Lawsuits Suggest Some Video Game Cheating Could Be Illegal (axios.com) 80
A raft of lawsuits from the games industry seeks to crack down on cheating in some popular online games, arguing that making cheats for games and even using them might be illegal. From a report: Cheating is a scourge of many online games, inspiring increasingly bold legal counteroffensives by some of the companies who make them. Those lawsuits are largely aimed against makers of cheat software, but they don't let players who use the cheats fully off the hook.Cheat-makers "induce and enable individual Destiny 2 players to create an unauthorized and infringing derivative work each time they deploy the cheat software," states one lawsuit from Sony-owned Bungie Studios that's still winding its way through the courts.
The kinds of cheats in play aren't the ones old-school gamers might have applied by inputting a developer-programmed invincibility code. Rather, they involve premium cheats that let players see through walls to get an advantage in multiplayer combat games such as Destiny 2 or Call of Duty. Game companies, many of which are banning tens and hundreds of thousands of accounts, say cheating scares off honest players and is costly to fight. Bungie estimated in one suit that it spends "roughly $1,250,000 per year on its anti-cheating measures," not including legal costs.
The kinds of cheats in play aren't the ones old-school gamers might have applied by inputting a developer-programmed invincibility code. Rather, they involve premium cheats that let players see through walls to get an advantage in multiplayer combat games such as Destiny 2 or Call of Duty. Game companies, many of which are banning tens and hundreds of thousands of accounts, say cheating scares off honest players and is costly to fight. Bungie estimated in one suit that it spends "roughly $1,250,000 per year on its anti-cheating measures," not including legal costs.
Seeing through walls (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does the server even send information on what's on the other side of walls down to the client?
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I believe the only possible answer to that is because the coders/programmers were/are morons.
It was probably to cut some programming corner, and one of the idiots said no one would ever take advantage of that.
Re:Seeing through walls (Score:4, Informative)
Sending information about complete local game state (eg anything within radius x) is a lot easier and more efficient than having to do line of sight tests for each player to each other player, which would not necessarily be accurate anyway due to latency and could cause jitter or popping if the client viewpoint has moved to expose the position of their opponent but the server had not yet sent that info to the client because from the servers point of view they are still hidden.
This also only addresses one kind of cheat - there are many others.
Cheaters cost the industry real money in terms of much more development resources having to be spent on stopping cheaters instead of developing new content, and it also often adds a performance penalty that cuts into frame rates,m and increases the cost of development.
In addition, the cheaters drive non-cheat players away from the games, and this costs the company sales revenues.
If you want to cheat, play a single player game and cheat your heart out. No one will care. But cheaters who spoil the game for others deserve to be punished.
Re:Seeing through walls (Score:4)
Presumably because the motion predictor thinks the thing will/might become visible around a corner, or maybe because approximating visibility is easier than computing it exactly on the server side. I expect the first is more likely. It's sufficient for most cheating purposes, and would degrade the game quality for non-cheaters if the server changed the behavior.
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Also they could feasibly be making sound that the player IS supposed to hear, so their location and current actions are important for your computer to figure out what sounds to make.
Re: Seeing through walls (Score:2)
The server would have to predict YOU is the problem. Client side movement prediction puts your own client ahead of the server. Your client can easily predict that when you press jump you will go up, and your view will shift immediately. The server could only predict you running in a straight line. Jumping to look over an obstacle would break this whole system because a server can't predict it. Any obstacle you could quickly peak around would have to be treated as if it wasn't there.
When the test is wha
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Because netgames usually only send a small amount of data between the clients like player positions etc. to keep communication fast while visibility tests are made on the local machine. Otherwise you would have to simulate the whole scene from the view of the player on the server and keep it synchronous with the client which would be a distributed coding nightmare.
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FWIW, my guess is that the increased requirement for communication would increase the lag between action and response. The less communication you need, the faster your responses can be...if the local machine is fast enough.
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The other big issue is that players out of sight can affect the state of the world. Either their position and actions are sent all the time, or occasionally the server needs to dump a load of state data to a player as they enter a previously unseen area.
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What do you do if the player view state is out of synch between server and client? Either the client would see a player he's not supposed to see yet or not see a player that can already see them.
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Because the server is not responsible for rendering each frame of the game for each player?
