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Games Entertainment

Cheaters Sometimes Prosper 215

Posted by michael from the farming-moderation-points-will-only-get-you-heartache dept.
The Red Herring has a story discussing the cheating epidemic in online gaming. Discusses the problem from the point of view of the game companies, especially the ones producing console games who have to get it right the first time or face reissuing a huge number of CDs.
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Cheaters Sometimes Prosper More

Cheaters Sometimes Prosper

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  • So What? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So what? It's only a GAME.

    Say that slowly. IT IS ONLY A GAME.

    If you think someone you're playing with is cheating, go find another game. Do the equivalent of taking your ball and going home.

    Oh, wait, that breaks the revenue model. Nevermind.

  • Punishment rather than prevention (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    In the real world, people can't even stop each other from using guns and knives on each other. And mostly, they don't try.

    Instead, the real world operates on a punishment basis. If Alice injures Bob, there's lots of social and legal machinery which results in professionally violent people showing up to hurt Alice (put her in prison, confiscate her property, whatever it takes).

    So, how about this: require a deposit of $100 in addition to $10/month. If the server administrator catches the player cheating, they eject the player and keep the deposit. Want to come back with a new pseudonymous identity? No problem, that will be another $100, thank you.

    For a CD-ROM based game, simply include one (1) identity with the boxed set, and people who screw up can just buy another boxed set.

  • Re:PunkBuster (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    It also requires that every client's version of PunkBuster be up to date to detect the latest cheats, and it requires that PunkBuster actually have their program updated for the latest cheats. On top of this, PunkBuster kicks cheaters client side and not server side, so it is trusting the cheater's copy of PB to kick them. And someone I know wrote a program to disable the client side kick in PunkBuster, so...

    The real problem with cheats in counter-strike such as the speed cheat, wall hack and skin hack is that the people who maintain the game don't care much. These cheats sometimes take forever to get patched.

  • Who cares? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let me see ... the NASDAQ [newsforge.com] is tanking again ... Nortel Networks [cnn.com] lost $19 billion in the last quarter ... VA Linux is running out of cash [cnet.com] ... the entire IT industry is sinking fast (and the rest of the economy is right behind) ... and you're worried about players cheating in some juvenile video game?

    Get a grip, people.

  • Cheaters are Playing a Different Game (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16, 2001 @06:27PM (#146379)
    Remember Rene Magritte's famous painting. It's a picture of a pipe, with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." - "This is not a pipe." If you think about it, the caption is correct. There is no pipe. There is only a picture of a pipe. However, most people looking at the picture would say "Oh, that's a pipe." They wouldn't think to step outside the context, and properly reference the object as a picture of a pipe. This is simple mental laziness. We have come to associate representations very closely with the objects they are supposed to represent.

    It's the same thing with how regular players and cheaters view games. When a regular player think of CS, or UT, or Quake, or whatever, they think of a game whereby one has to run around and shoot and hide and whatever else to win. They associate representations very closely with the objects or actions they are supposed to represent. However, cheaters think differently. They do not show the same kind of mental laziness. They see games for what they are: A client-server application with certain checks and balances in place which, if manipulated or hacked correctly, will yield some reward. This reward (represnted as kills, frags, bonus points, items, or whatever else in the game) also represents the cheater's resourcefulness in being able to manipulate the metagame, rather than the game. As such, it serves as a point of pride.

    Regular gamers are playing a game which they perceive as real. Cheaters are playing a metagame whereby they manipulate the rules of the game to their advantage. Their measures of success are represented similarly, but this success is due to different sets of skills in the two cases. There is no comparison.

  • Bloody hell, of course they sometimes prosper.. (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:33PM (#146380)

    Case in point: Microsoft.

    -- Guges --

  • As reported in The Onion [theonion.com], DEA Chief: Winners Occasionally Use Drugs [theonion.com].

    Alex Bischoff
  • Took me awhile to find this; thought I'd share:

    Ceci n'est pas une pipe. [k12.md.us]

    --

  • Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers?

    For the same reasons internet filter software can't tell when someone is being obscene. They're dumb and don't understand context.

    If you implement a cheat-detector that occasionally detects a false posative, the people who got screwed by it will scream foul, and rightly so. (Assuming they even know what happened to them.)

  • In order for your reply to be convincing to me, I'd have to agree with the unstated premise that divorce is relevant in discussions of morality.
  • The real root of the problem is that the servers are dumb and the clients are where all the smarts are. This means that the clients are in charge of *everything* about how your gameworld works, from how your character moves, to how you shoot, to whether or not you can see other people through walls. Thus one doesn't need to hack the server to cheat - one only has to fiddle with one's own copy of the game on one's own computer. That's why this sort of cheating is inevitable.

    I'm not sure what the solution is. Putting the smarts in the server probably isn't feasable given how complex these games are. (No way are you going to be able to dedicate 32 meg of ram and the equivilent of 500 Mhz of clock cycles per simultaneous user on your server, for example.)

    With non-action games (for example, online chess), having smart clients doesn't lead to cheating because all that matters to the game is the moves and the board. If one player is seeing a bland 2-d board and the other is seeing a fancy 3-d board, with full animation, it doesn't really matter. The rules are so simple that they *can* be enforced, because it is trivial to write code that can detect if a client is trying to do something that should be "impossible".

    This is part of what I dislike about the current run of online games. There's no way I'm ever going to bother working hard at getting good at a game when all that work will pale in comparasin to some jerk who's willing to cheat. (And the same principle applies to both action games and RPGs.)

  • What about divorces where the couple doesn't have children?
  • The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.

    What effective ways do you propose to "out the cheaters"? See your basketball scenario doesn't quite apply to online games because cheaters can come back as quickly as you kick them out. If Kobe Briant gets ejected from a basketball game, he's out for that game. But if (CZ)Mulan gets ejected from a Tribes 2 server for using an aimbot, how do you know that he won't just log back in as (GD)ChouYoun and pick right back up where he left off?

    What you're talking about happens now. If someone is firing rockets out of the back, they get swamped from all sides. If someone is camping next to a spawn point in a game of Last Man Standing, they get ratted out by those who've been eliminated already. If someone is saving backup copies of their characters, then selling all their stuff to someone else then restoring their backup and getting their stuff back, other players are likely to bitch to the admin. Doesn't stop it from happening. They still cheat. How would you recommend that be prevented without destroying gameplay or requiring that all servers CPU power be doubled to handle all the new "Big Brother" code?
  • computers do not have intellegence

    No, but human programmers that tell computers how to work do (well, some of them anyway). Generally, when a game player yells out, "XYZ is a cheater!" he's made a conclusion based on certain logic (moves too fast, shoots too accurately, has a nick like "cheatBot", climbs walls backwards, etc.). You can certainly program the same logic into a game server.

