Cheating in Multiplayer Games 323
millertime3250 writes "Tom's Hardware is running an interesting article on cheating in multiplayer games. In an issues that has gained increasing notority, it is a great read for those Counter-Strike players and others alike. It defines the different types of cheats like Client Hook, OpenGL Hack, and Hard-Coded Hack, and cheating's effect on gaming."
Kick em out... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Kick em out... (Score:5, Interesting)
However I think the problem isn't so much at LAN games where you have actual physical people who'll clearly see if you're turning on auto-aim or wallhacks, but rather online games where every person is isolated, and the only monitoring is the realism of their gameplay. Some guys, like Urban Terror [urbanterror.net], allow some players to spectate, or to spectate after they die, and this can allow one to look over someone's shoulder and determine, to a pretty good accuracy, if their play seems skillfully good, or unreasonable. Wallhackers, for instance, are generally brutally obvious.
Most online games I've played have been ruined by hackers. From Diablo, to Quake 3, to America's Army. Cheaters in online games are not only morally reprehensible, they seem to have a very weak desire to be challenged, and hence can often be considered the weak of the herd.
Re:Kick em out... (Score:4, Interesting)
That is very useful, unfortunately this mechanism can also be used to the advantage of cheaters. If dead players spectating can talk to their team, they can observe enemy players' movements and report them to still living teammates. Some servers disable dead spectating for this reason.
Most online games I've played have been ruined by hackers
Yeah, I agree totally. They've really poisoned the well; it's such a common phenomenon that pretty much every game I've played in online in the last year or two there has been at least one accusation of cheating. Anyone who plays well or just has a good day becomes suspect, and it really sucks playing online in that sort of atmosphere.
The Internet has been a really depressing revelation on what people can be when they think no one's watching. From cheaters in online gaming to virus writers and crackers, all that anonymity hasn't yielded a very flattering portrait of people. And will in turn produce an internet in the future that is much more intensively monitored and controlled.
Re:Kick em out... (Score:3, Insightful)
He's a good kid, but assholes have convinced him and others that the only way to succeed is to cheat. They have no self-respect o
Re:Kick em out... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, they don't take it seriously enough that they covertly and as secretly as possible spend hours every night attempting to earn the respect for their gameplay...clearly they're, err, "mocking" (at least after they're caught). You must be the kid who sent love notes to girls, and when they laughed you away claimed that you were "just joking". The world is all a retrospective laugh to the pathetic.
an on
Re:Kick em out... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that wherever it makes sense, have a handicap rating system that segregates players by ability or peer-rating, or both. That way, if someone chooses to cheat, he will either have to deliberately play badly for a time (no fun), or take some kind of penalty to remain in the same class, or be moved up to the next level.
In the best case, all of the cheaters would wind up playing against each ot
Re:Kick em out... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Kick em out... (Score:2)
That has to be illegal. Unless they made him sign a disclaimer/waiver/whatever beforehand, that is.
Waiver (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe I should let a lawyer look this over before making people s
Re:Kick em out... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Kick em out... (Score:3, Funny)
interesting (Score:5, Funny)
George W. Bush has started submitting articles to
That's an interesting strategery for the upcoming presidential race.
Good election karma (Score:5, Funny)
Re:interesting (Score:3, Funny)
Quake cheats (Score:2, Redundant)
Quake Cheats [catb.org]
Slashdot article on the same [slashdot.org]
TCP to the rescue! (Score:5, Funny)
Counter Strike - Palladium Edition
Re:TCP to the rescue! (Score:5, Insightful)
Believe it or not. This is actually one of the DRM applications I am actually looking forward too. It would make (massively multiplayer) online games so much more entertaining.
This goes to show once again that no technology is inherently good or bad. It is the application of said technology where we must collectively learn to act more responsibly.
Re:TCP to the rescue! (Score:4, Interesting)
Counter-Strike isn't that good. I doubt anything would be.
unlikely (Score:2)
I tried once, and broke the stick of a joystick from trying to move "that much faster". A grove was well worn into the front bumber as well.
It's all about trust (Score:2, Insightful)
Security through obscurity? (Score:2, Insightful)
Damn (Score:5, Funny)
More whiners than cheaters (Score:5, Funny)
Gotta Communicate Re:More whiners than cheaters (Score:5, Funny)
Best way to do it: call incredible shots - "nice shot sChmUcK sNiPP3r! Way to shoot me from behind you in the head while I was jumping from across the map through a crate!"