To keep network traffic down, the game server only needs to keep track of the players and items on the level and make sure all players are working with the same data. None of that is visual; All the rendering (including wall clipping) is done client side because that's just what makes sense.
This if course means a bad actor client can snoop or modify the game's data to reveal more than the player is meant to see, but t
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Sure there used to be private servers that anyone could spin up and host whatever rules / game they wanted, but we all know there's no where near enough solidarity between gamers to mandate their return.
So you're left with two realistic options: Play the games as is, or wait until they finally get an agreement set in stone with the ISPs to get streaming not to suck and mandate all future games be played via dumb terminal. Want a third option? So do I. If you've got something better
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Because things like hit detection would not work if all your logic was on the server. It's too high latency to play an FPS over the Internet unless you have most of the work done on the client. So generally the client sends a stream of actions, and the server will verify the result to be within a certain amount of drift, but ultimately the final decision on where you were shooting usually comes from where your local machine says you were aiming at the time you clicked and what you were seeing on the scree
Re: Seeing through walls (Score:3, Informative)
Lots of reasons why clients need to know where things are. For example they need to be able to play the engine sound of the vehicle you can't see at the correct place in the 3D sound space. Or correctly handling the case where something you can't see is reflected off something shiny you can see.
Re: Seeing through walls (Score:2)
Or correctly handling the case where something you can't see is reflected off something shiny you can see.
Hell, shadows even.
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Why does the server even send information on what's on the other side of walls down to the client?
1) As others have pointed out there's good technical reasons why the client needs to know things that aren't visible to the player. If nothing else the collision calculations that determine visibility are probably very expensive and need to be done by the client.
2) The question is a bit of a red herring. Wall-hacks are only one kind of cheat, there's also aim-bots, seeing hidden or obscured stats, and other hacks that don't rely on info not visible to the user. The moment the client is compromised you're go
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Latency. Too many people are on connections that would prevent playing online shooters otherwise. If the client already knows, the client can do the reaction instead. Of course, that means cheat-software can also know.
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As for the reason, it's two fold:
1) Distributed / mesh networking. - Some games use this to avoid high latency links. As an example: player 1 may have a 20ms connection to player 2 but a 80ms connection to player 3. Player 2 on the other hand has a 20ms connection to both player 1 and player 3. The fastest route to get data from player 1 to player 3 i
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Plenty of reasons.
1. Accurate audio positioning of footsteps etc. The client must know position of the footsteps.
2. If the player charges around the corner, the client needs to know what's around it to render. Otherwise lag will result in a player suddenly appearing when they weren't there. Also, being killed by invisible players will be a thing, especially with higher pings. Probably not a good idea to put that in your game.
3. While it would be great to only send the exact data the client needs to have, re
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Or why don't they just check the client-side code is unadulterated, surely that's possible with code-signing and error correction types of algo's.
I don't mind these companies trying to stop cheating but there are lines they shouldn't cross such as spying on the users computer.
I also find it concerning that hacks might be classed as alternative works, I feel that there could be negative consequences down the road elsewhere if this was allowed and most of all it's not true, derivative works have to be sold, t
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How do you check that the code-signing program has not been altered?
so claming that mods = copyright issues / dmca? (Score:2)
so claiming that mods = copyright issues / DMCA?
and if ends up in the wrong court then things like OS debug tools may end being banned.
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I suspect that the wow glider lawsuit has encouraged more companies to consider the DMCA as the solution to their "cheating" problems. But in the process, games which attach to a client process and provide overlays (ex. Discord) or do screen cap (ex. Twitch) would also be infringing. Actually, since I do write this sort of code on occasion, you'd be surprised at how many things attach themselves to running processes in a mature system, most of them are innocuous.
At the end of the day, if the courts agree to
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FWIW, I already see shrink wrap software will have to be seen as a legal trojan. I *strongly* prefer GPL software, and among that AGPL. But not many games are developed with that license.
OTOH, I think it's now been well over a decade before I interested enough to buy a game. The last one required a server connection to run, so I uninstalled it.
and other laws will help like ada screen reader (Score:2)
and other laws will help like ada screen readers or do you want to lock out blind people
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Someone who makes a mod is arguably creating a derivative work.
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Someone who makes a mod is arguably creating a derivative work.
No, they're not.
