Slashdot Mirror
Multiplayer Game Cheating
Washizu writes: "Ensemble Studios programmer Matt Pritchard, who worked on both Age of Empires, and Age of Empires 2: The Age of Kings, has written an article for Gamasutra, the online game developer magazine, on multiplayer game cheating methods and prevention." A lot to say here about human nature. A lot of it applies to virtually any form of online human interaction: from games to, yes, even Slashdot's message boards. A very worthwhile read.
I for one deplore cheating on online games. For shame. I'd write more, but I've got to go log on with my other account and moderate this post up.
--Shoeboy
So now tell me... is this a wrong use of the word hacker again? It seems to me that cracker should have been used. Or is everyone bored with that argument by now?
This article reads a lot like the paper on hacker mentality that was just posted, doesn't it?
---
when the rain comes, they run and hide their heads. they might as well be dead.
I think that some times a little chitting can add to a game, come on how many can say that you haven't got home from work and entered "it is a good day to die" in to the chat Window of Warcraft II and send a Peon out to kill the dark armys of the humans? Helps with the stress and it can add a little to the game.
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
If I went into a job interview and took the previous persons resume in with me how far would that get me? That's about the same thing as cheating in video games.
These kids better wise up before they get smacked by the real word.
when you use any sort of game cheat for so long it just isn't even fun to play anymore. You have such an unfair advantage that if you actually are enjoying it, you really need to take a look at yourself and consider getting professional help. Computer games that are played online are NOT real. You are NOT cool when you win. I think that gamers that cheat to win sucked at everything they did (inside or outside of the Internet) and they feel this need to fix that (something like the fathers that scream at the kids to kick ass in some such sport or get all fired up on bad calls because they are living their non-existant sports career out in their kids).
:)
.02
Anyway, like I said, after a while it just isn't fun anymore. Until someone starts cheating a lot they will always have this desire to do it (to see what it was like). It is nothing special. Get over it
Just my worthless
I once went onto Battle.net to play FFA StarCraft. One time, I went in to play against two others who "didn't know each other" and two computer opponents. I went easily after the computers, but found out halfway through the rest why the other two opponents seemed to be very strong.
Out of the blue, I saw a message on the chat giving away one of the people's positions and needing help. They had been duping me up to that point about being part of a FFA, but knew each other and were planning on "winning" by knocking me out of the game, and then claiming that one of them won.
I still cannot understand the mentality of cheating to win. To me, you can't really win against someone if you take a severe handicap to do so. Cheating, whether through codes, fraud, trainers or the like, does no good. Sure, you can win more often, but is that win really worth anything?
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
All the Mac users out there must remember the classic tank game, Bolo.
It had so many cheating checks built into the game. It was impossible! Every player had to have the same major version of the game so that every player could keep tabs on every other player.
I'm sure that once you get to 64 way Half Life games, the network traffic generated by checking to see if a given player is moving too fast is unwieldly.
Cheating does not always apply to having more charachters who get goodies and transfer them between each other. What about the people who create female charachters, in hopes of getting some guy to give them that level 14 sword of invulnerability? In my eyes, these are some of the worste.
Some people are too lazy (or dont know how / dont know how to effectively play) RPGs, and HAVE to cheat. This does not make it right, but people cheat at ANYTHING. All of us have cheated in some way, sometime in out lives.. wrote that one word you could never spell onto your desk minutes before the spelling test.. took advantage of the money cheat in ROM 2.1, or even clocked in 30 minutes earlier than you should have. The people who always cheat in RPGs jsut bug everyone else out. In one mud I play, one person convinced other mudders to give her over 475 gold (in this mud, if you have 100 gold, you are very very wealthy) and she was level 4! The girl wasnt even 'strong' enough to leave the first town / level. That is what I hate..
/. is a commercial entity. goto slashdot.com
One thing that impressed me about the article was the ingenuity of cheaters (the ones who actually create the cheats, not the lamers who just download and use them). The Doom/Quake franchise managed to, in some sense, harness that creativity by allowing people to create their own game modifications.
How could the creativity of cheaters be harnessed in other ways, without ruining the game for non-cheaters? Maybe create games where you design in-game ships or weapons by writing some sort of psuedo-code ?
wants to be the first monkey to touch the monolith
WHAT?? You can't cheat on Slashdot!!
Be nice to your friends. If it weren't for them, you'd be a complete stranger.
Oh come on, the games didn't create the problems... if they did, we wouldn't have had crime until the early 80's. And I dare you to go play basketball in the center of any megalopolis and say that you're out in nature. Reality don't work that way....
Violence is perpetuated by scared kids who want some control and who want to do better than those who came before them.
Never understimate the power of human stupidity -Lazarus Long
Anyone remember multi-character cheating in the MUD days? How exactly would you stop that? No matter how cheat-proof your online game is someone will be out there with three copies of it running around killing monsters they shouldn't be to give the gold/experience to their real character. It's more of a social problem than how cheat-proof you are.
- Me-So-Ha which takes away any fun you might have while playing with these guys or as them.
I remember playing on a MUD where generally everyone just blew cheating off and looked down upon the people who did it (it wasn't that big of a MUD so there was a little community). No one wanted to cheat because then the other players wouldn't help them in their quests or give them a little gold or spellup when they needed it. Coincidentally, there was no cheating. On the other side, I played on another MUD where the players laughed cheating off as "harmless" as long as it didn't interfere with game balance. On that one, there were level 2 guys running around with The-Armor-of-Ultimate-Invincibility-You-Can't-Hit
-Antipop
The discussion at hand was not about being able to compete, rather it was about cheating....hey, perhaps yours is the view held by the cheaters! Certainly, those who cheat rationalize their cheating as 'vigorous competative practices' or some such nonsense. I guess he who has the gold does make the rules. Maybe you are merely obnoxious but not off-topic.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
The article identified six types of cheating, but completely failed to identify any reasonable solution for the first one: reflex augmentation.
It is not terribly difficult to write a script to execute commands without the use of the mouse. In Quake 2, the only real effect was that some people had godlike aim - and this was usually pretty easy to spot.
But consider what reflex augmentation could do in Warcraft 2, for example. One could write a script that caused the "mouse" to "click" on your Town Hall and Barracks, automatically creating peons and ogres at a set rate, while you controlled everything else.
Would this even be possible to spot?? From the server side, it would just look like someone had insanely good reflexes. And, of course, it would be easy to tone it down just a little - occasionally have your script "mis-click" just to the left of the town hall, put in tiny delays, etc.
It seems to me that the only way to prevent reflex augmentation would be to force the player to play on someone else's computer with a very restrictive account... any thoughts?
"Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he deems himself your master."
Jeez, I thought I just sucked. Now I know better
Seriously, I think all those CS players out there can testify to how hard it is to prove someone was cheating (and even harder to prove you are not cheating). I've seen arguments constantly go back and forth about "how could you shoot me through the wall unless you were cheating" countered with "well, there is usually someone hiding there and I heard you walking over there".
The only sure way to limit cheating is to play on a server you know is honest and one that is monitored by an admin throughout the game. Even then, it's hard to tell, but at least if there's an admin there, as a last resort he can kick/ban both alleged cheaters and their whining accusers and let the game go on in peace!
-------
-------
"It was people! People soiled our green!"
The problem with the entire RPG genre of on-line games is that it isn't really the fun that hooks people in, it is the basic stimulus-response instinct that keeps people up all night playing Everquest or a MUD. By making you do things to get rewards (levels, new items, etc.), and by dishing them out a little at a time (with a fair ammount of randomization), these games tap into the same psychological conditioning scheme that makes old ladies spend their retirement checks all day at slot machines and BINGO games.