Nothing new said, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry... (Score:5, Funny)
Alot of cheaters think it's ok (Score:5, Insightful)
because they "aren't that good" or "I still get killed even though I'm cheating!"
I've seen lots of cheating in Americas Army and it was the primary reason I stopped playing that game. It really ruins the game, although it is fun to kill a cheater when you KNOW they are cheating! :)
I think my cheat is ok ;-) (Score:2, Interesting)
Thus, my favourite FPS becomes Team Fortress, Yay HWG.
Seriously though, how much satisfaction can you get out of killing someone with an 'aimbot' and a wallhack. Personally i'm extatic (too lazy to check spelling, prob spelled wrong) when, in Couterstrike i have 1 kills and 12 deaths because hey, with pure luck i just killed the top player on the other team. Top that Mr. Cheat!
cs anti cheats (Score:3, Informative)
you can check it out at www.wnygames.com - it's similar to creeping death imho, but more tailored to the server we play on.
Re:cs anti cheats (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:cs anti cheats (Score:2)
Re:cs anti cheats (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting point and something I myself have been worried about for quite some time. More frightening to me than a cheating person (usually a lamer using someone else's scripts with poor or little understanding of how they actually work), is the eventuality of an admin who decides to use a server maliciously. It seems to me that with the power server admins have over the clients in some games, it would be feasible to use a server to distribute a virus, etc.
Imagine how many unique gamers go to a well-populated game server everyday...
Re:cs anti cheats (Score:3, Insightful)
Permissions are your friend! Whilst not unstoppable, it makes it a damn sight harder for untrusted code to break your system.
Windows has more sophisticated ACLs than *nix, so surely it would be possible to set up a similar game user with no access to the rest of the file system/registry. Why don't game installers do this by default on Windows to proactively try to prevent this type of hack? Why don
Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
Does "better" equipment constitute cheating? Someone with a laggy connection, for example, becomes harder to hit. Someone with a bigger monitor may be able to see movement more clearly than a poor guy with a 15in screen. Is this the digital divide in fragging?
I know touch-screens could provide a REAL advantage but wouldn't be defined as a cheat by the article. Sure, it's not as deliberate as an aimbot but it has to at least come close.
Re:Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:3, Funny)
http://www.pugg.net/lamers.gif [pugg.net]
Minesweeper (Score:3, Informative)
As a recovering minesweeper addict, a habit I picked up before I discovered UNIX during the windows 3.11 days - and no, GNOME mines won't cut it, I'm starting to twitch.
I already have a pretty good best score (76 on expert, though these days I have trouble getting below 100), a touchscreen coupled with a keyboard binding for both mouse buttons, would be a distinctly unfair advantage! Hmm.
Re:Minesweeper (Score:2)
I really don't see how a digitizer on your screen could be used to make headshots. I mean, how does that work? You would have to have the mouse movements calibrated rather precisely, and even then, you would only be able to shoot people in a ring around the center of your screen. That and it would only work with a real touchscreen, not a Wacom style screen.
Of course, I don't really need to know because in the only
Re:Minesweeper (Score:2)
Re:Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:2)
Lemme guess - you've never played classic Quake with a ping of 400 have you? Ok, it may be harder for a LPB to hit my lagged butt, but then, it is near impossible for me to make it around corners/thru doors wihtout getting stuck, stay out of lava/slime, or hit anything at all - since by the time my poor packet with "pull trigger" in it has reached the server, you've already communicated with the server up to 10 times.
No... having lag an
Re:Touch-screens and other equipment (Score:2)
It sucks, but it nearly made playing on a modem worth it. =p
Tech advantages (Score:2, Insightful)
Where's the fun at? (Score:5, Informative)
On one server in particular i suspected three clanners of cheating but the admin told me that it was rock solid. I later returned with an aim-bot/wall-hack and showed him how false his sense of protection actually was. All i did was a quick search on google and downloaded the first thing that popped up.
What really confuses me is why people cheat in the first place. Those who use aimbots are really lame. Where's the fun if you don't even have to click. All you gotta do is face the cross-hairs in the general direction and it does it all for you. Wouldn't you get bored real quickly? I really don't see anything amusing about it all except that you guys like to open your mouth and talk about how 1337 you are when in fact you're nothing but a bunch of little pathetic script kiddies.