A derivative work can stand by itself, representing a change to the original work, but requires that the entire work be represented. A mod changes one aspect of a game and cannot be used on its own. It requires the original game.
So, no, a mod is not a derivative work. We need to stop this bullshit of tying everything to copyright law.
easy fix (Score:2)
I just don't play games online. Problem resolved. I can cheat all I want and never publish my "derivative work".
Re: easy fix (Score:2)
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How would that affect my offline play in any way?
Re: easy fix (Score:2)
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OK, now fix it for people who like to play multiplayer games (IOW this is not a solution).
This will be abused (Score:2)
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Installing and running someone else's software - as a general rule - automatically violates their implicit and exclusive copyright over the code. That's why pretty much all software comes with a license protecting you when you do things that would otherwise violate the copyright holder's exclusive rights. If you don't follow the license, you lose your protections.
You can't - by law - make copies of PDFs you find on the Internet and save them to your hard drive. If that's the criteria, you already don't o
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You have no idea how copyright works.
Re: This will be abused (Score:2)
Says a dipshit with no counter argument.
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There's not to counter, any more than there would be if you claimed gravity causes things to fall up.
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Depends how you are cheating. I remember back in the early everquest days, 01-04, some guilds would have a person running a linux box with network analysis software and another app could display a map and fill it in with the information traveling between the client and the server.
It allowed guilds to quickly and easily "see" all the mobs and where they were at. Sure, it only ran on linux and you were only running everquest on windows back then, so you had multiple computers setup, but it was pretty nifty.
Ir
Re: This will be abused (Score:2)
The copyright angle is to get the cheat engine developers. You, they'll just ban.
Nope fully legal under the doctrine of sale. (Score:1)
You cat legally tell me that I'm not allowed to do with what I own.
And if you sold something to somebody else under specific terms, as soon as they sell it to me, I no longer have to deal with your bs.
I own the property, I control how its used. That's the law.
That's why Elon is allowed to destroy twitter, he got debt financing and paid for it. Everybody had plans and goals for it, but he is the owner now. If that's ok, then its the same thing.
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You cat legally tell me that I'm not allowed to do with what I own.
You all gave that up with steam, mmos and windows 10. As soon as you touched a client-server programmed EXE, software licenses could be enforced by the courts because you've given up ownership of your device.
You don't seem to grasp the last 25 years of PC gaming has been one of theft and larceny, the whole industry knew in 1997 with the advent of ultima online, the average PC gamer and programmer was chimp factor five levels of stupid about basic facts about mainframe computing.
MMO's (hereby known as clien
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When you connect any two computers together and network them together, according to basic electronics, they become a single electrical circuit.
I'm quite familiar with basic electronics, and no, computers connected via fiber-optic links and TCP-IP do not "become a single electrical circuit".
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When you connect any two computers together and network them together, according to basic electronics, they become a single electrical circuit.
They do, when you connect any computer together they become a single computer, aka when you take up steam or any application with a login screen or user account, you're getting robbed idiot, Microsoft, valve and the game industry desperately wanted to kill off local plaintext binary executables that enabled mass piracy to begin with. When you connect your PC to the internet, they can now divide any future program (windows, pc game, etc) into two sets of exe's, while denying you ownership of the game you pa
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And if you sold something to somebody else under specific terms, as soon as they sell it to me, I no longer have to deal with your bs.
Their response is that they didn't sell any property, they granted a license for use, with restrictions. Not sure if this position has been tested in court.
Passing the blame as usual (Score:3)
However this is not the case for all games. Take something like WoW, and you'll see they have little to no cheating issues. These games were made for multiplayer and the server plays much more of an active role in the gameplay. Just like online chess, where the players only send the moves they made, the calculations and board is managed by the server. Thus cheating is not possible
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One way to cheat in WOW (this may not work now but it use to) was to edit the graphics file. You could change the image that the client displayed when an enemy combatant was carrying the flag in a battleground or when they grabbed a power up or if they were a priest.
Sure, it takes a bit of work and know how, but it was a thing for a while. Another thing you could do was change the appearance of your avatar locally, which could still be fun.
Shit, with wow 3.5.5a (I think that's the last wotlk client) you can
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The real reason why these games are so easy to hack is that, they are using game engines that were designed for single-player.