  • Follow Real-World Examples (Score:5)

    by Hrunting ( 2191 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:41PM (#146389) Homepage
    Anything that has rules someone will try to cheat at. Everyone dies, right? Well, that doesn't stop people from trying to cheat death. Why? Rules inherently suck. They were made to be broken. A Christian man and woman get in a relationship. God says don't cheat. What do they do? You guessed it. They cheat.

    So how do real-life games take care of this scenario? Well, let's take basketball as an example. You have two basic ways of handling cheating in basketball. At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul. In an online game, this would be akin to a server admin maintaining the rules. It would be even better if it was automated (ie. the game could identify cheaters). Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers? At the unorganized level (ie. street ball), you have mob rule. Jim travels, so Bob calls a foul. Jim says, "No way, dood." Bob's buddies nod their heads. What happens if Jim refuses to agree? He's either out of the game or beat up (or both). What happens if Bob keeps calling wussy fouls? Bob's either out of the game or beat up. In an online server, this would be akin to sort of moderation system. Players could identify another player as a cheater. If this person gets identified enough, he's kicked off. If some jackass starts going around fingering everyone as a cheater (or the cheater himself starts fingering everyone), he gets knocked off. Mob rule is very effective.

    The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.
  • Coherent, Simple, Swift Justice - an on-line game should have a obviously-posted cheating policy, defining what is considered cheating (which should change over time as required), and a clearly-spelled out punishment system. There should be a easy way for players to report a cheater, and a defined methodology for "trial" (which could be as ruthless as "We (the company) have the sole discretion to determine your guilt/innocense"). Thus, everyone knows the law, it's easy to report violators, and justice is swift.

    Won't work. You can't scale the system fast enough. With the possibility of hundreds of thousands of gamers playing, there's no way a company of 30 employees could deal with the flood of complaints. EQ is a great example of why this doesn't work. It's full of cheaters and there's simply to way to track them all.

    The real answer is in allowing the community to deal out "justice" with it's own policing. Tribes does an excellant job of thing. You can vote to remove players. Put the power in the hands of the gamers to control their own communities.
  • > But if (CZ)Mulan gets ejected from a Tribes 2
    > server for using an aimbot, how do you know that
    > he won't just log back in as (GD)ChouYoun and
    > pick right back up where he left off?

    Nothing right now. Well - I suppose you could ban the IP, but that doesn't solve the problem.

    The cheater problem (and also the irc-moron problem) both come in effect because they are more or less anonymous services. For a mob rule to work, you have to be able to identify persons, which could easily be done with a login/RSA auth :)

  • I disagree. "Normal" people don't think that the bullets in the gun are "physical", and they aren't viewing it as a solid, immutable world, but rather they appreciate that every limitation in the game is an aspect that modifies your strategy. Bullets run out? Great that means that I have to formulate a strategy that will lead to reequiping, even though it means I have to run for dangerous areas: Perhaps I'll analyze the various weapon spawn points to determine the best area for doing so. Can't run for eternity without getting tired? Okay strategically run at only the right moments to ensure burnout doesn't occur. etc.

    The point of all of this is that every limitation and restriction in the game (ergo not being able to see through walls) is a part of the rules of the game, and it is these rules that cheaters want to supercede so that they can have an upperhand over non-cheaters. Personally I consider cheaters seriously psychologically challenged (How can a cheater with an aimbot feel a sense of accomplishment? I despise anyone who feels that cheating is reasonable, and I will treat people the same in real life. A cheater is an anti-social opportunists who would fuck you over given a chance, and who likely shoplifts in their spare time). Cheaters are the scourge of online games because their goal is purely to make life hell for non-cheaters. I played Diablo I online for about 5 minutes before just completely giving up because every level was full of asshole 500hp/all spell "lvl. 2" characters. These losers would hang out just to kill true low level characters (because of course there was no challenge). How very cool.

  • This is absolutely idiotic. Cheaters are antisocial opportunists who feel such a sense of inferiority and a failure to ever compete that they "overcompensate" by using tools that allow them to supercede rules of the game: Tools which in >99.9999% of they just downloaded (they're not "subverting the architecture" : They're just losers using someone else's program).

    Just because your idea of fun is more childish than others', doesn't make other people's idea of fun any less legitimate than yours.

    I hope you're a troll and you're not really this stupid. A cheater intentional has "fun" at the expense of everyone else.

  • "Whether it's aimbots for Unreal Tournament or techniques for improving response times over the Internet, the potpourri of cheats shows how pervasive online cheating has become."

    I'm sorry, but having a faster connection or tweaking your stack isn't cheating.

    They're referring to using aimbots to improve how fast your player acquires and shoots targets.

  • On modems that do compression-on-the-fly, it will render the compression useless (since good encryption has few patterns).

    Solution? Compress the data in the game before you encrypt it.

  • Social Answers to the Cheating Problem... (Score:5)

    by trims ( 10010 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @08:05PM (#146396) Homepage

    First off, as others have stated before, the primary technical solution is to never trust the client. The following assumes that all appropriate technical measures have been taken to minimize the change of cheating.

    That said, people will still find a way to cheat. The fundamental reason is that none of the "real-life" barriers to cheating currently exist in the on-line community. This is primarily due to these factors:

    1. No Permanent Indentity - since anyone can be anyone (and, more importantly, one person can have an unlimited number of pseudonyms), applying some penalty to one identity has virtually no effect.
    2. No consistent and methodical punishment system - there essentially is no "legal" system for cheaters. How do we define cheating? How does it get reported? How is one "convicted" of cheating? What happens if you're a cheater?
    3. A social system which currently actively promotes people who cheat - for the most part, people who devise cheats are held in veneration for their technical skills. In order to get the desired recognition, the cheat-maker must widely disseminate their cheat; otherwise, how are people to know how cool they are? This is a phenomena related the cracker groups.

    We can only defeat cheating through a change in the social system. The problem is primarily sociological, not technical. Here's how I'd go about it:

    • Fixed Identities - no, I don't mean you have to be "Bob Jones" on the system, but rather this: when one buys a new game (for $50), you get a serial number. Perhaps an RSA-signed message. When the user tries to log into the online system for the first time, they are required to enter their serial number. They can then generate an identity. The system then associates that Serial Number with the Identity. Thus, if the company terminates the Identity (for whatever reason), the player loses the ability to ever create another Identity. They would face a financial penalty (you have to go buy another copy of the game) for cheating. There are nuances to this (like allowing a person to create another identity if they haven't been terminated, but you all get the idea), but the general idea is to create a system where terminating a player's identity locks them from creating any other identity.
    • Coherent, Simple, Swift Justice - an on-line game should have a obviously-posted cheating policy, defining what is considered cheating (which should change over time as required), and a clearly-spelled out punishment system. There should be a easy way for players to report a cheater, and a defined methodology for "trial" (which could be as ruthless as "We (the company) have the sole discretion to determine your guilt/innocense"). Thus, everyone knows the law, it's easy to report violators, and justice is swift.
    • The on-line community quits handing out accolades based on technical skill alone - we need to start evaluating the ends to which people use their skills, not just the skills themselves. The techie community has long buried its head in the sand over this issue (perhaps because of its close association with the Defense Industry and some unresolved guilt therefrom), but people, there's more here to judge a person on. To use a bad example: Hitler was one of the most efficient and charismatic leaders of the past century. Nazi Germany had probably the best-run (ie most efficient at carrying out stated goals) government in a very long time. Should we emulate them? Admire them?