Since the satisfaction one gets in these games is usually the reward of a more powerful character, the mind begins to make the association of "better character == more fun", and cheating, or power-leveling, or "twinking" becomes very attractive.
The draw of these games is that they sort of let you live life in fast-forward. In a few dozen hours of gaming, you go from being a pathetic babe in the woods to being a massive warrior or wizard. Cheating speeds this up even more. It's a logical extention of the persuit of the goals the game establishes, really.
You don't often see the kind of rampant cheating that prevailed in Diablo 1 or Ultima Online when you are playing the FPS games. It seems that the shooters have acquired a sort of sports culture. To cheat at Team Fortress would be a lot like cheating at a pick-up basketball game. Neither side has more fun as a result, because the rewards of player-vs-player gaming comes from the joys of testing your skills against other people. Cheating in such situations is boring for both the cheater and the victim, even among younger kids.
It seems to me that the challenge that lies before those who wish to write on-line RPG's is to get a little farther away from the "kill monster, get a treat" format that is so common to these games. Good storytelling is helpful; nobody cheats at games like Myst. Creating a social environment that facilitates less of a "who's got the biggest *" mindset would also reduce cheating dramatically.
Mind you, I'm not saying that the typical hack-and-slash, smash-and-grab RPG does not have its place. I wore out a mouse on the first Diablo, same as the next geek. All I am trying to say is that game designers ought to start thinking beyond it, now that the current technology allows them to explore a lot of new avenues.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I say that if people really wanted to play the game they would, and wouldn't need to cheat. The trick is, NOT TO TAKE ONLINE GAMING THAT SERIOUS. That said, cheat at Quake III and I'll f**k you up, bitch.
lol
lf.o
Another fun AoE cheat, if I recall correctly, happened if you loaded one of your villagers onto an enemy's transport ship. Not only could you lead the transport around into your warships' waiting guns (the ship follows the villager so he can board), but your villager when on the enemy transport would be invisible. Off the map. No team-color indicator in the little map window. So unless your opponent saw you board the ship (unlikely) or happens to dump his transport on-shore, you could hide for the entire length of the game until the other players go mad trying to find you and quit.
bah...read up on your history. People have been cheating, stealing, mudering sons (and daughters)-of-dogs since we got out of the trees (or got kicked out of the garden of eden, your call)
It's far more constructive to find ways of protecting ourselves from the assholes in life without hurting the innocent (i.e. writing code that's harder to crack, writing games that are harder to cheat in, finding ways of detecting cheaters and warning others about them, etc) than to whine about a bunch of values that never have really existed.
In massively multiplayer online games, most notably MMORPGs, integrity is everything. If people can't trust the integrity of other characters, they won't bother spending the time to build them. I think a lot of attention needs to be paid about how to keep server-side certain pieces of critical data.
First, the tradeoff: anything you keep server side on a trusted server is safe. Anything you load client side you can assume for the sake of argument will be possibly modified by a player. So, let's take a MMORPG: you have characters, monster, and various abilities all interacting. What is responsible for the integrity? The server needs to be. First, the all important player character should be totally stored server-side. No information about stats/abilities/etc is kept locally, and the server never reads any from the client. It just sends a scenario and accepts commands. A pristine client interprets options from the server to provide an interface, but just because you locally manage to send a "super fireball" command when you only have a regular "fireball", doesn't mean the server should parse that. It should obviously return an error. (and probably flag you for some sort of observation, cheater!)
In any event, the dichotomy between client and server matches that between cause and effect -- never let clients dole out effects, only accept input.
On to the more difficult problem, which is when the information you pass to the client is more than they should have, based on the fact that you cannot transmit it as-needed due to bandwidth/cpu/latency limitations. This is where innovation needs to occur. Things like handing over partial maps, or possibly breaking maps/info up into smaller pieces and giving them all out encrypted, then handing decryption keys over real time. (And this would be an art in itself? Would 16-bit XORs work? Or would someone find a way to analyze all 65k combinations for consistency and break through in sufficient time to gain an advantage?)
In a game which was not time-sensitive, obviously, this stuff should be kept server side. For example, I've never played age of kings, but I've played HOMM2/3, which are turn-based strategy games. In those cases, all data could be kept server-side, other than the revealed portion of the map. Because the players play each turn in succession, time is not a real issue. A few seconds for pulling data is not that important.
Anyhow, good article. This is definitely one of the biggest problems facing MMO gaming, and as multiplayer becomes more important to games, and as more games go MP-only, this will be critical. Bandwidth and lower latency will help alleviate the problem, but there's a lot of room, I think, for clever protection from cheaters.
Kindly finish jacking-off so we don't have to read more inane, sicko-sexual comments.
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
I love playing Half-life, and I figure if I break even (Kill/Deaths) it's pretty good. You have to figure if there's 12 others trying to kill you, then that's REALLY good actually.
Some people just don't see it that way and/or are too egomaniacal to accept it, so they cheat. They look at the 3-Kills, 7-Deaths stat and can't live with it.
But, like I said, it doesn't matter why they do it. The fact that there is wide spread cheating in what is percieved to be a close-knit gamers' culture, makes outsiders seriously wonder if we aren't all screwed up.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
...in Doom/Doom2, when doing single-player.
I mean, I was playing Doom in order to blow off some steam. The last thing I need when I'm trying to relax is to worry about someone killing me. So iddqd and idkfa it was. To my credit, I was playing at Nightmare lever wth mosters respawning every 8 seconds. But that was the idea - infinite carnage. You'd finish a level with 5000% kills...
I would never cheat on a multiplayer game. I do get really pissed off when people accuse me of cheating just because I got them 20 times and they haven't got me.
I get really annoyed when playing a FPS+Strategy game like Tribes, where you can deploy turrets, drop mines, etc. People accuse you of cheating for actually using the resources on the game! It's rediculous.
--
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is kinky.
Cheats are a downright manipulation of software.. thats hacking. And i respect that people can manipulate software bugs to their advantage. That is, untill cheats become more popular. Then its just script kiddie software:)
--
Slartibartfast:"Is that your robot?"
Marvin:"No, I'm mine."
I'm not sure if this is all that new. When I played D&D circa 1982-85 there were all sorts of folks who would have +6 longswords, magical armor, etc.. Quite often we'd meet individual players who had crafted their characters by writing in their stats. I.e., STr 14 is too low, erase and make it 18+2. They'd get upset if we told them that they couldn't play their characters.
I also remember the Ultima series on Apple II's and Ataris and how easy it was to boost characters. Of course, these games weren't multiplayer then.
Your open source and free software comment was a joke, right? Here's a little substitution game:
[blank] causes declining morals and the end of civilization.
a) Dungeons and Dragons (1980's)
b) Heavy Metal Music (Tipper Gore)
c) The Internet (Bush)
d) DeCSS (mpaa)
e) Catcher in the Rye
f) Jazz Music
g) Television
Damn. I must be morally corrupt and on the way to hell.
To solve the cheating problem we can take a lesson from game theory. Most people will only cheat if it benefits them. Most people will not play with others who cheat. We cannot keep people from trying to gain an advantage. Some of these advantages, like convincing people to give up equipment with promises of sex, are a gray area. Others, like hacking the code, is more clear. In either case, it is important for all players to know who the cheaters are. If cheating is obvious, then the players can do something about it.. Often, these cheaters will learn not to cheat, and sometimes will be accepted back into the game. Many of us have already gone through this process. I think it is important to set up Multiplayer Games with these realities in mind.
