um, no (Score:5, Interesting)
That is actually a very bad design choice. See, with VAC I can attach a debugger, and at my own relaxed pace figure the game out. Or Vac, for that matter. They dont even care to make it difficult to attach a debugger. This way I will have my hack done with no hassle. If the account is banned in 2 months, fine, i will get a clean one.
Now with PB it is a different story, try to debug it carelessly and you will find yourself banned in no time, making debugging slower and generally more difficult.
To add, MW2 has a dated engine which everyone and his brother knows. It has been tweaked but not much. How about that: the game's player list is referenced by a static variable. And it's a straight, static array with braindead simple structure. The engine also offers flags like 'isVisible' which make lightweight, non-DX hacks a pure pleasure to write. No attempts whatsoever to make it difficult to hack the thing. Compared to RedOrchestra or even Battlefield series, COD was traditionally the easiest, by far easiest, to hack. If you reverse the thing you will notice the programmers did not care one bit to make it hard. To add some perspective: most hobbysts have had their hacks ready one day after launch, and a few days later mainstream cheating sites were filled with in-depth reviews of the data structures. It took few months for such level of details to become public knowledge for BF2, and for games as RedOrchestra it *never* became public. Looking at COD6 code I'd venture a guess the dev team was not treated very well and was all but motivated. Just my few cents.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
That's because the PC is an open platform and just as DRM can't work, anti-cheating software like this can't work. The client is untrusted, anything on it can be worked around.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"With DRM you're trying to prevent the user from viewing the content under certain conditions but allowing them to view it under others"
This is really what you're doing in the anti-cheating scenario, just on a more abstract level. You still have to pass raw data to the graphics API or graphics card eventually as raw data. You cannot both render it with standard hardware and keep it in an encrypted format. Realistically though it's in a plain format before this because performing client side logic on encrypt
The destructoid article is wrong: no dedicated (Score:3, Informative)
the destructoid article shows the use of a patch that enable the console, to change game defaults configs to something insane (insane fun? the video looks like fun). It can be a step to dedicated server, but is NOT a dedicated server. Is still a machine hosted by a player logued and playing the game, it needs a GPU, etc, etc..
NOT DEDICATED.
Oh, AGAIN? (Score:5, Funny)
For those not in the know, this is how the conversation goes.
That's the best case scenario. A depressing number of devs don't even consider trying to design-out hacks, and think that whack-a-hack is a winning long term strategy, despite the decades of evidence that say it ain't so. I'm looking at you Blizzard.
Re:Oh, AGAIN? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Mmm, fair enough, it's true that Blizzard are succeeding despite their best efforts to design in problems.
They could be winning more though, if they didn't have to spend support money on playing whack-a-hack, and cut off players (and their revenue streams).
Bear in mind that whack-a-hack is forever. You can only stop doing it when your game becomes so unpopular that nobody is hacking it any more.
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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 se
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You realise that you're enumerating design decisions there, not immutable laws?
If you decide to give up control of the servers and design your game in a way that allows clients to win just by sending the right "I did X" packet, then it's game over as far as anti-cheating is concerned. But there's nothing forcing you to make those decisions.
Re: (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
Barely a start (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:Barely a start (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:Barely a start (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd say anyone who is even moderately good at a FPS, or even just had a few lucky days has had this happen. Let's not forget being banned for the grave offense of "Killing the admin." :P
I remember once turning a corner in CS:S, while playing as CT and finding 4 Ts aiming my direction. My response to this situation, understandably, was to hold down fire button while backing out in the direction from which I came. While the first guy that died was a fairly legit aimed shot, the other 3 that fell to lucky head
Re:Barely a start (Score:4, Funny)
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.
It's even funnier in Left 4 Dead.
For one thing, most Infected there produce a very distinct sound, and with a little bit of training, one can aim at sound alone and shoot through walls, hitting more often than not. With more experience you can hear that sound from quite far away.
Then there are bugs in the game engine which result in shadows "bleeding through" walls or roof at some spots, and occasionally even chunk of the model - again, leading to wall shots.
Finally, after playing for a long time, you learn the maps really well, and that includes all the typical ambush spots. At that point quite often you start shooting before turning around the corner, so that if a Boomer is there (probability 30%), he dies before he has any chance of barfing on you.
In all of the above scenarios, if you're the one doing the shooting, you'll get "OMG! wallhax/aimbot!" whines more often than not, especially when the other team is relatively unexperienced (or is being pwnd). I've been vote-kicked off servers several times because of that.
Parent
Re: (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?
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The most annoying part of MW2 (Score:2)
Is that I have to open a bunch of ports and do port forwarding to my ps3 just to play online... their support forums say to turn on pnp on the wireless router, which is absolute crap, they do not really list the ports being used other then a wide range.. and anyone thats using linux/openbsd/similar firewalls and routers, have to play trial and error on which ports to open without removing all rules and forwarding all ports to the ps3....
I frequently get punted during host migration in the middle of a game..
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Not this time (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe the sales figures in the press releases are true, but there's no way to know how big the sales could have been if there had not been such bad word of mouth before release.
I know this much: The sales charts on the Steam home page showed that unlike Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins, the pre-sale of MW2 didn't even make the top ten until just before release, where as the pre-sale of the other two went right to the top very early on.
The only way to deal with a company that ignores consumer wishes is to not give them money. Personally, I decided to spend my time and money with Borderlands and DA:O instead.
We'll see if the sales figures continue to grow now that the scene "demo" of MW2 has been released. I bet that one will allow for dedicated servers.
Stats (Score:2, Interesting)
Are there any correlation statistics between pirates and cheaters? Are pirates more likely to cheat?
Re: (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.
How about non USA/Europe players? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you're not going to allow people to host their own servers, then you screw up Brazilians who don't get less than 250 ping. Ignoring a country with 150 million people and a project to bring internet connectivity to every home in a couple of years is a really good plan. Besides, we love being treated like a 3rd world country. Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.
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I don't think they really care about a nation that pirates the majority of software products regardless. Pirates tend to justify piracy any way they can just to feel better about it.
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I don't really see how this is a troll. Why would you waste your time on investing in a country that generally pirates everything constantly? Where past attempts for investment lead to nothing? It would be a waste of money for Infinity Ward.
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.
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Unfortunately, the people making the decisions have probably never held a controller, let alone attempted to play an FPS with one.
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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.
MW2 (Score:3, Informative)
Anyone else think "MechWarrior 2" whenever they see the acronym?