    We can lick the problem, but it's not all in the game-designers' court. Some of the responsibility lies in the gaming community itself.

    -Erik

  • they are using their skills to win a battle...sounds human enough to me.

    No, they are breaking the game's rules laid out by the implementors/designers, effectively adding their own. It's like an athlete who takes performance-enhancing drugs: They gains an advantage over other contestants who don't, but instead follow the rules.

    War doesn't enter into it: This is interactive entertainment, and - from Red Herring's perspective - a revenue stream for the manufacturer/server provider, one which can dry up if non-cheaters stop playing that game especially or multiplayer games generally.

  • One of the oldest forms of cheating known to man, is cheating at gambling. In the end, it takes a computer to suspect, but a human to confirm. Even in gambling, some cheaters get away with it. It's not an exact science, although we would like it to be. Expect complex automated cheating prevention to make mistakes, so account for it.
    Great, now we have to debug the cheat-prevention in addition to the game.

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.

  • Re:Solution is simpler clients, smarter servers (Score:3)

    by sholden ( 12227 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @08:04PM (#146399) Homepage
    Netrek does not have a large cheating problem. The true state of the game is known only to the server. Clients are given only the information that they would know. Clients use RSA keys to authenticate to the server. If a client is cracked, the client key can be quickly revoked and new clients distributed. If the clients are kept simple, several clients and keys could be distributed on a CD. Most clients would be under 100k. The art and graphics could be shared by all clients and take up the bulk of the CD. If anyone cracks one of the clients, its key can be revoked and there is no need to re-release a new CD. More clients, all randomly linked and encrypted on the disk, can be right there. The main thing is that the server only allows blessed clients to play, and only shares with any connection what it could know.

    That scheme works in netrek because it isn't as popular as quake. Cracking these schemes doesn't seem to difficult by the speed in which they are done in the PC world. Proxy programs are one technique. They aren't going to crack RSA they'll use some other technique or some flaw in the process used. Software companies can't spend time doing security audits, they have to release yesterday since the 'technology' in the game is dating fast...

    Netrek also runs at about 5 frames per second which isn't really good enough for quake.

    I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.

    Having all the state in the server is ideal. Having the server do all the calculations is ideal. The clients can of course can try to run the simulation in lock-step with the server (which is hard without full knowledge) in order to provide a better player experience. Just like quake style game clients try and predict what will happen so that a delayed packet doesn't just cause them to freeze up. Making it run fast enough is the problem. Scaling to lots of players is an even bigger problem. Crossfire is doing things reasonably well though...

    It still doesn't solve clients that help the player by auto-aiming and such. They don't need any extra information they just give the player better reaction times and mouse skills... These can be written as proxies which are hard to stop, though you can make life really hard for them... However, given enough late night hacking a few gurus could probably write a program that scans the video frame buffer (or just directly accesses the memory of the game process) and automatically shoots things it classifies as enemies. It can automatically shoot things by actually being the mouse driver and sending the correct mouse movements...

    Of course programers should actually like the ability to write helper-bots - they turn the game into a pretty graphics version of corewars. That should give programmers the edge...

    Believe it or not I haven't started RANTING yet... here we go...

    <RANT>

    Given time (and that game producers/authors wake up and see a possible revenue stream) you'll just choose a server that you know doesn't have cheats on it (or one that does, if that's the type of game you like).

    Maybe the game defaults to use a public server, but you can send your credit card number to Blizzard/ID/whoever and be given access to the subscribers only server which is actively monitored for cheaters.

    Or an seperate individual or company will see some money (or just not like cheating) and run their own server which costs money (or just requires some form of idenitification) and has very specific anti-cheating rules that result in cheaters getting banned.

    The problem will be solved socially if it is solved at all. Technology isn't going to do it, and I don't think it's worth trying to solve it that way. Yes only give the clients the information they should have, it makes for better software design if nothing else. Yes use crypto to make cheating harder, it makes for cooler software if nothing else. Yes make it hard for cheats - but not if that means at the expense of programmer time that could have been spent fixing a damn bug, and not at the expense of windows software style piracy protection - must plug the fscking CD drive into the laptop in order to play the damn game (or download a small patch - gee which do I do?).

    Solve social problems sociably. Cheating is classified as an anti-social activity by most (unless you're doing something where cheating is the point) so use social measures to reduce it or at least move it away from some places.
    </RANT>
  • Hardware hacks?

    That would be my approach to the games if I wanted to cheat. Overclocked keyboard anyone? ;-)
    --
    Leonid S. Knyshov

  • No Way (Score:5)

    by NMerriam ( 15122 ) <NMerriam@artboy.org> on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:31PM (#146401) Homepage
    Cheaters sometimes win?

    Yeah, right, next you'll tell me that winners sometimes use drugs.

    Sorry, michael, but we had a lot of school assemblies about this and you're just wrong.

    ---------------------------------------------
  • Have you seen the moderation system at that site, what's it called?... oh, yeah, Slashdot?
  • I'll just cat all those 1024 byte packets together and PGP the whole thing. The increase in size would be insignificant.

    Of course, you probably think that one needs to PGP each packet individually, and stick the key name and PGP signature on each packet. Only a fucking idiot game developer would do that. The only reason not to encrypt game packets is processing time, not bandwidth.
  • Hence the adage: If you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'

    The variant I've heard for that in basketball is: If you never commit a foul, you aren't playing tight enough defense.

    --

  • For single player, I don't call it cheating. You aren't 'cheating' anyone.. you purchased a game, you know how it works, and you found a way to do something else with it that pleases you. You aren't defrauding anyone.

    Cheating on multiplayer... there are, and probably always will be, two equal and opposite viewpoints here. Those that say the game should be used as intended for multiplayer, and those who feel that client-server design is such that, if you can warp your client to display information your computer already knows about in a different way, then you should do so.
    Examples: Mile high flags in Tribes, see-thru walls in Quake.... The now-defunct 'gambling' cheat in diablo 2..

    And that'll never change.
  • It's up to developers, period.
    Look at Nettrek.
    For the unnitiated, a modified nettrek client is called a 'borg'. Main borg features are: automatic trajectory calculation&firing, automatic missile detonation if we can't escape it, etc. Due to the simple vector math in Nettrek, it's easy for a client to be modified to give you a huge advantage in lining up your shots/picking the absolute best time to do certain things.
    How do the developers get around this? Simple. Signed code. Their software is set to return certain checksums to the server; the server can identify individual clients and allow/disallow them (so if someone writes a cool new client in Java, they can have it accepted at servers, it's up to the server operator)

    SOme servers permit *any* client to connect, in which case the game changes to a contest of who has the best borg...