The previous generation servers, that the earliest branches of chessd are based off of, solved this problem by what they call "timeseal". They distributed a closed source binary for a bunch of platforms to their users, and should they choose to use them, it would use the MOVE command in such a way where it would trust the time reported. This was a half assed solution, at best. Besides being easily reverse engineered, anyone who knows how to use their system's "date" command can fool it.
The crux of the matter is, at least in chessd's case, that we can't stop cheating. We can pretend to stop people using timers, but there's no way in heck we can stop people who use a chess engine to analyze their position, etc. Hence, in our rewrite we will be implementing a "trust" system. Either the user trusts the client and risks playing a cheater, or trusts the server and bites the lag bullet. We will, of course, be doing _some_ checking on the trusted moves to make sure they aren't obviously faked. (No negative times!)
We don't think that an E-Bay style recommendation system is needed, because frankly, the server admin can always ban someone who they have good reason to believe is cheating.
In conclusion, you should trust your opponent out of good faith. If you can't, you can either trust the server and bite the performance bullet, or not play at all.
-bugg
The point is, often cheaters (in certain types of games) will end up being punished automatically, because online games just aren't fun unless you have someone to play against, and no one likes playing against a cheater.
There has not even been one feeble eep from people who cheat, on this message board. This has been entirely a one sided discussion.
Now that is pure boolshit. Some of y'all would like to cheat if you could, but the fact is some of you don't want to be honest about it.
Cheating in games is nothing more than an extension of how people cheat on tests, and worst of all, how people cheat to get ahead in life. Yes. People are known to lie, steal, espionage and sabotage their way ahead in life. It is the dark side of human nature.
That is why we invented the words treacherous and untrustworthy. Because, as Blade said, someone is always trying to skate uphill.
========================
63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I remember searching the code to Adventure (Colosasal Cave) in hopes of getting me out 'You are in a twisty maze of passageways, all alike.'
Heck anything that gets kids into programming, can't be that bad of a thing.
For nostaliga, go download Adventure: Adventure
(From the Article..very interesting. read on) An FPS aiming proxy works like this: The proxy program is run on a networked computer and the player configures it with the address of the server they are going to play on. They then run the FPS game on another machine and connect to the proxy machine, which in turn connects the game to the server, acting just like an Internet packet router.
:)
The only hitch is that the proxy monitors and attempts to decode all of the packets it is routing. The program keeps track of the movements and locations of all the players the server is reporting to the game, building a simple model. When the proxy sees a Fire Weapon command packet issued by the cheating player, it checks the locations and directions of all the players it is currently tracking and picks a target from them. It then inserts a Move/Rotate command packet into the stream going to the server in front of (or into) the Fire Weapon command packet that points the player straight at the selected target. And there you have it: perfect aim without all the mouse twisting. (End of Article)
I just cant help thinking, these guys are so desperate about cheating. All this effort could have been spent on building something productive or learning how to use the mouse with the keyboard and kicking bots ass. Why cant we just learn to lose sometimes. Why is winning so important ? I have had my ass kicked by bots and humans alike, but I jump right back up and rail his sweet ass to kingdom come. Gaming is not all about winning, but its about perspiration that drips from your eyebrows, but you cant wipe it off, because you know your enemy is out there, seeking you out with a railgun combined with the power of Quad Damage, with an ethereal blue shadow to his skin, and you wish you were somewhere else...
Rapid Nirvana
Or how would Neo dodge bullets or bend spoons in The Matrix???
Yes I've used the map hack on Starcraft- not to cheat, but to give myself a fighting chance because cheating is so widespread on BNET. The whole balance of power concept from that Star Trek episode where Kirk in response to the Klingons arming one side of a warring faction, broke the rules and armed the other side in order to create an equilibrium. It's a never ending cycle because everytime a patch is released, the new hack follows in a matter of days. Maybe trying to cut corners for that edge is just human nature.
RPG's encourage kids to live in a fantasy world.
etc.
Like adults, children are very good at distinguishing fantasy from reality. Many children play games (computer-based and otherwise) in which they can fly, yet relatively few of them attempt this in the real world. Either you fail to grok this, or you have an extremely low (and deeply incorrect) estimation of the intelligence of children.
Sailing over the event horizon
one of the most annoying things is when people become ghosts in Quake 3 Arena. Somehow by overrunning the buffer, they can make it so they can't be touched. I will usually leave a server as soon as I see one. this is why I will be buying Unreal. (I only play Q3 demo).
As someone without a cable/DSL/anything above 33.6, I have little interest in multiplayer gaming. I typically buy games only for single player only.
It drives me insane when I hear an announcement that X game is delayed to correct a few multiplayer cheat bugs. *I DON'T CARE*. Why do I have to sit and wait because some poor attention-starved loser wants to cheat on a part I will never use?
Add to that the added insanity (disclaimer: I believe single player games should allow me to cheat my damn brains out - i bought the game, let me do what I want with it) that sometimes developers disable cheating entirely in the game as a way to deal with the multiplayer bugs.
How are they going to solve that? Sell two separate versions of the game? I'd also expect it to be cheaper than the single+multiplayer version.
Is there any reason why this can't be done? Or am I, as a single player, destined to be ignored due to the complaints regarding a game I don't even play?
I think that most people forget that the "kids" playing these RPGs are not your impressionable 5 or 6 year old but teenagers and young adults. Seriously, do you think a young kid, even if he's a little older like 8-9, could get a handle on the complex AD&D rules? Or play even the simplier CRPGs? It's not very likely (or common). The little kids I know play Nascar and football games on their computer, the teenagers play Diablo II and Icewind Dale. For "real" RPGs, the little kids have never heard of AD&D or Magic The Gathering while the teenagers play them for fun. It doesn't go beyond that. I can see a little kid being influenced by their thief character in Diablo II (At the store: "I'll be just like Goron the Thief and steal this piece of candy!") but the teenagers know better. Teens are not as stupid/niave/impressionable or whatever as adults seem to think. Give us some credit, playing a stupid game on your computer or sitting around with friends playing AD&D does not make teens lie, steal, and cheat. It does let us have a little fun.
-Antipop
vs.
The "hacking cheater, who opens the binary in a hex editor, actually groks what's in there, and figures out the cheat codes, AND mabye WRITES the very patches that he cheats with.
The first kind, is really kind of contemptable. And I, for one, doubt that anyone really buys into his "sk1ll3z".
But the second kind... well hacking up the executable of someone elses game (and generally the source is NOT available in MOST games)... that takes GENUINE skill. And not only to I NOT hold these guys in contempt, but I think that we could agree that THESE guys are due some respect. Patching executables is a dying art in this era of fast and smart compilers, linkers, and assemblers. Hell, most people would never even THINK to even LOOK at an executable in an editor, much less CHANGE anything. My kudos to the guys who can still do it.... and do it well.
john
Resistance is NOT futile!!!
Haiku:
I am not a drone.
Remove the collective if
Imagine all the people...
I didn't get that message from it. I don't think it is evil to hack on a game and find its weakenss. It IS evil to use that knowledge to screw with an unsuspecting person's game. Well, at least it is rude. I've considered writing a Battlezone bot just for the fun of it, but you can be darn sure I would have let other players know it was a bot they were playing against.
In the end, I decided to write my own game instead (or more correctly, a game toolkit). Sorry about sneaking in that shamelessly self serving plug. :)
Cheers,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Looks like "Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, Select, Start" has been the downfall of human kind.
Why not skip the technical solution and go for the social one? Sort of like Advogato's trust model, or maybe more like PGP's key exchange mechanism. I trust Anna, who trusts Bob, so I trust Bob. Stuff like that. If someone cheats, you don't trust them. That way you don't have to trust everyone explicity, but you still have a wide pool to play from. Perhaps this is a bit too complicated for the average FPS-player (I'm not sure it could be implemented to where I thought it was easy). Do any games have solutions like this? Of course, such a model could possibly be abused and would put new players at a disadvantage (aren't they already, though?).