What i really hate is the fact that every game is prone to cheaters. Even when playing chess online some people resort to using computer programs to help them out. How lame is it to run gnu chess in the background?
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:5, Insightful)
While that's the usual and stereotypical reason given, I think there's a more obvious reason; to these people, it's really really funny to watch everyone jumping up and down and getting angry screaming "OMG CHEATER" because of their cheating. That's the fun for them - not the winning, but pissing everyone else off.
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:4, Informative)
In fact, one of the best cheats for an FPS is "wallhacking". You install a modified graphics driver that negates the Z value of drawn objects.
That way, distant things appear in front of nearby ones, instead of the reverse. So you can prepare to fire at an enemy before he's even in view. (Especially powerful with indirect weapons, like a rocket launcher with large explosions)
I've seen screenshots of Z-inversion wallhacking in RTCW:ET, but don't remember where they went. Here's one screenshot [planet-rtcw.com] of a related hack: the alpha-blended trick, where the video driver is modified to make everything translucent.
Cheating based on videodrivers can effect many different games- anything where seeing more clearly could be an advantage.
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:4, Interesting)
That way, distant things appear in front of nearby ones, instead of the reverse. So you can prepare to fire at an enemy before he's even in view.
Here is a possible partial solution: have the server issue multiple randomly moving false images behind the "opaque" area. Normal people would never see them, but the cheaters would have to deal with many fake targes, making the illicit information less useful. Going a little farther, the server might even be able to move a fake image into the cheater's view (but somehow still invisible to normal players) and ban the cheater when he tries to shoot at it.
Re:Where's the fun at? (Score:4, Insightful)
Somewhat more reasonable would be including code in the client to create fake enemy images behind solid surfaces...
However, if the game client software was smart enough to do that (meaning it could calculate for itself which walls totally blocked off your view of the area), then it might as well just not send 100% concealed enemy pictures to the video card.
The kinds of driver-hacks I'm talking about are possible because the game relies on the video card to decide if an enemy is visible to the player, rather than computing that itself.
(Even better would be for the server to restrict transmitting enemy data for things you cannot see. The original Quake did this- I don't know why they took it out. This would have a side effect of making 40 player games smoother...)
No mention of hlguard (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.unitedadmins.com/hlguard.php
Re:No mention of hlguard (Score:2)
i regularly play on a hlguard protected server since amod it runs doesn't work with vac and i've personally caught 4 wallhack/aimbotters in the last 3 days just by spectating after people start to complain
Re:No mention of hlguard (Score:2)
Aimbots are a different issue, there isnt much you can do to stop external code from moving the mouse once the enemy is on screen.
Nothing new.. (Score:5, Informative)
I haven't played counter-strike, but it seems like the same types of people are at it again... I don't know, they always barge in and ruin perfectly innocent games. Cheating really does take out all the fun in multiplayer and even singleplayer videogames. That's why, you play with who you trust!
The only way to do THAT is to make friends...and know them well. A third party isn't going to be able to determine if someone will be a good friend for you or not.
My problem is I could never find anyone who was as obsessed as I was with videogames (Descent II was fun over modem, I got to kick my friend's ass all the time =P)
IDSPISPOPD (Score:2)
Thats kinda like the Mike Tyson Punchout! game -- 007 373 5963
That got you directly into the fight with Mike Tyson
Since when ... (Score:2)
A great resource (Score:5, Informative)
Actually they discourage multiplayer hacks, but otherwsise there is just about any info on the subject you may want.
No good solution. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. It's annoying. Cheating also takes place in casinos and in other physical forms of game play. It's a difficult problem that has been around since games were invented... and it's not going away anytime soon. I don't claim to know the answer. It's just like SPAM, popup ads, and all sorts of other online annoyances. There may not even be a good technological solution... The only thing I can think of is to play with people you know, and if you play with someone else, be wary of what's going on. If they cheat, fuck 'em... There are lots of other people to play with.
Would it help any if... (Score:2)
It could become an entirely different form of competition. Just because you can cheat doesn't mean you can do it well.
I know there'd always be some cheaters hell-bent on ruining the experience for legitimate players, but perhaps this would give a lot of them the chance to harmlessly work off whatever it is that drives them to cheat.