    The point is, what about plain old code signing?
  • Now PGP 27 1MB files and tell us how much total added space there is?

    Now PGP 2700 1kB files.

  • Actually the percentage of couples that both read the bible daily and get divorced is less than one tenth of one percent.

    Otherwise, nice post.
  • Sorry for my wording, I was rushed and did not spell it out in utterly unambiguous terminology.

    The statistics show that couples that read the bible daily together have a divorce rate of 0.1 percent. That's one couple per thousand couples that read the bible daily get divorced. Remarkably different from any other group I have ever seen split out in the statistics.

    And no, this does not happen because we "believe we'll burn in hell for eternity" if we get divorced. I fear that some intolerant individuals have misrepresented Christianity to many of you. As a Christian, even if I got divorced, if I repented of that sin, I would be forgiven in eternity. I would still certainly suffer the consequences of the sin (feeling miserable, alimony, whatever). But I would be forgiven.

    Chrisitianity is about love - read 1 Corinthians 13, or Matthew 5-7, you'll see what we are called to. Are we all capable of that? No, we're sinful humans, and not capable of that perfection - but we should try to get as close as possible. Unfortunately many people who are labelled as Christians and are not (Oral Roberts, etc. etc.) don't follow those goals and tarnish the reality.
  • To use a bad example: Hitler was one of the most efficient and charismatic leaders of the past century. Nazi Germany had probably the best-run (ie most efficient at carrying out stated goals) government in a very long time. Should we emulate them? Admire them?

    In the very short term it was efficiently run. In the longer term, it failed utterly.

    Technical excellence requires winning in the short term and the long term.
    bukra fil mish mish
    -
    Monitor the Web, or Track your site!

  • Well, I guess my point was that the system was dependent upon getting involved in war, which limited its long-term viability.
    bukra fil mish mish
    -
    Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
  • Cheating is inevitable, game designers/operators can waste a lot of time fighting it but they have as much chance of winning as the government does in the drug war.

    So here's how to deal with it...
    Limit accounts to one per person (handled via credit card, etc.) and Rank players depending on their record. So Bob signs up for the latest game armed with aim-bots, automappers, transparent-wall hacks, etc. and starts at level one. He battles other L1s and wipes the floor with them (as should be expected). He gets bumped to L2 automatically by the system, this continues for awhile and he soon finds himself ranked at L15 and battling only other people using similar cheats and therefore battling on a level playing field.

    If someone is consistently losing they would drop down a level. The system could even handle asking someone who is doing well but not dominating if they want to go up a level where they will face stronger challenges.

  • The problem is that this allows a company to control the use of the product after you've purchased it. Should Origin/EA be able to delete someone's account in Ultima Online because that person has a web page critical of the game or company?

    Once we start a trend where companies can (and do) permanently disable people's ability to use a product after they sell it, where's it to stop?

    There's a *much* better solution. Just don't write games with things like Railguns. There's a reason every cheater in Q2/Q3 runs for the railgun, it's an instant-hit weapon doing a huge ammount of damage. Any bot can do that, what good is that?

    Bots can't properly anticipate complex movement (ie, not straight line) and put a rocket where someone is going. Bots can't lob grenades into an area you want to go. All bots can do it the simple, trivial things

    If games were based more on complex skills like pathfinding through maps, using non-instant weapons, etc. then an aimbot wouldn't do anyone much good.

    A client/server architecture like Q3 has stops most of the simple run-fast cheats, or god-mode stuff.

    The measure of a good game would be one that nobody could write a client-side bot for (ie, one that had to operate on the same info that the server sends to the player.) If nobody can write a bot to do it well, nobody will use those bots.

    But, first we need to get rid of railguns and sniper rifles, those are perfect for bots.
  • I woudln't say human players can always detect cheaters. If some guy nails me in the head ten times in a row with a sniper rifle, he might be cheating - but he might also just be damn good with a sniper rifle!

    I don't really mind things like Aimbots and such. I do hate some cheats like speed modfiers, but those kinds of things seem to get weeded out quickly - personally I'd rather face some danger from cheating than punish really skilled players.

    Really there's almost no way to stop cheating until online games stream video directly to the monitor from a central server - and even then there will probably be some ways to bend the rules!!

  • Remapping the wall-tiles in a DOOM-style shoot-em-up game to a transparent image is a local event that nevertheless can change the odds dramatically in a networked game.

    It's true, text based MUD's don't have this problem. Are you suggesting we all forsake the 3D-OGL games we've become so used to?


    mefus
    --
    um, er... eh -- *click*
  • What about a game that incorperates this drive? Something that's playable as-is, but allows for this type of thing, that incorperates it into the game?
    Is there something out there like this?

  • I do not find it acceptable at all that others determine for me what I can an cannot do within the boundaries of my legally earned rights.

    this is pretty funny. what country are you from. see, here in the us we have a constitution that contains a list of our rights. most of these rights were earned years ago and the people here today now think they have the "right" to everything. i know it sounds kinda silly...

    we probably have people who can read "the right to play online games where noone cheats" into the constitution. sadly enough it doesnt mention such a thing. i'm glad to see the founding fathers incorporated online gaming into your legally earned rights. it probably also includes such important things as: watching jerry springer and mtv, shopping with convinence at wal-mart, cheap gass for huge tank-like cars, and lest we forget the right to high speed internet access for everyone. you must indeed live in a wonderful country.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that

  • ... (Score:2)

    by gimpboy ( 34912 )
    there are things that you prefer, and there are things that you have the right to. the former is ever growing and the latter is ever shrinking. these two things can sometimes overlap, but not as often as people would like.

    it is true that i enjoy posting on slashdot, but i dont confuse that with a right. if malda decided today that i could no longer post, canceled my account, banned my ip and kept an eye out for me as i tried to create new accounts via a proxy server this action would be fine. it is taco's perogative to ban me from slashdot.

    at this point i would have to find another outlet where i discuss stuff. i dont think i was really missing the point. people all over slashdot and across the united states think they have these "rights" and it's really annoying. they do however have the right to say they have the aforementioned "rights" and i suppose i'll support their right to say that. i will also refute what they say when i think they are incorrect.

    it's strange how people get used to something and then one day it's gone. but hey it was my right; you cannot take that away from me. i personally look forward to the day all cell phones stop working. hell we are so dependent on land lines that to loose those would be an impressive sight to see.

    back on topic :) i think the game issue comes down to responsability on the part of the gaming company. they need to be willing to put their foot down when necessary and move swiftly to correct problems when they are found. you are a consumer and can speak with your money. when you are dissatisfied with a product speak out, mail the company, make a thisonlinegamesucks.com website, organize a protest, march on silicon valley, etc. use the rights you do have to achieve what you desire.

    use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
  • Maybe the next generation games have trusted clients supplied with 'm (such as USB dongles w/ microcontrollers or so).
  • You, my dear Sir, are clueless on the field of Information & cryptography. I won't even begin to start where you are wrong. Lets translate this in 'carlanguage':

    "Not only do you have to have a spare tire for each seat & what-not, but closed cars are bigger, so that adds to traffic as well".