There is no inconsistency.
Hacking suddenly becomes a bad thing? Nope. Hacking is good and always will be. If anything, the article just re-asserts the chant "There is no security through obscurity."
Neither, but an open source program is preferable. :-) And in the context of games, open source immediately ends even the pretense of client-side security, so that it can be addressed. With closed source, there will always be some people who aren't sure, who think maybe it really is secure. That is the kind of environment that the cheaters want.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Also, most of the "security through obscurity" that was mentioned dealt not with hiding how something was done, but with making it hard enough to locate data during any single session that the usefulness of that data is gone by the time it is found. Even if the game were completely "Open Source", every suggestion made is relevant; the author essentially acknowledges that the software will be so thoroughly analyzed by some people that they might as well have the source code.
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
I don't see how there could be any solution to this. In theory, you could take your cheating all the way to a massively complicated AI you plug in between the machine the game is running on, and the keyboard, mouse and monitor you see.
There's also no solution to having more information than you're supposed to -- how about turning up the brightness on your monitor? How about using video drivers that allow you to up the gamma? Maybe automatically adjust the levels so that contrast is perfect?
There's stuff you just can't control. But the stuff you can't control isn't necessarily the interesting part of the game. I don't play video games because I'm always insanely frustrated by stuff like why my peons seem to have such pathetic AI. Try to design the game so that cheating doesn't matter, rather than trying to make cheating hard, and you've got a great game. Imagine -- how could you cheat at Sim City? You can't (other than trivially: more money, etc), because the decisions you make in Sim City are decisions that a computer can't (currently) make.
On the other hand, testing your skill in spotting stuff on a dark monitor screen, or in getting the mouse just perfect, isn't all that interesting.
The best strategy I can see so far is to keep the authoritative simulation on a central server. Game character data would have to be stored and authenticated by some central authority as well. My vision for a MMRPG involves a network of virtual worlds running on many servers, and that makes the who cheating issue even more complicated. Anyone have any thoughts to share on that?
BTW, you can check out my SDK at www.gridslammer.org.
Later,
Thad
The Bolachek Journals
Cheating really hit a new low with Ultima Online. Because it was the first persistent MMORPG brought to the masses, it was really asking for it. Duping, house-breakins, hacked stats, 3rd party clients, etc. What really sucked was that there was no avoiding it (like you could in Diablo), and at times, due to the persistent nature, even forced you to play or respond back even when you didn't want to. You literally couldn't put the game down, and only later did I realize how pure evil this is. Once, I stayed up for 4 hours when I should have been asleep for work, defending my friend's house from a few players using the latest house-breakin exploit. So far, Diablo II is working out pretty well. Multiplayer on closed Battle.net seems to be clean, and coop play, even among anonymous players, can be trusted. It suffers from the resulting lag of anti-cheating measures(storing characters on there servers), but it's well worth it.
But isn't the purpose of the Doomsday machine lost if you keep it a secret!
This would not happen if playing these games honestly was as fun as it is supposed to be.
Not true.
All it takes is one person who considers it more fun to harrass their fellow players than to play the game.
These people will always exist, no matter how good the game is. Look at the slashdot trolls for an example.
Any system that has to deal with a vast number of people will have to protect itself against the small but occasionally very capable minority who will actively try to ruin it for everyone else. This applies to games, public forums, network administration, and many other aspects of life.
Cmon mods... This says nothing about online game cheating. Save your points for someone who has a point.
Boycott Shampoo! Demand REAL POO!
The first strategy is to encrypt very significant values in memory at all times. [...] A communicative [?] function such as XOR is your friend here, as it alters values upon storing, restores them upon reading, and is extremely fast. The whole point is to make it very hard for the hacker to find the variables he is searching for in the first place. Values the hacker would know to look for are not left around so that a simple scan can find them.
Take two images, XOR them, and search for the change in the key variable instead. *Splat!*
The paper was still on-topic and to the point. .EXE's.
Just because he used a term that 99% of readers will recognize (.EXE files) does not mean he was talking only about
Would you have preferred he said something like "different file types that can be run on different platforms as the game developers see fit" or some other annoyingly long phrase?
Who cares what file type he used for the example?
Out there on the web, we've got this site...
MUD-Dev is a professional and advanced amatuer discussion and design sharing forum, based around a mailing list and the kanga.nu domain. These topics are a regular subject of discussion there.
Follow this for a philosophical/technical discussion about trusting the client; includes significant amounts of contribution by Raph Koster (OU's Designer Dragon)
This is a currently running discussion about controlling "grief players"...
Take a look... there's some good stuff in here.
-- Still waiting for the Nike endorsement
Look at how many hacks and/or cheats that have been uncovered in Everquest. Nada.. Ziltch.. A few cheats that have been quickly 'repaired', but those that resided in the 'buisness logic' of the game.
;-P
One has to ask how they did it. And I can tell you one thing, it wasn't with client side logic.
They do virtually *EVERYTHING* that this article says is a big nono, or simply not possible. Yet they are successfull. They take some addition precautions as well, such as not allowing the app to run minimized, therby making it a *little* harder to hack while running. They encrypt all local files, and do a CRC check on them. If they fail, they update them. All communications is encrypted, and yet they still maintain decent framerates..
Granted, their framerates aren;t their selling points, but the game is playable with *hundreds* of people in the same zone..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Now i'm not real sure what lesson should be learned from that, but i do have a point to make :) The whole 'stimulus-response' deal is incorrect for PK situations in RPGs. You mentioned FPS games where cheating is not as rampant, but what were the Diablo cheats all about? PK. In D2 a lot has been done to stop this, and i think it will be rather successful. Blizzard doesn't really care if you cheat and add skills/stats/items to your character, but the problem is when you use those abilities against another player. Draw your own conclusions.
-Elendale (*sniff* i love the smell of burning karma...)
Karma burn coming
As i meta-troll again
IANAT (I Am Not A Troll)
Perhaps Godlike aim could be controlled with multiple target zones, having protected and armored target zones, etc. So players would be able to customize the 'avatars' to wear armor or force fields in such a way that the cheater can't 'automatically' aim on the lesser protected fields. Of course the cheat program can probably always keep track and start 'aiming' for the less protected fields, but then again, the smart game would have the players always compensating anyway to beef up the most attacked region.
And about the 'script' for WC2? Shouldn't that be a feature of the game!?! Shouldn't we be able to automatically, by default, produce peons and ogres, etc? Civ had this, in a very rough way. Then it's level on all sides, and becomes a game of skill and planning, instead of reflexes.
Take away the reflex penalty/bonus, and reflex augmentation is not part of the game.
In FPS, that may be impossible because the game is so heavily reflex based anyway!
Bye!
GPL Deconstructed
I think someone should make a persistent world game designed for programmers. Instead of having them focus their energy destroying the experience for other players, why not make a game that encourages programming/hacking - in fact it requires it.
That is, all the entities in the game are controlled by computer programs, which are written by the players. The programs can run remotely on their machines and make request over the network (with some human guidance) or they can run 24hrs a day on a Java Servlet on the server.
The idea of programmers writing robots for a game isn't all that new. A long time ago there was C Robots. About 8 years ago Dave Taylor and I got our start in the gaming world by running the National Programming Contest for IEEE. This contest had a fresh new game every year that was played by client programs and run on the IBM AIX platform (they gave us free machines). Our contest were simple because contestants only had one weekend to make a client, but I can imagine a much more complex and interesting world for clients to play in.