Re:Would it help any if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, you would probably see a little traffic, but the primary drive for cheaters is to beat the other guy (and usually rub it in their face.) That doesn't work on a level playing field. Remember, those people who cheat are mostly (1) those who are hell-bent to run the fun of the legit players, and (2) those who want to win the game at any cost. This, unfortunately, caters to neither.
Re:Would it help any if... (Score:3, Interesting)
Therefore you could take, say, the BRMH client and add features such as a torpedo data computer, automatic updates of army counts on all known planets, keys to turn... you were st
It's not that big of a deal... (Score:3, Funny)
I play a lot of CS and I Don't really think cheating is THAT big of a deal, with kickvoting, people can kick off the cheaters, so it becomes irrelevant... Really the most annoying thing is people that get killed and then automically accuse the person that killed them of "HAXXORING".
Not to say that I've not seen any cheaters, but they are easy to spot, and it's always fun to mess with them, you would be surprised what information about a person you can discover with just google and public information...
Always fun to give them a call in the middle of the night suggesting they keep to honest methods of gameplaying...
This always makes me laugh. (Score:4, Funny)
If this continues then the only players of CS and the like will be hardcore cheaters. This will be even funnier because often cheaters consider themselves to be above reproach and will threaten and verbally abuse anyone else who cheats as they do. So all game servers will be infested with retards squawking at each other.
Looking further into the future...
An arms race of cheats is almost inevitable. As with a real life arms race it will continue indefinitely until someone comes up with The Ultimate Cheat. By analogy with real life, we can see that this Ultimate Cheat will probably consist of submitting a link to the game server to Slashdot, causing it to be turned into a molten pile of slag and driving everyone playing bonkers. Then no one will play the games any more because of the risk of their computers exploding and I will be happy, for then I will have other freeciv players to play with.
Then someone develops a wallhack for freeciv, and the cycle starts over again...
This just in! (Score:4, Funny)
In other surprising news, Microsoft continues to make software with security holes.
Cheating won't go away. (Score:5, Insightful)
Pack when I played Quake 3 quite a bit, I didn't mind the cheaters. I looked at it as playing against an enemy with an unfair advantage. And while I might have lost more often than not against a cheater, I'd still be honing my skills against them. Plus if someone else won the deathmatch, they'd be pissed out of their minds, which was always funny.
Cheaters Hell (Score:5, Funny)
Methinks in a cheaters hell you play against Satan who is on a beowulf cluster with 10Gb of RAM and running OGC, whilst you are on a 386SX-25 running windows XP.
And Satan shoots real bullets :)
QuakeCon (Score:3, Funny)
At quakecon people are rarely found cheating, probably because most of the people there play Quake, which there seems to be far less cheating for. Instead of cheating, however, people resort to dumbass things like sending netsend messages across the network (he got kicked out on his ass for that one) and other general network tomfoolery.
The game architecture is part of the problem (Score:5, Insightful)
One issue, as I see it, is the architecture of the game servers themselves. Half-Life, for example, feeds information about the location of all players on the entire map to the client. You can add all the signing and checking of client side binaries that you want, but someone is going to figure out a way to creatively intercept that data if it is there.
The long-term solution is to just not have the data there. While it would be more work on the CPU to make the game engine instantly draw a character on-screen from no previous information, I would think most multiplayer gamers would give up a few FPS to play cheat-free.
I'm not familar with any back-end changes for games like HL2 and Doom3. Is anyone out there thinking of this? It just seems common sense. If people are exploiting data, just remove the data.
Re:The game architecture is part of the problem (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The game architecture is part of the problem (Score:4, Informative)
And the problem is not in the CPU (client side at least) to have players not visible on the screen at the moment not sent. If anything, it _increases_ CPU usage to have this. Latency is the issue. If you are going around a corner and you don't know anything about whats on the other side, and you peek around it, it will take say 100-200ms to get this information, resulting in a very bad experience.
Not to mention your advice seems to only help for wallhacking problems. Your client has to know what's visible on your screen, and what's on your screen can be aimed at. More perfectly with the assistance of a cheat even.
Re:The game architecture is part of the problem (Score:2)
How about server-side clipping? If you can't see the player, you don't get the data.
Of course to do this properly would introduce a massive load on the server... and the whole setup would need to be low-latency for it to work at all... but it's not completely inconceivable.
