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It's not a video, but it might stand in for the moment: MP3 of Wil's keynote

Unlike MMORGs which are controlled almost entirely by server side user agents, first person shooters very vulnerable to cheating.

There are, even now, dozens of "hacks" that work with counterstrike - the most inventive give on screen itinerary information about players (which you can see through translucent walls) a la Deux Ex!

Allow me to ramble...

COD similarly suffers from cheaters. A sponsored (paid!) COD2 player was recently "discovered" cheating after a commercial hack manufacturer had their website's database exposed via a phpbb (iirc?) vulnerability. The happy-hacker was an admin at a gaming forum and compared the email addresses gleened from the site to ones registered on his forum... and tada, one of the biggest names in COD2 was a known cheat user... he even PAID $200 for it. (private cheats are almost always undetected)

Anti-cheat techniques often fail. VAC (now VAC2) - the Vale AntiCheat plugin - is notorious for being easy to sidle past. Other commercial varients such as Punk Buster either no longer support the games you want to play, or offer only a small degree better detection than the game manufacturer.

I was on a COD2 server last night, and Punk Buster kicked in doing a check, and the number of players went down from 20 to 3.

I may be wrong here, but the BF2 patches, compared to the release client, have seriously stepped up the anti-cheat detection. Alt-tabbing out of the game or running background processes on a single processor machine can make BF2 unbreakable as PunkBuster threads kick in to scan the system.

Most attempts at tracking and hashing memory have failed - there's too much ram on PCs nowadays! Without OS-level write handlers its very hard to track subversive programs. And I'm not even going to mention game-based "hacks" such as enabling the alpha channel on Valve textures (vtf files have a .txt filed associated with enabling this trivial hack!)...

Then there's always the driver. Seeing as there are so many ogl implementations and extended vendor drivers (ie: NGO drivers for nvidia hardware etc) it would be impossible to market a game that requires signed drivers!

Lets talk about the UK counter-strike scene for a sec...

C4U - See For Yourself - were, by all means, a talented clan. However, they fielded two known AND CAUGHT hackers for some time, Kritical, and Willzooo (less the l33tisms in their handles). I went to the UKs biggest lan event a few weeks back, as a gamer, only to find in none other than the counter-strike tournament, Kritical and Willzooo... To make my disgust worst, they were PLAYING for the UKs formost and successful sponsored team - Team Dignitas! http://www.team-dignitas.org/ - they're sponsored by Intel and Creative, and I can assure you these guys get a monthly salary for playing computer games (not to mention the hardware)...

So there you have it. Cheating is interlaced within the gaming community, ex-cheaters who have been banned from competitions and ridiculed by the community are forgotten about in only a matter of months, and later find themselves paid to play games.

There is no incentive not to cheat. It is ludicrous to bet on something where you cannot tell if someone is cheating or not.

  Matt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PunkBuster
http://www.ggl.com/index.php?controller=News&metho d=article&id=4423
http://www.ukterrorist.com/news/wilzooo_hax/

here's the right one: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900

gg

Try this: http://www.ggl.com/news.php?NewsId=3900

Want to turn it into a game of who-can-click-faster or what?

I actually think this is absolutely true. It's pretty scary to me but I have read a lot of articles and comments from RTS players who cherish the micromanagement and want to keep RTS games about the controlling of individual units.

In reading a bit about Age of Mythology when I was playing it I noticed a lot of players saying that they hated the changes in the "Titans" expansion pack which were geared at reducing micromanagement. For example, in searching for comments like that I saw http://www.ggl.com/view_forum_topic.php?TopicId=30 4&Start=50 where one of the players says:

I haven't and won't play the Titans because of the autoqueue function... [amongst other reasons]

Autoqueue is just an infinite queue option that tells the building to keep producing units! I've seen people say that infinite queue takes the skill out of the game. So to them repeatedly returning to a building and queueing up more units is a skill. I'm not debating that it is in fact a skill, but I don't think it's fun and I think spending less time on this and more time on other parts of the game would be preferrable.

From http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display .cgi?action=ct&f=1,26176,0,10

Holy crap u want the auto queue from AoT!!!!!. This was probably the WORST feature in AoT and you want it in AoE3. When I heard AoE3 was not going to have autoqueue, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I pray to God ES don't mess up and put autoque in a patch or expansion.

NO AUTOQUE!

These sort of opinions are why there is no 'infinite-queue' option in recent releases Age of Empires III and Rise of Legends. It's not that the developers don't know how to put it in because it's in Age of Mythology: Titans and Rise of Nations. If you feel that there is not enough interface improvement it may partly be that people because actually fighting against these changes!

Seriously, I see console wars as a way to slowly destroy PC gaming. the fact of the matter is that PC gaming doesnt really have fan boys. 360 killing the PC this article sort of agrees with me

If what you like out of video games is competition, nothing beats CS. It's so easy to organize 5v5 matches, hop in a server with some friends and it's as if you're in a high stakes shootout with all the tension. There's always TONS of people playing, always tons of competition, it's no wonder it's the top competitive video game around.

Think of it this way, why do you go back and play the same sport you like over and over. Because you like to compete in basketball, or football or whatever. Same thing with CS, it's all about competition, and it'll keep you coming back.

P.S. If you're worried about cheaters, there's many communities that are organized with the specific goal of stopping this threat with sophisticated anti cheat software and admin support.

Check out ESEA CEVO NEL CAL GGL

Thanks to the Xbox 360's excellent controller, it won't take veterans of console first-person shooters very long to feel comfortable with the gameplay in Call of Duty 2. The default control scheme feels perfect right from the start, and there's a good chance that you'll be a genuine killing machine by the time you finish the brief tutorial that kicks off the game.

And then, of course, there are the controls. The debate between keyboard and mouse vs. controller still rages on, but in this fast-paced arcade-style shooter we didn't find the control pad be a serious handicap. While a sniping match would likely end in the favor of the player on the PC, playing through the offline levels was just as easy with a thumbstick as with a mouse.

Another part of becoming a pro gamer is getting hooked watching pro game tournaments. GGL.com is providing a ton of coverage of the World Cyber Games in Singapore going on right now and live streaming broadcasts begin tomorrow. It can all be found here: http://www.ggl.com/wcg2005.php/ There is also a bunch of video from Blizzcon a few weeks ago in the downloads section. Enjoy!

How to get into the competitive side of Quake3 and UT2K4:
- get the competition mods: OSP for Quake 3, UTComp for Unreal Tournament 2004
- play some public games in the modes enjoy: 1v1, TDM, FFA, CTF... if you haven't played with OSP/UTComp before you've probably only played noobs, so expect to get owned here.
- check the demos of the best players, you'll learn a lot from that.
- find the IRC channels where pickup games are organized, even if they're not as good as clan games they're still much better than your average public game. It's a good starting point, and if you enjoy the pickup games then you can look for a clan and get more into the community.

Some links:
http://www.esreality.com/ - genreal e-sport news/community, some demos
http://www.challenge-tv.com/ - Quake demos
http://www.ggl.com/ - competition in the US
http://www.clanbase.com/ - competition in Europe
http://www.unrealnorth.com/ - Unreal community
This isn't everything of course, there are many more leagues & communities.

About cheating, in all honesty, it is not something you should care about. You shouldn't think about it: in most cases when you think someone is cheating he's probably not, and if he is, well what can you do about it? Stop caring about it, problem solved.

The Global Gaming League (ggl.com) is trying to start the same sort of professional gaming atmosphere in the U.S.... and your comment reminded me of their old slogan:

Stop playing with yourself .