What is kind of new here is the idea of a persistent world. As players get more advanced they can have their characters spawn new ones. A computer program can control 10 people almost as easily as 1. And computer programs can play 24 hrs a day, but human players have to sleep. And for someone looking to make money - you could charge for "hosting" the client program.
-- Virtual Windows Project
They get ahead by lying to those people, cheating those people, stealing from those people.
Isn't this how politics and the corporate world works?
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
This whole issue comes down to a simple matter of "consensual crime". So long as all the people involved are party to the "misconduct", and none object, then no-harm-no-foul. It is when one or more persons are cheated out of a fair experience that it becomes a problem.<p>
I will stop repeating what Izaak said now...
"You can't win. You can't break even. You can't quit." -A. Ginsberg
Man, I recall my DikuMUD days over at CopperMud ... had a friend of mine who did the same thing, made a female character and got tons of help, even from some of the Gods in the game.
We did find a bug someplace, whenever someone in the game drank some weird potion, the game crashed and reloaded itself. So my friends decided to use it to duplicate a few items and some cash. So far, so good. Then one of them got greedy, and proceeded to crash the game about 25 times in a row, managing to gain somewhere around 120 mill gold coins, when 200 thou was more money that you could spend in an afternoon, and of course that pissed the Gods off.
The point is... there's always gonna be someone who finds and exploit the loopholes. ut them ore greedy they are, the faster they're caught and the faster the loophole's fixed.
Oh, those glorious days of Copper Diku...
(I'm ready for my 0 score now!)
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
More recently, we played a LOT of quake at our office, so naturally, we whipped up a server mod that made all damage quad if your player name was ABDUL (player named used by a co-worker who received much abuse). Good for many laughs.
AIM Alert! Read this if you use AOL Instant Messenger.
You almost made your point... While I agree that the declining morals/values issue needs to be addressed its not the fault of RPG's. It is almost entirely the parent of said childrens fault. These games are not for children. Period. Teenagers, well ok, depending on the values you have successfully instilled in them. If you let a television set raise your child then you will get what we as a society are seeing in the rise of violence amongst minors. Our generation had D&D and we didn't go around killing classmates and teachers yet D&D was more of a fantasy world than these games create because you have to visualize the deaths of your oppenents etc. On the flipside if you teach young minds the strategies that games teach (for arguments sake even checkers does this) they will have learned skills that puts them several steps ahead of most folks in business school. And wait a minute... is baseball(or other little league sports for the matter) better for your kids when parents are beating up (recently killing) other parents/coaches/umpires because they disagree with the calls? Many of the little league systems could even be blamed for the rise in the use of steroids because the children are being taught to win at all costs. I think not. I would say the best activity for children to participate in is martial arts training (don't even bother with the 'thats violence' retort) as long as your not a 'little league' small minded parent who puts thier kids in tournament karate events(see above note on parental behaviour) for selfish reasons like pressuring your kids to perform.We are bringing up children in a society where they are encouraged (in school none the less) to turn thier parents in if the parents use corporal punishment and children can divorce themselves from thier parents etc. The problem goes much deeper than the proverbial scratch in the surface mentioned here though, 'Blame Shifting' is on the rise. People can't believe that its thier own fault thier kids are the way they are so they need scapegoats to blame for thier inaddequate parenting. Parents sued Judas Priest and Ozzy Osborne for this kind of lunacy in the 80's becuase thier kids committed suicide. Hence, it is much easier to say its so and so's fault rather then thier own. Disagree? Read your own post and then take that magnifiying glass of self-righteousness and point it back at yourself. Like I said the blame is on the parents, a lack of parenting combined with a lack of discipline for innappropriate actions not society, not rpg's, not even music or television.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
I believe that the people who produce cheats to games do so for different reasons than the people who use cheats use them. The person creating a cheat might want to see how a particular program works for knowledge's sake, might enjoy reverse-engineering for its own sake, might want to demonstrate his coding skill to others, might want to get a little advance knowledge about the game offline before he goes online and makes a tough decision. (Example: how to spend skill points in Diablo 2. This is a crucial decision that, due to poor documentation, must be made with relatively little information - unless you create a level 93 character of your class offline just to find out.) He might even want to abuse the system and cheat, but I speak from experience when I say that mostly, by the time you're done reverse-engineering the game structures you're interested in, it's no longer that interesting to play with the cheats.
And once you're done, you might want to distribute your cheat so you can get a little credit for your skill - but don't. It's the losers who download your cheat and use it to ruin the game for everyone else you have to be worried about.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
When I have Quad Damage, the last weapon I consider is the railgun!
Anyway, it's pretty fun to reverse engineer stuff. (try it some time!) The person who first did it probably wrote the proxy as a "proof of concept" and then less scrupulous folks adapted it for actual cheating.
i, for one, don't give a shit about cheating because whenever someone i'm playing is cheating, i can walk over to their computer and kick them in the good 'n plentys. let me explain:
internet multiplay is crap! stop doing it! everybody cheats, we know this. you don't know the people you're playing against (this, i'm sure, is not true in many cases, but i'm generalizing) so what fun is it to win? basically, all that internet play does is foster agressiveness and competitiveness in people-- two things i personally can live without. internet play is also difficult for modem users who are up against HPBs all the time.. gosh, what fun!
the solution is, get some friends together and start having LAN parties. start playing with people you know. multiplayer games are so much more fun when you get to talk about it afterwards over a beer or a mountain dew or whatever the hell you want to drink: "dude, that one part where you bounced off my rocket over the lava and onto jimmy's head was RAD!" "yeah, rad". i know, sounds lame, but you all know it's fun.
basically, i'm giving a call to gamers to quit being lazy sax of shznit and start organizing LAN parties in your town: they kick ass, and you could probably use the socializing (if you're anything like the hermits i normally party with)!
thanks for your time, sorry if i was overly-crude
grizzo: totally insecure, but very convenient.
I think you may be lost, buddy. The tent revival meeting is 2 blocks down on your left. If you hurry you can still catch the story hour. Tonight's story: Abraham and Isaac: A charming bible story teaching real family values.
"Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey?"- Peter Gabriel
Someday, you'll be all grown up, and will realize that highschoolers are children.
... but it's still got some typos:
"A 'communicative' function such as XOR is your friend here..."
I realize this is (only slightly) offtopic, but the article mentioned that in the original Diablo cheating was rampant. I've been playing Diablo II for a while and I don't believe I've encountered any cheaters. The CD key system and requiring Closed characters to be stored on their servers seems pretty secure to me, but I'm curious, anyone have thoughts/comments on how cheat-proof it actually is?
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try."
I used to be one of those to cheat at on-line games. I am too busy with real work to bother with on-line games today, but back in High School I did it all the time. Why did I? Not because I wanted to win, but to get the 'WHAT THE @#%$@#" reaction out of people. It was also a test of my programming and reverse engineering skills. Believe it or not, some on-line games cheat themselves*. Another question to ask is what is a cheat? Is it cheating to find the exact mathematical relationships between each object in a game, when the game does not reveal this information in its documentation? (How many hit points each weapon does to another player, how fast does a villager gather food from fishes vs berry bushes). Is it cheating to write a script enters text for a user in a MUD (Either for macros, or automating boring tasks)? Is it cheating to have a T1 when you are playing against people using 28.8k modems? Is it cheating to turn up the contrast and brightness on your monitor? For those that are technically minded there is always the lure of using technical skills to assist in the game. Trying to come up with a cheat/loophole is half the fun. May of the RST games are nothing more than optimization problems (what is the fastest build sequence to get to the imperial age). One of my favorite cheats the article did not cover: PRNG synchronization: Examine 'random' events in a game and use them to find the seed for the random number generator. I used to do with all the time with BBS games. People always wondered how I managed to make so much money in the games casino. * Trade Wars had a casino in the bar. Each person drew three cards from 0-9. You had to place each card when received into one of three slots. The person with the highest score won. The dealer cheated. If he/she/it drew a 0 it would be ignored and another card drawn. So the odds of the dealer drawing a 0 is 1 in 100, instead of 1 in 10 like everyone else.