    You see, that doesn't make sense :-)
  • I think it is a kind of mental laziness on the part of the cheater.

    Playing the kind of metagame you describe requires that you are prepared to inconsistently violate the internal logic of the game.

    The key word is "inconsistently". Because the received rewards are, as you say, "in the game" while the methods used to get those rewards are outside the game.

    Which is more mentally lazy:

    1) Voluntarily and actively suspending your disbelief for the duration of a movie in an attempt to apprehend the work as the director intended, or

    2) Continually noting (or worse, commenting on) aspects of the movie (e.g., casting, technical) that could be defined as "outside the context"?

    I do acknowledge your point, which is that there can be no comparison between cheaters and non-cheaters since they are playing different games, but I don't agree that the non-cheaters are necessarily more mentally lazy.
  • Piffle. An efficient symmetric cipher does not require any additional information. Its a transformation, not an expansion. There is no need for checksums or repeated bits unless the underlying layer needs it anyway.

    An asymmetric cipher is a different beast althogther and may explain why you made the comment, however asymmetric ciphers should only be used in the initial (general non-performance related) exchange in order to set up a symmetric key.

    The CPU cost for decent encryption at ADSL and modem speeds, even at maximum link rate, is not particularly large, and the latency introduced is almost non-existant (we are, of course, assuming a good implementation of a good algorithm here, VOIP stream ciphers and block ciphers such as Blowfish are particularly effective).

    Unfortunately, the most important point here is missed. No matter how well secured the link is, the gamer has complete control over one end of it. Therefore, with a bit of hunting around in memory, they have the encryption key, and, in fact, access to all the buffers the information is being decrypted into, and all the internal game structures.

    You just can't trust the client.
  • Piffle. An efficient symmetric cipher does not require any additional information. Its a transformation, not an expansion. There is no need for checksums or repeated bits unless the underlying layer needs it anyway.

    An asymmetric cipher is a different beast althogther and may explain why you made the comment, however asymmetric ciphers should only be used in the initial (general non-performance related) exchange in order to set up a symmetric key.

    The CPU cost for decent encryption at ADSL and modem speeds, even at maximum link rate, is not particularly large, and the latency introduced is almost non-existant (we are, of course, assuming a good implementation of a good algorithm here, VOIP stream ciphers and block ciphers such as Blowfish are particularly effective).

    Unfortunately, the most important point here is missed. No matter how well secured the link is, the gamer has complete control over one end of it. Therefore, with a bit of hunting around in memory, they have the encryption key, and, in fact, access to all the buffers the information is being decrypted into, and all the internal game structures.

    You just can't trust the client.
  • One problem with that line of logic. This is not war, this is competition. And competitions have rules. The rules are defined by two entities 1) the creators of the game, and 2) the server admins running the game servers. If an admin out there wants people to use cheats on their server, by all means, go ahead. But I'm betting the vast majority don't.
  • A game where you have to write scripts to have a chance?

    No, you do not need to write scripts, but you do need to adapt to them and you should not really expect to be able to beat the few people wh are better at scripts then you. You need to write scripts to beat the sript writers; You need to understand scripts to beat the people who can read new scripts and understand them; but you only need to be able to pick up some wierd new user inderface feature and start using it to be able to beat your average player (if a script is really good then it will eventually be documented so that you don't even need to know how to read the coade to control it).
  • You may have been joking but your partially correct. You can control cheating by allowing specific cheats. RTS games make a good example:

    People want to write scripts to help them micromanage their units and they want to write cheats to allow them to see the whole board. Ok, fine. This means we should make it very difficult to write cheats to see the whole board and we should build a scripting langague into the game. Clearly, the guy with the better scripts will kick the shit out of the guy with crappy scripts, so we set up the game to share the scripts. Now, we have eliminated one form of cheating (scripts) by making them legal and fair, but we still have two types of cheating: map cheats and tricks to prevent your scripts from being shared. The solution to these two cheats is to make them unprofitable (Remember: these cheats require hacking assembler while scripts are user friendly). Specifically, we will make battle.net delay the distribution of the scripts for a week or month. Now, it will always be more profitable to develope a better bot and train with the good bots you have as opposed to hacking the assembler to cheat.

    Anyway, the moral of the story is that if someone wants to spend the time programming to give themselves an advantage GOOD, but we should force them to eventually share their efforts with the rest of the world.
  • Ok, lets's try your 'Evolution in Action' on another type of game.

    "Dude, pawns can only move foward one space."

    'No way! I'm cheating! Evolution in action! Check out this new move I made up.'

    "You can't bring your pieces back onto the board!"

    'I've given my bishop the "Raise the dead skill."

    "What was THAT move?"

    'Oh, I gave my King and Uzi so he can kill your pieces without moving. Since I haven't moved, he has now killed off all your pieces. Checkmate! I am the chess master! None can beat me and my new modified rules!'
  • You've just proven the other guy's point. Statistics ARE meaningful, you just have to be careful about the meaning that you draw from them. In Science nothing is "absolute" a scientist cannot really be 100% sure that gravity will work the next time you drop a pencil, but it's never gone wrong before, and so they can say with ALMOST total certainty.

    Now on race and crime or race and intelligence. Those are meaningful statistics, but to really get at what they mean, they have to be compared to other meaningful statistics: such as race and economics, race and education, and those factors again on crime and intelligence. Heres another meaningful statistic: first generation African immigrants in america have a lower crime rate and greater level of income than whites on average. Yes there is a correlation between race and position in society, but the suggestion that the blame lies in a problem with the race rather than a problem with the society has little backing in fact.

    So yes, if you excercise it will reduce the PROBABILITY that you will have heart trouble. They can't say "Eat right and excercise and you'll never have a heart attack" because that would be blatantly untrue, but saying that it "may" prevent heart disease covers the fact that yes, on average, healthy people have a much lower rate of heart disease, but some people are still just unlucky and we can't assure you of anything 100%

    Sorry to be so offtopic, but I had time to kill and this guy was letting his mouth run where he shouldn't have.

  • This is a good idea, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes modifying the "shared" art can be cheating. Case in point. In the online game Tribes (the first one, not the second), a cheat appeared that let you know where the flag carrier was anywhere on the map. What'd they do? They changed the flag artwork to make the flag 6 stories tall...
  • > Provide the players with *clients* that only display the game and send player movement/control data.

    The problem is latency. In an ideal world the server would tell the client "exactly" what it can or can't see.