Re:The game architecture is part of the problem (Score:2)
Or at least a compromise solution. In half-life, as you can see if you ever try out ogc, every player client knows where every player is at all times on the map, what their health is, and what weapon they are carrying.
Perhaps the game could server-side clip things outside of a minimum radius, and let the client handle the hard work of close-up clipping. That way, at least the ogc'ers couldn't see everything.
I'm sure some game designer is gonna give me a slap-down, but it sounds good.
Re:It's not just part of the problem... (Score:3, Funny)
Oh! Oh! I've got one!
Chess!
And how about... Go?
My favourite kind of cheat... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a big fan of the cheat which allows you to tweak its effect. There's an example given of a BF:1942 cheat which will double your fire rate and driving speed. This suggests something interesting; the incremental cheat. Just use the cheat to up your fire rate and driving speed by 5% to start with. If no one responds; up it a bit more, and more, until someone starts calling you a cheater. Then you can turn it back down and then tell them that they're making false accusations, whilst still having perhaps a 20% advantage over other players.
hooks = cheats? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, opengl wrappers/hooks can do more than just remove walls. They generally can also sniff the memory structures from the game client and do most of the stuff client hooks can do as well, whereas the article seems to think they can only remove walls.
UT2003 (Score:2)
Re:UT2003 (Score:2)
Adrenalin
You can get Adrenalin by picking up the red and white pills scattered throughout the levels, or by achieving kills. Once your Adrenalin reaches 100, you will be allowed to perform one of the following special moves, the effects of which will only last for a while:
Speed - forward, forward, forward, forward
Regen - back, back, back, back
Invisibility - right, right, left,
OBVIOUS solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay...obviously they could still create proxys and such that would try to let them cheat where they can't, as they do now...but I think this would honestly help deter the average guy who isn't creating proxies for the time and effort it takes to actually find a way to slip through the current protections...I hope.
Doubt it'll work. (Score:3, Informative)
1) Break the rules.
2) Annoy other people.
In a server where cheats are allowed, it's hard for them to do 1 or 2 so they don't get any satisfaction.
These are the sort of people who'd glue a soccer ball to their foot, and think they're being smart.
admin rights. (Score:5, Interesting)
IFAIC, the only possible way to spot a cheater is by spectating. Ignore how fast his reflexes are, and look at his strategy. Does he do a route that runs by all the pickups? Does he look behind himself a lot? Does he play smart? Then he's probably not cheating.
To get a cheat free server, admins should find players that visit a lot and arn't jerks and give them admin rights. Simple.
New Games, Old Attitudes.. (Score:3, Informative)
Who remembers Netrek?
There were several clients to choose from to play the game. The trick? On major servers, you just had to use a blessed binary. Special permission to use RSA, and have developers responsible massivly cut down on ``borgs''.
If a developer was found to be producing clients that cheat, his key was yanked from the master server that all the game servers fed off of, and it revoked every client in the field.
Go Team Beer!
Is radar cheating? And what to do about it... (Score:4, Interesting)
The most popular radar program for DAoC is Excalibur [sourceforge.net], hosted by your very own Sourceforge. The troubling thing about Excalibur is that it does not fit any of the definitions of cheating, although it clearly gives players using it an unfair advantage. It does not modify the game binaries, or modify memory areas or graphical output when running. It does not interfere with or modify data streams between the client and server. In fact, it doesn't even run on the same computer you play the game on. Excalibur runs on a Linux / *nix computer on your local network, and works by passively sniffing packets, decoding them, and constructing a detailed overhead map of the player's surrounding area. Thus it is, and always will be, undetectable whether someone is using radar or not.
It really is a rather clever hack, but it's ruining the game for us honest players. (And no, I have never ran Excalibur, even to try it out.) The question is what can be done about? It would seem that the only two options are:
1.) Encrypt every packet sent between the server and client, which would undoubtably slow everything down.
2.) Send less information to the client, by implementing some kind of server-side clipping, whereby the server determines what objects are visible to each client and sends only those. Again, this would slow everything down, on the server side because it requires more work, and on the client side because when the player suddenly encounters the enemy horde, his computer will be forced to load hundreds of character models all at once.
So, any other suggestions?