After reading the article, I'm just depressed. But, I had kind of a neat idea for hitting cheaters back - hard. The wailing and gnashing of teeth would be heard far and wide...
Now, in Quake III, each player has a unique CD key that identifies them with the master server. This is used to prevents piracy.
Imagine if some of the countermeasures described in the article were implemented in a really subtle way... not to prevent cheating, but to just detect it, and detect it carefully and explicitly. Let that system run for a few months or so and collect a big blacklist of the cheater's unique CD keys, without anyone knowing about it.
Then the sting... (insert evil laughter here...) ban them from playing in regular games. Set up another "master" server just for the cheaters, listing servers that explicitly allowed cheating, and only let the cheaters play on those servers.
Oh yeah... make sure the delay before people got put on the blacklist was long enough that the fsckers couldn't return the game and get their money back.
Maybe that would teach the little bastards! Please, ID software! Do this for DOOM 2000!
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
If you have lots of dumb clients, and only a central server that is authoritative, cheating can be limited a lot. You can require unique CD keys to make sure a player has bought (or really stolen - not just copied) the game, and can only connect once, not several times. You can store all user data (stats, characters, etc.) on the server.
But I don't like that approach. It might eliminate cheating, but it will limit playing, too. CD keys make it impossible to share the game with your family and/or use it on several PC's you own. Central storage makes it impossible to keep the character for yourself. You own it, but you don't. If some crackers take down the central servers, nobody can play, and you might lose your characters. There's no way to make a backup. And if the company goes out of business or just ceases support for the game (pretty likely when the successor is released - or the successor's successor), then the game will be dead, no way to play over the net anymore. If it's an online-only game, it's gone for good, unless they release a final patch to get rid of those limitations.
It's also about heritage, and gaming culture, will we be able to keep our games? I can still go back and play the games I bought over a decade ago. We should make sure the same can be said about the games we buy today!
So my opinion is: Don't accept the limitations. If the limitations are necessary, only accept them if they will be removed after the game's life ends. If we as the customers don't object to the restrictions placed on our games, the companies will restrict them further, obviously hurting consumers. Pay-per-play is especially bad, because once you stop paying, you'll eventually lose everything you did pay for before...
-- Eavy (: Linux Is Not UniX
Maybe the server could estimate the skill of individual players (tracking them over time) and assign each player a rank. The idea is that you'd be allowed to play only other players in the same rank as yourself. This would pretty quickly put all the cheaters into the same (high) rank, possibly along with a few genuinely great players.
This solution has a few problems of its own:
Still, I think those drawbacks are minor compared to the current situation, which a lot of people are clearly unhappy with. It does help solve the problem as I see it, that of lamers who just want to beat whomever they play against, by making it much more likely that if X and Y are playing each other at all, they will be playing with more or less equal skill.
--
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
Surely I'm not the only one who remembers smart-ass Lord British getting fried in Ultima Online? ;-)
The exe looks for information first in folders in the same folder as the exe, then in a compressed file homeworld.big. If you get a special app called...(voice fades out)
(people can be heard snoring)
(fades back in)...once you have saved the folders, all you have to do is open the
Homeworld has no way to combat this in multiplayer sessions except display "cheat detect" at the top of the screen. I, personally, beefed up my attack two points for most ships. It has no noticable effect on gameplay...(drones on some more)...
Are there any other games like this??
yotty50k@techie.comhttp://yotty.freeservers.com
Then, the trolls showed up. They mocked the Slashbots that drove the intelligent posters away. In a desparate attempt to foster useful conversion, and because he couldn't stand to see people make fun of his site, he implemented moderation. This has been nothing but a disaster. Rather than act as a catalyst for spot-lighting the few intelligent messages, it allowed the Slashbot Karma Whores to pat themselves on the back for useless, mindless drivel. But, the trolls fought back. They organized and attacked brilliantly. They posted hysterical rants, mocked the repetitions, UNFUNY Slashbots (you Slashbots used to think "Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" was "Insightful", not "Inciteful"), and fictional opinions designed to trigger the knee-jerk response of the hive-minded Slashbots. They are entertaining and artistic. Now that the old guard has mostly abandoned Slashdot for smaller communities, the trolls are the best thing about Slashdot. Frankly, they are the only good thing about Slashdot.
I no longer come to Slashdot to learn and share. I come here for a cheap laugh.
Thank you, trolls.
I used to play multiplayer Quake classic a lot . . . eight hours a day one summer. I made some binary patches to the Linux client, both to enable cheats in multiplayer and fix some minor bugs (players that weren't visible in the score list, messages with carriage returns in them, bogus shirt colors in team games, etc).
I played with the cheats for a while, and discovered some interesting things. The good players could sometimes tell that I was cheating (I never denied it if someone guessed). The cheats often made the game less interesting, because there was less suspense (I only played with rendering hacks). And most interesting... even after I stopped using them, I was a better player from my experiences with them, because I had a better grasp of how other players acted; which routes they took on particular maps, how they evaded me when they thought I couldn't see them, stuff like that.
The stuff I was using was clumsy enough that when I finally found really good opponents (Clanring DM people), it kept me from improving. So I stopped using them, even the lighting hacks, which I think a *lot* of other players were achieving by editing the maps. And eventually I was good enough on my own that people called me a cheater anyway--a high compliment, IMO.
The article has some good advice for game developers; but I think that some forms of cheating, especially in FPS games, cannot be prevented. Determined hackers can always write their own client, or wrap the rendering layer nowadays. The best you can do is carefully filter the information sent to network clients, so that they don't get info about objects that should be hidden. And I can chime in to say that it's always unfair anyway--because of differing lag.
And for RTS games, I think a design goal should be that a human player can learn to be better than a computer. Definitely true for Starcraft, but I would like an option to write my own AI, and an arena where it can compete with other AIs... an RTS Core Wars :)
Java: the COBOL of the new millenium.
Unfortunately, all the empirical evidence I am aware of (barring one now-discredited study of TV and its effect on children) is against you, and not the original poster.
Children are not stupid. They are initially naive. They typically fully understand abstract concepts such as lying, advertising for personal gain, misdirection, and the difference between fantasy and reality at around age 6. Exposing children to conflicting data can only make them note the conflicts sooner.
I would not normally post on something as offtopic as this, but I get irritated when people assume children are stupid. Perhaps you should write your arguments down in words of two syllables or less, and see if they still convince you.
---
Part of the problem is that, currently, clans are synonymous of organized gangs fighting for domination. This intense competition makes cheating not only attractive to entire clans, but also to newbies that are faced by experienced players who have no incentive to help them.
A much more productive use of clans is to create a network of players that can be trusted, are fun to play with and have reliable internet connections. Since the concept clan is not about world domination anymore, arbitrary limits on the number of members disappear and the skills required for admission is minimal. The clan can then setup parallel games only opened to members, as well as a few open ones, for recruiting purposes.
A nice side effect of this organizational structure is that good players will naturally be attracted by the prospect of fun, competitive and lag free games.
Civilization is the process by which man frees himself from man. -- Ayn Rand
Children are *NOT* good at distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Geez, the number of times I see wholly ignorant people spewing that line in defense of letting kids have access to FPS, violent movies, etcetera.