    However, today's network just don't have a low enough ping to do this. Quake used client-side prediction for movement as ANY form of lag provides a discontinious play experience.

    Actually Ultima Online does do the above. You can't "use" the next item, until the server acknowledges the first item is valid.
    i.e. open container, drink potion

    You're also forgotting, that ALL program's have bugs. You can have the best hack-proof client, but if the server logic (bug) is incorrect people can still cheat.
  • The fascinating thing is that everything you've said also applies to /. and its comments.
  • The way I figure it, your average cheater is going to get bored pretty fast. Running around with wallhack or an aimbot can't be much fun after a while.

    What gets me is bitching about cheating. I was playing Counterstrike a couple days ago and this one guy, who I'm pretty sure wasn't cheating but was doing very well, was getting constantly abused for being a cheater. It went on and on whine, bitch, complain, vote, fail. It really takes away from my enjoyment of them game.

    I'd like to see a game company come up with a way to stop cheating in online games, I'm just sick of hearing about it.

  • Your "mob rule" example, while a good one, works only on smaller scales. If Bob and Jim have a nigh-infinite number of other pickup basketball games to choose from where no one knows their reputations, there's much less incentive to act in a nonselfish way. Get banned from one Quake server and there are still ten thousand more left to play on.

    Of course, part of the reason people play games like street basketball isn't just to win at any cost or rack up their personal statistics, it's to be part of a little community, with all the social benefits & obligations that entails. There don't seem to be many comparable online gaming "neighborhoods" based on anything but wanting to play the same game. Within the set of, say, Quake CTF players, there's nothing to delineate games for casual players blowing off steam after work from those for unpleasant autotaunting 14 year olds who play for six hours a day.

    I don't know how to fix this; server descriptions don't keep anyone from joining a newbie server and being an asshole, and password-protected servers will keep out too much traffic you might otherwise welcome. More hands-on administrator involvement would be expensive for centralized-server games, and people running their own game servers don't usually seem to care what goes on when they're not playing.

  • I used to get accused of cheating a lot in Quake. I had 128k ISDN at a time when most other people hat 28.8k modems. It did represent an advantage, and sometimes a big one, but was it cheating?
  • That game industry makes more per year than the Movie industry does. Games drive new hardware purchases more than any other segment of the market (Pr0n might come in close for selling new monitors, video cards and keyboard replacements.) In short, if the game industry tanks because a bunch of prepubescent dweebies are cheating, we're fucked.
  • It's tough though...a lot of bots don't "cheat" by breaking the rules of the game...they just play really, really well. So in the millions of people that play, some of them, some of the time, approach that skill level. It sure might /look/ like cheating, but it could be all skill.
  • This totally ignores a large part of cheating, which is that software on the client can control the play even if the gameplay is handled on the server. Clients can still run automappers, autoaimers, and so on.

    I used to play MUDs, and used a Procomm's key recorder to record movement keystrokes to go from the pub to the orc's den or whatever. It saved monotonous typing. But it also gave me a minor advantage: on my blazing 9600 bps connection, I'd zip past other players on my way there. It's a slippery slope between that and writing software to play the monotonous aspects of the game for you, attacking monsters, monitoring health, selling loot, and so on. MUDs did nothing to prevent this sort of client-side automation.

    Those sorts of problems extend to a wide range of games, from MUDs to 3D shooters to word games, board games, card games, and so on.
  • . To use a bad example: Hitler

    BUZZZ.

    You have Godwin'd. Please try again...


  • If they're clever, it would be possible to patch CDs. Though you probably can't update the physical media, downloading a few kilobytes of update each time you sign on wouldn't be too unreasonable. This could be cached on memory cards, maybe, and loaded on boot (similar to Intel's microcode updates).

    Of course, making the system easily modifyable like this might make cheating that much easier. ;)
  • It's the only way.

    Some people just delight in screwing things up for everyone else. Maybe they feel vengeful against all the total strangers to them; maybe it gives them some stupid sense of power, to annoy so many at once; maybe they just want some attention. But they are out there and they will do it.

    I played Unreal Tournament one night, and some of the players on the other team took our flag. But instead of taking it to their home base, they hid it somewhere, and sat around text-chatting to each other. When players on my team asked them to just take the #%!$ flag and have done with it, they denied having the flag, but eventually said "Oh, THIS flag?" Very funny... not. All I could do was find another server. I don't even think they were actually cheating, but they were definitely screwing around with us rather than playing the game.

    I played CounterStrike one night, and some guy had an invisibility hack. It was a bomb-planting level and he was a Terrorist. What happened was that the CTs would kill all the Ts but the invisible one, and then the level would just drag on and on until time ran out. This guy would run right next to me, making a clicking sound (I'm pretty sure he was toggling his flashlight off and on; it sounded like the flashlight click). I tried spraying bullets around, but I don't think he was "there" to hit. Everyone, including all the other Ts, wanted to vote him off but we couldn't make it work.

    I've played CS on servers where Friendly Fire was enabled, and guys would run around killing their teammates. But that's not the worst. Some guys would shoot you just enough times to really hurt you, but not kill you, so the server would never kick them off. If you killed them, the server would kick you off. You couldn't win, and we couldn't get voting off to work.

    I have other examples, but in all cases just being able to vote the moron off the server would keep the cheater from ruining the game for everyone else.

    More subtle cheats, like ones to see through walls, are impossible to prove; but the truly obnoxious and outrageous stuff would be shut down cold. And that's a good thing.

    steveha

  • The only significant thing about this article is that it's in the Red Herring, the investment magazine. Slashdot has covered this before [slashdot.org], and the previous coverage was better. Go there. Also see this list. [anticheater.com]
  • That's a very interesting idea. I would say that one client per person would be better and to have a trial system for people's keys to be revoked. People file complaints to a central server which keeps tracks of actual game servers, and a shit list. Complaints contain information such as time of cheating, what happened, and maybe even a server log. If 3 or so people file a complaint against one key, then they go 'on trial' make their case by filling out a form, and the people hired to stop cheating evaluate the forms after being properly educated about that game itself, and the possible causes for false alarms etc. When someone starts a server, they can choose not to allow shit listed people, and authenticate every person through the use of their keys and a central server. I think it just might work, although I just thought of it, so I am sure their are some kinks.
  • in war, improvements are often made to weapons, on the fly, to increase their lethality.

    ditto for armour and maneuverability.

    who is to say that the hackers aren't doing the "right thing"? they are using their skills to win a battle...sounds human enough to me.


    Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.

  • In almost all sports, a certain amount of cheating is part of a winning strategy.

    At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul.

    Not exactly when, but maybe about half of when. If the average penalty for cheating doesn't wipe out the advantage gained from it, then you do it. After all, your first loyalty must be to your team.

    In specific cases, this can be a no-brainer. If you're covering a receiver downfield and he's about to catch a pass for a touchdown, you tackle him. The penalty for pass interference sure beats giving up six points.