Re:Is radar cheating? And what to do about it... (Score:3, Informative)
Cheaters Ruined battle.net (Score:2)
If you're good enough, it doesn't matter. (Score:2)
Also, I've never had problems finding public servers with no cheaters. Maybe I just never noticed them, but I don't think cheating is the massive plague that makes public multiplayer games impossible to enjo
Cheating Death - anticheat for HL (Score:2, Informative)
While in optional mode, players are checked for a running C-D client and will rename the player if they don't have C-D currently installed and running. For optimal protection against cheaters, servers can be configured to only allow players running the C-D client.
Unfort
Dear God... (Score:5, Funny)
Baysean Filtering? (Score:5, Interesting)
If an auto-shoot aimbot is used, the time between when the enemy is on the perp's screen and the time the gun is shot should be nearly constant -- by screen I mean either entire screen or some radius of the pointer. If it's a human making the decision, that time would have a wider distribution with a larger variance.
For auto-aim but no shoot, take notice of when the pointer moves across the screen rapidly. Yes, there'd be type I and II errors (both not catching all auto-aims and recording simple things like turning around), but with enough analysis, it might be doable. Further analysis could be done on mouse movements prior to headshots. If a significant number of headshots (or killshots in general) came immediately following a rapid mouse movement, than an aimbot is rather statistically likely.
For wallhacks, consider a graph that connects all hallways to other hallways... if a player is consistently converging on enemies out of view, ie the shortest distance between the two players is constant or decreasing, statistically speaking, a wallhack is likely.
Of course, for all of these, the confidence intervals could be set arbitrarily close to unity -- and so it would give server admins the ability to risk overall Type I or II errors. This insures against being lucky some of the time, or doing the logical or rational thing in certain situations.
While cheating could overcome these methods by introducing errors (intentionally miss sometimes, walk around randomly some of the time, etc.), it would reduce the impact the cheater would have on the game, thereby making it less interesting for the cheater... perhaps to the point of not worth his while.
A non-cheat that's easy to fix: (Score:4, Interesting)
The easy fix: introduce random errors in the map draw. Make the location of trees in an area a function of a random distriubtion. Make hallways marginally shorter, longer, wider, or narrower, in an effort to prevent people from using natural markings as methods of aiming (ie put your thumb three pixels below the lowest tree leaf to throw the grenade into the hole in the ground from maximum possible distance away).
It's not a cheat (no modifications, etc) but it clearly is in conflict with the spirit of the game. Game developers -- fix this!
It gets worse as the games get bigger (Score:4, Insightful)
For those not in the know MPBT 3025 hnceforth BT, was an online version of the battletech boardgames. You have a space faring civilization that has fallen from its golden age. There is much lost technique and technology. Not the least of which is the political organization that allowed all those people to live together. The game was organized along the lines of the 5 major successor states. It consisted of the successor states battling for control of the known universe. The States or Teams had at various times upwards of 3k players and intense rivalries.
The game had a long history having been out and in development for over 10 years. The latest version having been do real soon for nearly 8 years. I am not certain but I believe it was the complete inability to resolve community issues related to the various forms of cheating that first killed interest in the game by players and finally caused EA its last owner to kill the project.
Imagine quake capture the flag with 5 sides and 2 to 4 thousand players a side. Now imagine "responsible players" being tasked with controlling the behavior of their teams, and having nothing but the power of persuasion to do so. This was the community of MPBT 3025.
Needless to say the game became every kind of a cesspool you can imagine. There wasn't just one level of cheating but multiple levels of cheating and betrayal. The base level was what The tom's article speaks of and is the most minor of cheating in online gaming. The hacking of the connection, game engine, weapon data files was something both obvious and by and large easy to deal with. The experienced players could spot the game behaving freakily and would ostracize the cheats or find ways to harrass them. It was something that was annoying but easily dealt with.
The higher levels of cheating were most likely what did the game in. The next level involved multiple accounts, various point transfer schemes, and impersonation. This is where "Cheating" showed that violationg the social contract produces truly disgusting results. There is very little that can compare to participating in an online world, and finding yourself betrayed by people you felt were your friends. In other online games theres similar problems, i.e. people in multiple guilds, people in multiple nations in the smaller empire games. But, in bt, with 5 large nations and virtually no way to keep track you had betrayal as the purpose of the game. Almost all combat was team combat, and towards the end everything revolved around planting ringers.