Fantasy rules the child's life. The bogy-man under the bed, the magic of the shopping mall Santa, playing house, don't step on the cracks, Bambi dying.
Even a lot of adults don't have the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Look at the number of adults who believe that America grabbed the U571 submarine, or believe that UFOs exist.
It has nothing to do with intelligence and *everything* to do with naivete. Children don't have the life experience necessary to distinguish reality from fantasy.
In adults, it's more tempting to use the word "ignorance," but it's really the same thing: a naive person who hasn't the experience to know historical truth from Hollywood fantasy; or scientific methods versus wishful thinking.
At any rate, the bottom line is that anyone with experience with children or who spends a few minutes looking in a few child psychology books, will certainly understand that fantasy and reality are not easily distinguished by children.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is, at best, naive.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
I'll admit I'm not much of a gamer -- Other than Civ II, I enjoy watching more than playing, usually, because I'm so bad. My own incompetence aside, I am grateful to games for being the driving force in CPU/Graphics power on the PC platform over the past few years. Games create the mass market, and everybody benefits. Is it possible that the rise of online gaming will bring about a similar mass demand for applications w/ built-in network security checking? The paranoid geeks who've been clamoring for this sort of thing don't seem to have had much effect.
I hope gamers get ornery enough about cheaters (and generalize the lessons) to demand something more than the "optional" security of today's apps.
Kill, Tux, kill!
Oh wow. I just got back into Dallas from Siggraph 30 minutes ago and discovered my mailbox filling up with emails from the /. side-effect. Just a couple quick comments on the discussion....
0) This article first appeared in print in the June 2000 Issue of Game Developer Magazine.
1) I didn't come up with the title. I honestly couldn't think of a catchy title, so I let my editor come up with one. As far as nit-picking over the useage of "Hacker" and "Cracker" - don't sweat it. Yes, I know the difference.
2) The most important point in my mind is that multiplayer cheating hurts other human players and is an order of magnitude different from the things we do when playing solo (single player) games. When a person realizes they are on the receiving end of a cheat - that another human being wants to do that to them - it's a hugely distructive feeling.
2a) People walk away from games and badmouth them to their friends when they think they are getting screwed. The better selling your game, the more this matters.
3) Many people have been emailing me and posting about things I didn't cover. I really appreciate it though I do already have some of it. When I wrote the article I had to keep it to about 7000 words, so I only got to cover about 1/2 of what I wanted to. Given the reception it has received, there will likely be a second article on the topic.
3a) Keep the comments and emails coming - I will try and respond to all.
That's all for now. I really appreciate everyone's input and thoughts on the matter.
-Matt Pritchard
Take your racist evolution insanity and go to Russia or China where they'll appreciate your amoral views.
LOL isnt THAT racist? Parents, its Parents. Other influences also, but its certainly NOT hereditary, although you can have a long line of jerks teaching jerks how to behave.
Fear the government that fears your guns. Fear the government that fears your computers. Remove them from my email.
Apparently they have caught some people using ShowEQ. This is because the cheaters did something stupid, like saying "a level 28 guy just spawned on the other side of the level", something they could not possibly know. Or you jump off a boat in the middle of the ocean, point yourself in the direction of a building you need to get to (but can't see), swim for 10 minutes, and wind up at the building. You couldn't even see land, how did you know EXACTLY where the building was? If stuff like this happens repeatedly, they can easily catch people. But if you're careful, they'll never find out.
One way to stop this would be to encrypt the data stream. Then the hackers would need to do some work - they'd have to run a debugger on the Windows box (which could probably be detected), find the key, and decrypt everything. Or they could grab the data after it's received and decrypted (by modifying the program, or writing a VXD to peek at some memory). It would be much harder anyway, but at the expense of CPU time. For a client with a fast computer, this might not be noticable - but the server would take a significant performance hit.
After I turned the article in. That's what I get for staying up to 3am to finish the darn thing.
"There is no such thing as a cheat-proof game."
Page 541 of the excellent "Applied Cryptography" has a few protocols for fair coin tossing -- cheating is at best intractable. Apparently this idea has been extended to fair poker games, as well.
Perhaps it would have been better if I said to edit the code resources with resedit??
Or maybe to replace the masked rom with an EPROM after you hooked a 74Ls02 to the chip select line?
I just thought that everyone would understand what I meant....
-Mp
So you claim Slashdot's better now than it ever was. Let's take a look at the creme-de-la-creme (according to the $3 crack smoking moderators) of some recent stories:
+4, FUNNY? And less than a year after they bring AOL in line we'll see our first story about Micorsoft kerebosing up the new protocol. You've read about these things in history class, kids. Now you can see it as it happens.
+4, INFORMATIVE? If anyone is curious, 'Zvezda' means 'Star' in Russian, 'Zarya' means 'Dawn'. [note: not only do I think a dictionary post doesn't deserve +4, the fact that Zvezda=Star was already stated in the blurb]
+3 FUNNY? great... attach a 5km tether to that puppy and lets drag it around like a motorhome. ;)
+3 INFORMATIVE? They'll be basically 6 kinds of replies to this story: 1) I still don't know why we're wasting money on {tech} when people in {place} are {mode of suffering agreed to be bad}. We should be worrying about solving our problems here on Earth! 2) This is the coolest thing ever! The most magnificent achievement since {primitive yet crucial tech}. It's the first step towards {cosmic achievement}, just like {author} predicted. 3) Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these! 4) I shrug. I am so underwhelmed. Millions and millions of {currency} wasted so we could put more trash in space. It will last less than {hyperbole of brevity} and be as useless as {hyperbole of futility}. 5) Look up these links here. Yeah, I need the karma. 6) Not bad for a Pizza Hut flight.
The only thing that gives me any hope for slashdot is this topic, as the first 2 +5s are trolls. Shoeboy is a god.
And I've seen the trolls take down topics. The only reason Troll Day Tuesday doesn't happen anymore is that a few of the best trolls are busy with other projects/jobs. Saying that the trolls have little impact is rather ignorant.
Tired of whiney, karma-whoring, out of touch, UNFUNY slashbots.
I want Rob to make it so I can browse at +5/-1, and hide everything in between.
That, or make it so users can customize in their accounts whether TROLL is a penalty or a bonus.
Of course, that wouldn't be the best solution, as the $3 crack crowd DOESN'T KNOW WHAT A FUCKING TROLL IS! Spam is not trolling. Spam is OFFTOPIC or REDUNDANT. Aggrevated verbal abuse is not trolling. Verbal abuse is FLAIMBAIT. Trolling is posting seemingly legitimate messages that exagerate, misunderstand, or confuse an issue such that tons of people respond and moderator's go nuts.
With this "online-basteridizing" of the license, what's to say Microsoft can't turn Microsoft.net around on its customers? "You can't sell Windows 2001," MS decries, "because some of your settings our are on servers, and we own that part of the license". Do we sense a privacy issue exploding here?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
If Neo and Agent Smith were playing warcraft... Neo: "Ha! my Orcs just annialated you and you don't have any resources left." Agent Smith: "Pepperoni Pizza Pepperoni Pizza Pepperoni Pizza Pepperoni Pizza" Neo: "Wha?" Later... Neo: "Whoa!" Agent Smith: "I can't stand the smell of you." Neo: "Oh yeah? Maybe that's your pizza breath...What the?! Where did all these dudes come from?" Agent Smith: "Hee hee hee" Samuel L. Jackson: "Use the force *er* think of the spoon, Neo" Neo: "Huh?" Carrie-Anne Moss: "Follow the white rabbit, stupid." Neo: "Eh?" Audience: "Use this exploit to do a buffer overrun and modify the code on the fly" Neo "Oh." [Downloads exploit] "Dude! [Neo's invincible troll army destroys Agent Smiths regenerated troops. He pauses for a moment to reflect on the ramifications of the word h4x0r] John Travolta: "Now that's a tasty burger!" Neo: "Who are you?" John Travolta: "Sorry, wrong movie." Carrie-Anne Moss: "Battlefield Earth sucked"
"but I would like an option to write my own AI, and an arena where it can compete with other AIs... an RTS Core Wars :)"
d it3
You can.
http://www.camsys.org/cgi/download.cgi?id=scaie
I think there may have even been a tournament with just AI scripts.