I would like to see a reference for that if you have one.
Interesting (Score:1)
It seems interesting that they claim to spend 1.25M on fighting cheaters when, in general, their attempts have been sad and meaningless. Hell, even dedicated anti-cheat companies aren't very good at stopping cheaters. Riot's Vanguard rootkit doesn't even do it.
Trust me, I get it, cheaters suck, but Bungie is smoking something premo if they think this has any chance in hell of going through. Try hiring better developers for your shitty games, Bungie.
Of course they go after cheaters to protect profit (Score:2)
If they don't stop cheaters, players will become apathetic and not spend as much in the gambling part of the game that is the random loot/prize boxes they need to sell to players to compete. If competition is plagued with cheating, players will stop spending so much to try to outdo other opponents spending on the loot boxes.
The vendor wants to be the only game providing advantages over other players.
Wrong approach (Score:2)
Inspired by Apple TV+ comedy series Mythic Quest [apple.com] in which they create extra separated server for all nazi players. (When I was looking for the link, I just found that it will be soon expanded with new series Mere Mortals [apple.com])
I can imagine that for some players, writing cheats or to modify a game is another way to have fun.
I wrote one cheat program myself when I go
Console-only? (Score:2)
Can't these companies that are concerned about cheating in their games just make them console-only?
Admittedly, I know little about consoles and I'm not sure if this would be technically effective. As a long-time PC gamer I just hope that it would keep this crap (current generation of online games with loot boxes and whatnot) far from the PCs, with the added MASSIVE bonus that the asshole greedy companies won't push so hard to limit my freedom about what I can do with my own PC.
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Can't these companies that are concerned about cheating in their games just make them console-only?
If they don't like money, yes. There aren't a lot of non-profit game development studios though.
Blizzard, used this strategy... (Score:2)
Might be illegal? (Score:2)
Might be illegal? Really? Big claims to throw around without even mentioning what law "might" be broken.
It harms your profits? So what? So do other competing games - there is no law protecting your profits.
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So you didn't read the summary?
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I did. There's nothing in the summary that suggests any law is being broken.
Perhaps you're referring to the completely bullshit bit about: "induce and enable individual Destiny 2 players to create an unauthorized and infringing derivative work each time they deploy the cheat software,"?
That's not illegal. I can do whatever I want to my copy of Mickey's Christmas Carol and copyright law has NOTHING to say about it. What I can't do is *distribute* that derivative work. Just like the name says, copyright
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That's not illegal.
That's for a court to decide.
Just like the name says, copyright is a restriction on your right to *copy* the product. Nothing else.
Incorrect. There are several rights protected by copyright, only one of which is reproduction.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
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Sure, a corrupt enough court can mangle any law.
And yeah, there are actually a few other rights stolen by copyright law - but none of them apply in this scenario.
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What about the one explicitly mentioned in the lawsuit? Maybe the suit won't succeed of course, but it clearly has a basis in copyright law.
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Which one would that be? I'm not reading the legal filing, and even skimming the article the derivative works theory is all I see - which would be thrown out by any halfway competent (and honest) judge, because there is no law against making derivative works - only against *distributing* them (or in some cases publicly displaying/performing them). It's 100% legal to draw all over your Mickey Mouse poster to your heart's content.
Heck, before Linux, Minix was the home *nix of choice, but was hobbled by the
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there is no law against making derivative works
I already linked it for you but here it is: "the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following... to prepare derivative works based upon the copyrighted work;".
Prepare. Not distribute, prepare.
Interesting Times We Live In (Score:3)
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely despise cheating in online games. However, in order to violate copyright, I thought you had to distribute the work. What kind of maniac judge thinks that copying data from storage to memory is "distribution"?
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However, in order to violate copyright, I thought you had to distribute the work.
Preparing derivative works, making copies, and distributing copies (and some other things) are separate rights in US copyright law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu]
Derivative work ... (Score:2)
"... to create an unauthorized and infringing derivative work each time they deploy the cheat software"
This means they are running a modified client, that a modified client can show different information or allow different movement etc. means they haven't programmed the server correctly ...it should not give the client more information than it needs, or allow the client to send back impossible moves ...
You can cheat because they don't know how to or could not be bothered to write the game properly ...
Hello students , I will help you to solve your pr (Score:1)