Cheating is bad, betrayal by supposed friends is a catastrophe for a game. I can't say this loudly enough, and it is something that will either limit the scope of online games or limit them to weird survivor/lord of the flies knockoffs.
The final and worst form of cheating was, the players who volunteered as honorary staff to gain a leg up. As bad as regular betrayal this was worse. In my mind it was the last nail in the coffin for the game. Its, also the great lesson for all online games to come. Make certain that you have automated checks built in before the game even starts. That way, you can not only watch the players but watch the watchers.
You can't stop it, so rank it... (Score:3, Interesting)
You could even start a game (as an example) at Rank:7 +/-2, then people who are Rank:5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 can join.
RPGs: The REAL problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately, there's a central authority--the game server admins--and they have to use their authority to stop this stuff. Sadly the policy for most persistent online games is "every player we boot off for cheating is a player who won't pay us money anymore."
Netrek implemented most of the suggestions (Score:5, Interesting)
1. Don't send all the data to the client. The client should only know the minimum it needs to know in order to draw what the player sees. e.g. If something needs to be randomized it should be randomized server-side and sent to the client. Clients should not know the locations of any other clients that can't be seen by the player, etc.
2. Implement statistical checking to look for cheats. The netrek protocol has the client translate mouse clicks into angles. The server could identify cheaters by looking for a lot of very rapidly changing angles coming from the client. You can get some false positives this way with good players though.
3. Have some servers setup as cheating-allowed servers. I wrote borgs for netrek and played them on servers which allowed it. You'd actually also get people who were good playing on those servers without borgs just to try to sharpen their skills.
Netrek also had RSA checksumming of the binaries to make it more difficult to use a borg (or any other non-blessed client) on most servers (although this was crackable).
Server side Auditing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I specify one at a time as I imagine it'd take too much processing power to double check everybody, but the principle would be sound. No checking everybodies files, HD, whatever. Safe, non-intrusive and fairly difficult to spoof since the auditing relies on the server side mechanics, not the peer-hacked files.
A simple solution? (Score:4, Interesting)
This way regular players won't have any idea the invisibots are there. However, if a cheater should happen to have one in his field of view, his aimbot will take over and frag the poor unsuspecting invisibot.
If a player frags an invisibot, they get kicked.
It's not totally foolproof, but it seems to make sense. at least for aimbot cheats.
Re:A simple solution? (Score:3, Interesting)
Most people miss an important point. (Score:3, Insightful)
If enough people in the game think that doing something is cheating, unless you can convince them it's legit then it's cheating, even if it's allowed by the environment/server. Coz you're playing with them.
For example if there are a bunch of people on a CS server and they had decided to play knife fights only even though the server allows other stuff, you're an ass if you ignore them and mow them down with machineguns. Of course if you just joined and they didn't say anything then you're excused for the first time. The point is you want to play with them, you play by the "agreed on" rules. You don't like it, try convincing them. Sure you could convince them that playing "knife only" is not a good idea by being an ass, but that leaves them also convinced that you're an ass.
After all there are plenty of other servers for you to go. You might even be able to set up your own. But if no one wants to play with you and you have to go from server to server pissing people off, you're the one that has no life, not those who are "taking the game too seriously". After all, there are probably servers around which officially allow cheating (or set up your own), and if all the cheaters have to go to a "no cheats" server to cheat, that shows what sort of people they are.
In many games there are lots of rules (e.g. golf, football etc). There are also lots of unwritten rules. Often when an unwritten rule has to be written, it means someone has been an ass. Similarly, when added complexity has to be added to game servers. The players and the game suffer an additional cost.
Playing a multiplayer game is like setting up a mutually agreed reality. If you win by the rules of that mutually agreed reality, there is some honor. If you're the sort who can't play by the rules, you're one of the good reasons why people are not omnipotent. You'd self/mass destruct given an eternity.
I suppose Hell for these people would be being given God mode in their own reality, but nobody will play with them.
Re:Cheaters aren't the bad guys (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Cheaters aren't the bad guys (Score:3, Insightful)
Where do you think the next big game will spawn from, some late-night-hackers' bedroom, or a company that charges money...
Jeez some day I hope that even slashdot-zealots could figure out the simple little fact that everything in life doesn't come for free...
Not if the game's designed properly. (Score:3, Insightful)