    So, is that cheating? If you disguise it so the ref might not call it and you get away without a penalty, is that cheating? Or is that just a lucky break?

    In ice hockey, this is most evident. Penalties are called only if the infraction exceeds a certain severity. Well, certain is perhaps a poorly chosen word, 'cuz it varies wildly from game to game, ref to ref, and even minute to minute. As a player, you test this threshold until you see how bad you have to be before you get called. Hence the adage: If you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'

    My solution to on-line game cheating? Simple -- if you get caught, you have to give back all your prize money.

    --jzap

  • Re:RedHerring author on crack (Score:4)

    by Lozzer ( 141543 ) on Sunday June 17, 2001 @12:16PM (#146483) Journal

    So, instead of doing this: prepare data -> encrypt -> compress, do this instead: prepare data -> compress -> encrypt.

    Any reason why that wouldn't work?


  • Do you have any stats on the percentage of bible-reading couples who are miserable together anyway?
  • In order for your reply to be convincing to me, I'd have to agree with the unstated premise that divorce is relevant in discussions of morality.

    Well you can't prove morality by logic alone, but you can prove that divorce is bad if by bad you mean harmful to children.

    Check out the 1993 article on the subject in Atlantic Monthly [theatlantic.com]. Always a good source...

  • I just finished a game where 10% of the players had aimbots. Yeah, it was kind of shitty, but the point is, these 5kr1pt kiddies or whatever were killed, on average, the same amount of times as the rest of the people there. The majority of the cheaters are either children or incompetent assholes who couldn't win a game against a bunch of bots.

    One advantage you have against these losers is their equally pathetic knowledge of computer security. I love windows security, these lamers don't even know that they need a firewall. It's kind of cute, can also be amusing.

    I don't know what to say, check this link out.
    It's an ebay auction for an aimbot, look at final price and the COUNTER!!! It show how pathetic these people are.

    http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIte m& item=1606604206

    Though I still hate you fuckers with T3's and 30ish ping - thats almost as bad as cheating ;)

    The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit:
    Pissing off coffee drinking /.'ers since Spring 2001.

  • I'm afraid I've got a newsflash for everyone: Life isn't fair.

    As an avid online game player I understand the frustration that can be caused by a cheater. After a humiliating defeat there are the lingering doubts, was your opponent was simply more skillful than you or cheating their asses off.

    However, this article almost seems as if they think a solution to cheating must be found or online gaming will suffer drastically. Since online gaming has done nothing but grow and grow I seriously doubt it.

    While cheating is an annoying side affect of online gaming, it's part of life in general. People have a natural tendency to not want to work hard to achieve top results. (Look at Microsoft, why build a better product when FUD is so much cheaper?)

  • Two basic rules to the security model when building an online game:

    1) A clever, capable player will know everything his computer knows about the state of the game.
    Corollary: Expect secrets told to the player's computer to be overheard by the player. Especially secrets like the position of objects not in the player's line of sight.

    2) A clever, capable player will control everything about the state of the game that his computer controls about the state of the game.
    Corollary: Borg assists have been around since nettrek in the early '90s and will surely be around 10 years from now. Design a game that works as well with as without them, and you won't have a cheating problem.

    Game companies who "cheated" on these two rules in their development phase now have a cheating problem. Isn't that circular?
  • try PGP'ing 27,000,000 1024 byte packets and see how big that grows. Then figure out how much CPU time is required to decrpyt all of those packets in real time.

    You'll figure out who really is the fucking idiot.
  • Sounds great. I'd love to pay $250 for every game I want to play to accomodate the encryption co-processor.
  • should be drawn at multiplayer games. I personally could care less if you want to cheat on your own computer in your own time. In fact, if you wish to cheat with other cheaters that is your choice too. But once your cheats start screwing with me, then I get pissed off. The only true way to make a game 'un-hackable' is to make the client untrusted, as Diablo II does. Even D2 has been hacked, but it has by far had the fewest online cheats. Blizzard went ahead and left an open battle.net where the client would be trusted (and therefor are cheats), and there is also realms where EVERYthing is stored on the servers, and every time you click a button that click is sent to the servers and the servers tell you "ok, you swang". This puts a tremendous load on the servers (anybody who has seen Diablo II when it first came out saw the problems they had), and im sure it costs a tremendous amount of money. The only other approach to cheating that sort-of works is releasing new patches every couple months that re-work the protocol so cheats have to be re-writen, and hardly solves the problem.

    Programs like PunkBuster are just as stupid (In case you dont know, that is a program to detect cheats for games). People will just hack that too to disable it. No matter what you try the cheaters will always find a way.

    Consoles happen to be lucky, they will have the fewest number of cheaters because its simpley harder to cheat on. But once you start throwing consoles in the same arena as computers (xbox PC hardware) you are asking to get screwed over. The line between consoles and PC hardware seems to be getting finer and finer.

    Anyway, just my lame 2 cents.

  • Cheat On! (Score:5)

    by 2MuchC0ffeeMan ( 201987 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:35PM (#146509) Homepage
    see, the thing to do is enable cheats for everyone, and see who's the best cheater.

    i wonder how long they will get sick of having god mode on for everyone...

    i can see it now... 'look, i can make you jump with my rocket launcher, hahahahaah' ... i give it 5 minutes.

  • Solution to Cheating (Score:4)

    by joepits ( 224553 ) <phatso84 AT yahoo DOT com> on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:52PM (#146522)

    I've always wondered why it is so difficult to vote against a player in Counter-Strike. You have to open the console and type listplayers to find the cheater's number, then type vote #### whatever number he is. A lot of people are too lazy to do this or don't know how. Some don't even know how to get to the console.

    Game programmers should aknowledge the fact that there are cheaters and implement an easier way for other players to vote him off the server.

  • uhm...encryption -does- require more bandwidth in order to be effective.

    Any decent encryption uses checksums, repeated bits, and a ton of other info in order to make sure the info being sent is valid, and hence requires more bandwidth. Sometimes, they can use compression to make it smaller, but not by much.

    If you don't believe me, take any file, and run a decent encryption algorithm on it, and watch the file size change. It also slows the game down due to additional clock cycles being spent on encrypting the data...
  • My best friends always does this to himself. He starts a one player game, usually a role playing game. Then he either gets the hint book, or finds a crack or cheat, and then makes the game no fun for himself and doesn't finish the game. I always yell at him for it to. One time he wanted to see how many dragons in a row he could take in BG II... oh well his loss....
  • So cheating in multiplayer computer games is the new Scourge of the Internet? Do you have any IDEA how pompous and stupid that is? The only people more ridiculous than people who need to cheat to "win" at a computer game, which is nothing more than manipulating bits on a computer in a predictable way, are the people who think those clowns are anything other than amusing.