Yes, cheating destroys the scene around a
multiplayer game. When you log on to a server,
and you know, somebody WILL cheat, the game just
sucks. It's really interesting, where many people
actually have the cheats from. a few from the
web, but really a lot from computer game
magazines. computer game magazines print cheats
for a multiplayer only game (i.e. the
Counterstrike modification for Halflife). And
what sucks most are clans whose players modify
the terrorists' and counter-terrorists'
textures to be able to distinguish them from a
far distance.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Come on now. Is this guy serious? I think he needs to get out more. This is not as serious a problem as this guy seems to think it is. He is acting as if cheating in multiplayer games is the moral decay of society instead of looking at it for what it is, some hackers having some fun. There is a limited number of people who, have the knowledge and will waste their time to reverse engineer a game simply to be able to cheat at it. If you are ever playing a game on-line and you start to get genuinly upset about someone, you suspect, is cheating it's time for you to shut the game off and get out of your halogen lit room in your parent's basement.
Take a look at This for an insight into how a group of security experts developed a nice method to figure out the workings of an online poker game despite the fact that the hidden cards were never send down the wire to the thin java client.
Rather they used the fact that the publisher shows off the thouroughness of their software by publishing the deck shuffling alogirithm. Now because this is seeded from the system clock it is possible apply the shuffle using all different values of the clock until you find which time is in sync with the server.
Clever stuff
So if you let the designers and the reflex augmentation proxy writers bang it out against each other for a while then we should have real, working AI up and running much quicker than otherwise :-)
TA
I am currently in the process of developing an open-sourced HTML based game. Many of people have told I am crazy. Cheating will be rampant and nobody will want to play. My therory goes a little something like this. CHEAT, STEAL, PLUNDER If the game lets you do it. If you get caught you will be punished severely. You see this is how life is. I hope to habour a enviroment in which the player can interact knowing that anyone CAN cheat but not neccasarly is cheating. This will have a great effect on the game. 1) People wont get upset when they see some cheat (they will want to find out how to do it themselves) 2) I will offer reward for the best "HACKS" and "CHEATS", so they can help me in testing. The way this will working is on a nortorous scale. Everyone will be be assigned X Honour points. If you are caught(or suspected of) cheating, these points will be taken away. You can earn points back by reporting the exploit. There will be certain areas (Holy Sanctum of Rest, Inner court of the Castle)in the game you cannot go unless you have a high enough Honour. Like wise I will have an underground (you have to cheat to get there). Any ideas are welcome. Jeff Smith Sheik Geek Enterprises
The posting above is just this
maybe it's b/c i'm new to online play (and to games in the last 10 years,) but i find the argument that internet multiplay is crap b/c people cheat asine. i enjoy internet play. when i'm gaming and i encounter people with 300 pings speaking german and playing on the same server as me it seems a little cooler, a little more worldly, and thus a little more open. maybe it's me, but sometime i hope that experiences like these can act as equalizers among people. divisions among ages, races, borders, etc can be diminished a bit. limiting yourself to LAN-only gaming is just that - limiting. and i for one hate limits as an afront to my personal freedom and right to choice, for anything, games included.
as for the argument that after-game discussion is fun when it's with people you know first-hand, i say, bah! ICQ, messages boards, etc. provide the same experience. granted it may be a little difficult to chat with someone from Taiwan if we have a language barrier, but often enough that is not the case.
of course, i read all the post on this article and get a little discourged. lots of age-ism, us vs. them mentality going on and i think that's sad b/c the original article seemed pretty unbiased.
so internet games? they rule and i hope that they continue to be a viable and blooming segment of games. LAN games have their place, as an addition to internet games, not a replacement of. play some of each and enjoy!
/* Half alive and half dead too, work is for suckers and the sucker is you. - "Half-life" by Local H*/
This is the reason I don't play Everquest. Lack of LAN playability.
But D2 is definitely fun over my personal LAN.
-Vel
All I can say is... Ultima Online
That is a game that was ruined quite early on by cheaters of many varieties. They had scripts in the form of 3rd party macro software. They had exploitable bugs in their inter-server protocol that allowed players to duplicate items (any number of gold pieces in a stack is considered one item, so gold could be duplicated en masse). They've had people trying very hard for a long time to get around the rules they threw in for the sake of "fairness". Cheater websites sprang up like weeds.
They never did anything about the root causes of the cheating. They left the recall spell in the game, so the world got really boring really quick. They have a system for distributing karma and fame numerically, but they screwed that up by giving the players a way to determine what their ratings were. They made it necessary to perform mindless tasks for hours to advance to any appreciable level, and they let players see exactly what level they're at.
Threed's First Law of Game Design - If you give people a goal, they'll shoot for it. If the goal is artificial, then artificial means will be used to achieve it.
(If 30 karma points grants a bonus, and people know how many points they have, you can bet your ass someone will figure out a way to get those points in a hurry, no matter how much hacking or whoring is needed.)
Remove the artificial goals, make the game interesting in and of itself and listen to the players. Don't be afraid to lose the entire "asshole" segment of your audience - the remaining players will be more loyal as a result.
--Threed-Looking out for Numero Uno since 1976!
When I bought Ultima Online, I believed I was in for a whole knew gaming experience. Unfortunately that experience degraded much the same way as all the other online games. I quickly found out that my computer was too slow to handle the game and other players were quick to take advantage. I was also the only one of my peers trying to play without cheating to try and actually get something out of the experience. But inevitavly the game just degenerated into the same mind numbing tedium every day and I grew sick of it.
Actually, I used to be an avid fan of the whole FPS genre as well and I also used to be quite good. But I hardly play anymore. I hardly ever play anything online anymore due to lack of interest. Main reason: the playing fields aren't level and they never will be. And that's just dull. Besides, doing the same thing over and over gets old. So why play? Does anybody still find online gaming fun and challenging? If so, I'd like to know why.
Fon2d2
And lest this be labeled a troll or flamebait, let me say that men are often guilty of the same things. And I'm not saying it's a bad thing, either -- consider that each party gets something they want out of the transaction. The seducer ets the prize, and the seducee gets the attentions of the seducer.
So it's all good in my book. For the record, however, I don't play online games at all, so I may have no right to comment.
In fact, I vaguely remember a cheat for Monkey Island II that let you instantly skip to the end (I think it was Alt-W). People will always want to cheat no matter how good the game is if only to see what happens.
Actually it was either 'B A' or 'B A B A'. But hey... not to brag, but a couple years ago I wired up the old Nintendo and actually tried to play Contra without the Konami code... much to my surprise, I could consistently finish the entire game without dying more than once or twice (ie play forever, since you get like five free lives from points while playing through the game).
J
To contradict you:
5 08.htm
http://washtimes.com/national/default-200072722
Conclusive is as conclusive does; there are people who believe there's no conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. Go figure.
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
While pedophiles who fool around with their stepdaughters should be considered normal, well-adjusted members of society?
Bullshit. Glad I don't know him personally.
Sarge