    I know what I speak of. For years, Diablo on Battle.net has been rife with cheaters. In fact, approximately 95% of people in public games of Diablo are cheating (I shit you not, and that's a kind estimate; it's more like 99%!). What sort of people are these? These aren't "dangerous hackers". They're stupid 13 year old punks who think that turning on godmode in a trainer someone else wrote means that they're "better" than other players. All it is, is adolescents showing their immaturity. To say cheating at computer games is a terrible problem is massively overrating the importance of it.

    -Kasreyn
  • This is the solution. And it isn't as hard as you think at least it isn't in Unreal Tournament. If you create a demo of yourself playing using a cheat, only people who also have that cheat installed are able to run it.

    I help run a forum for gamers at www.ozforces.com and we recently did a test. We created a demo using a game that had a cheat installed. We then posted the demo on the forum and asked people to comment on the demo. Most people came back and said they couldn't run it, but there were a few people who could. When we informed people that you would only be able to run it if you had the cheat installed we got flamed badly, but it was an interesting experiment.

    This experiment didn't actually prove that they were cheaters. It only proved that they had the cheat installed. Unfortunatly it is starting to get to the point where if you find people who have it installed you have to assume they are cheats and disallow them from the server.
  • Anonymity increases the probability of people cheating. Even if they get caught there are essentially no consequences, just pick another server or nickname reconnect and carry on cheating. I also think the complexity of a game contributes to its signal to noise ratio in the sense that an rpg may be less likely to have the ratio of cheaters than an fps like half life. This may be due to simply having more players or the dynamic of the game is one that doesn't necessitate a whole lot of thinking compared to say an rpg. I think what I'm getting to is that reflex based games might be more prone to having people develop cheats for.

  • Only STUPID cheaters (Score:5)

    by Omerna ( 241397 ) <clbrewer@gmail.com> on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:37PM (#146535) Homepage
    sometimes win. Smart cheaters always win.
    --------------------------------------

  • PunkBuster (Score:5)

    by Omerna ( 241397 ) <clbrewer@gmail.com> on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:49PM (#146536) Homepage
    Available at http://www.PunkBuster.com (to lazy for html) stops many cheats for FPS games. I don't have the full list, but I use it for Counter-Strike. It's free, downloads quickly, and is very effective. (ie: any cheat that's in the program is totally blocked). It does require both the server and client to be running it for it to work :( If it ain't on the server if I have it running it doesn't matter at all.
    --------------------------------------
  • Grrrr. We know life isn't fair. What's wrong with wanting to do something about it?
  • There is a damn spoon. And no freakin macaroon is gonna change that.
  • punkbuster does not work
    reasons:
    1. not intended to yet
    the current focus is getting it stable, not yet stopping all cheats

    2. not wide use
    almost 0 servers run this in required mode

    3. lack of updates
    recently(read about it at crossfire.counter-strike.net) a anti-cheats CS page posted cheats after waiting I believe 3 weeks for valve and punkbusters response(he emailed them first) and getting none.

    its a good system, but would be much better if valve implemented something similar themselves built in and gave a shit about their customers past getting paid
  • Blocking ips doesn't work. Cheaters can often easily find new ips to login from. Also blocking ips of cheaters means you will be blocking ips of non-cheaters too.
  • that's actually an excellent idea! cheaters won't feal superior to non-cheaters anymore (in a world of cheaters everyone suddenly becomes a non-cheater).
    that's like when someone is bugging you to get your attention. he will stop when you ignore him.

    i hope someone has the balls to enforce cheating in their next game at least for one day (like an easter egg that gets activated on christmas or whenever). that'd be lot of fun.

  • Of Course They Do... (Score:4)

    by increduloidx ( 409461 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @05:33PM (#146558) Homepage
    I mean, how much do you think you'd get for a fenced BFG 10K?


    the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
  • I stopped playing games (fps, rts) altogether because of cheaters... I have a maphack for SCv1.08 already. It's been out for like 3 weeks... I can't stand to play and lose because I haven't been using the right cheats, and I'd rather know it was skill... I know others, who have genuine (and amazing) skill, but gave up because of lousy cheaters. I wish there was some way we could regulate it... I like in TFC and CS, how if you have your own server, you don't have to worry about cheaters. But I digress. Wait, no, I had no point from which to digress.
  • Here's an idea... If a company (e.g. Demon or whoever) are running a few servers, they could set them up as a league. You join the newbie server, and if you're way outclassing them, you get promoted to the next server. If you're playing bad on one of the 'better' servers, you get relegated. That way, you get to play against others with the same ability, which is usually more enjoyable. Also, cheaters will end up in amongst experienced players, who are more likely to kick them than on newbie servers.

    Any suggestions?
    Andy
  • Tribes 2 has serial numbers and unique callsigns
  • the referee system introduced in the Q3 mod Urban Terror. The server admins usually don't give a shit about the game, but they can give referee rights to anyone, who have only access to limited number of commands like voting, kicking, etc.
  • Cheating in single player games isn't the threat here. With the possible exception of developing an addiction to workarounds and codes that could carry into online play, cheating by yourself is no threat to anyone but yourself.

    I've heard a number of game designers whine about people using codes to diminish the challenge and subsequently the reward of games they put together. It seems silly. Take Time Splitters for the PS2. Free Radical didn't see fit to put any codes into the game in order to skip through the built in reward system. Players must beat sections of the game to reveal hidden characters, levels, and play modes. While I don't mind playing through the game for these extras, I've had a number of friends grow tired of the game--mostly thanks to the limited number of playable multiplayer maps at the outset--because they didn't have the patience. Free Radical shot themselves in the foot in my eyes because the lazy people in the market passed on the game after renting it or playing it at a friend's house and seeing how much work they would have to do to get anything cool.

    What game designers have to realize is that there exist two crowds: those who are happy to have a reward for all their hard work and those who want all the fun stuff now. Both of them spend money on games and both crowds must be appeased. And please spare me the argument that the presence of codes encourages everyone to cheat and cheapens the morals of good players. My friend Eric and I are both from the former crowd of gameplayers and we often have two saved games on our memory cards: one with our hard-won games and one with all the cheats enabled that we whip out for the party.

  • Solution is simpler clients, smarter servers (Score:5)

    by tyoud1 ( 460688 ) on Saturday June 16, 2001 @06:25PM (#146587)
    Netrek [netrek.org] does not have a large cheating problem. The true state of the game is known only to the server. Clients are given only the information that they would know. Clients use RSA keys to authenticate to the server. If a client is cracked, the client key can be quickly revoked and new clients distributed. If the clients are kept simple, several clients and keys could be distributed on a CD. Most clients would be under 100k. The art and graphics could be shared by all clients and take up the bulk of the CD. If anyone cracks one of the clients, its key can be revoked and there is no need to re-release a new CD. More clients, all randomly linked and encrypted on the disk, can be right there. The main thing is that the server only allows blessed clients to play, and only shares with any connection what it could know.

    I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.

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