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Playing an FPS for Money?
IronChef writes "Ran across a web site where someone is attempting to combine online games and cash. The difference here is it looks like it's not some big tournament where everyone gathers and the top 3 out of a field of hundreds get paid, but a small group jumps into a server for a buck or two per head, and the winner cashes out on the spot." And you thought you swear a lot when you lag now!
I had a feeling about that, but I wasn't 100% positive. Thank you for clearing that up for both of us. Now, can we get back to the topic? Thanks...
Recently, a bill was introduced in congress outlawing gambling in any form over the internet. It died in congress. Laws saying the same thing exist in a few states. If you live in one these, urbanmercenary is clearly illegal, even though it is a game of skill (like poker and sports betting). Otherwise, it is very unclear. There is a law prohibitting placing bets over a phone line from somewhere where gambling is illegal and those *may* apply here. Also, I hope urbanmercenary is based overseas like all online poker rooms are.
The main issue with legality as far as these things go is not the gambling itself; you will not be tracked down for gambling online and arrested, Janet Reno's comments this week on 20/20 not withstanding. The issues are that the site may be shut down if it is based in the US (especially since there may be a lot of people playing who are minors) and, more importantly, that if you make a living on it you may have some big tax problems. Casino gambling is different because you can do everything in cash, but here everything you win will get deposited into your bank account, which will be hard to explain to the IRS.
Care about freedom?
I'd rather be lucky than good.
Started as games too. People like to see the best play. Its as simple as that. When computer games take off and have as much respect as pro Basketball/Baseball/Football, and as much entertainment value, people will hire you to play on their team, to play in their online stadium, simply because you are the best. Why do people pay to see grown men play with a little ball? Same reason gamers will eventually pay to see the BEST play the game.
Whooot
In the distance you hear an ominous moo.
If the company was like 5 people making card
game over the net, but this is 40 programmers
sweating away at the code to make sure that
you don't loose a fraction of the penny and
when you win, is when you used your skills
to steal coins frags, etc. Moderator should
look on the site and read thru it before +3 ing
the post.
Well I dont know about FPS but surely RTS games are primed for gambling. After all, these games deal directly with money/gold/energy. So instead of sending your little peon to collect gold or whatever, you just plug in your credit card and deposit a few dollars into your account. Maybe there's different levels of game play, where you can battle it out for $5 = 5000 credits or your can play a high roller game where $5 = 5 credits. Winner takes all. Maybe it costs 100 credits to create a tank and when the enemy kills the tank he gets 99 credits and the bank takes 1 or maybe you dont even need to take a cut because for every game that is played there will always be units on the winning side that are paid for but you dont get a refund for.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well since there's no feasible way to ensure a fair match, why not just let the bots go wild? Bring your best pet bot and fight it out with whatever the other guy's decided to bring along.
It's ideas like this that will get online accounts, micropayments, and stuff like that into the mainstream. It is looking like people won't pay too much to play games online, but throwing money into a pot with a chance to double it! OH YEAH! That will add spice to a game and make a great revenue model. Wish I had thought of this... So much better than on-line gambling, etc. Please note that these guys are Canadian, eh? Or at least the company is... :)
Looking at the screenshots I though maybe I saw some Quake-like images there... I am not a gamer so I don't keep up on these things (OBVIOUSLY) but have they done something with the Quake code or is this a new from-scratch product they developed?
--8<--
--8<--
GlobalRankings has a good safeguard mechanism in place to avoid cheating of stats-dependent games:
http://www.globalrankings.com
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Well, as they mentioned on the site, this counts as a game of skill rather than a game of chance, so it is not a form of gambling. Think of it as a laser-tag tournament - definitely more of a skill than chance game...
as most, IANAL...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
:-)
Sure, remember the Playstation version of Wipeout 2097? All the tracks were littered with Red Bull banners. Also there was a cute Genesis platformer a few years back called Cool Spot, sponsored by 7-UP. Your character was the red spot from the middle of the 7-UP logo with arms, legs and shades, and the bonus levels were set inside bottles of 7-UP where you had to ride up to the top on bubbles. Also, there was Zool, another cutesy platformer where you had to pick up Chupa Chups lollies for bonuses. I think in all cases, the advertiser's money resulted in a much better game (or maybe I never played any sponsored games that sucked); it's a shame it doesn't happen more often, to be honest, since I can't see that games developers wouldn't mind funding from somebody whose interest isn't solely in meeting the next milestone or publishing deadline. But as somebody else pointed out, I can't see many advertisers wanting to have their ads in games where their shiny logo could be splattered with gore
Matthew @ Bytemark Hosting
ok, so I make the check out to l33t-killer-d00d ...
"Fucking Hell, if you had a nickel for every time you lag-killed me ... oh, nevermind, you DO."
;)
--The Kid
The Citadel
Did you just read what you wrote?
1 cent for 5 minutes, not 1 dollar.
320 credits = $3.20 = $.01/credit.
Cheap(ish).
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
This has possibiliities . . . I've never played one of these, but if you place it in a "New Country" radio station, and I get to blow up the records (err, CD's), shoot the crew for the "Morning Moron" show, and maybe a couple of those purported "artists" who wouldn't recognize Hank Williams if he haunted them, and I'd be all over it.
Hawk, who prefers western, but also listens to real country.
"And if you don't like Hank Williams, honey, you can kiss my MLK%$)Y*(^)&*
err, not quite. Casino's take a cut of every pot.
I can't speak for the rest of the world, but in Nevada, the point of those players isn't to take you, but rather to provide enough players to have a game.
It's been a while, but I believe that casinos are required to identify which players work for them on request.
hawk, a displaced Nevadan
Cheating for money = fraud
Fraud is a crime. You can prosecute it. You can sue cheaters in civil court. You can seize their computers. You can take lots of money away from them. You can make the lives of a few cheaters miserable and scare off a bunch more.
It's like professional sports, but without all that exhausting exercise and all that other bad stuff!
I always wondered why noone has exploited the possibility of selling ad-space in the game... I think it would be about as effective as real world advertising.
Maybe you could even get advertiser sponsored game servers. I don't think I'd mind an occasional coke ad on the wall (or even product placements!!! Just like the movies.. ) in exchange for a nice, fast server to play on.
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
There are several things that could be done to prevent cheaters prospering, such as human "umpires", reputation measures, statistical analysis, and the like.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
How can you ensure that the company itself isn't cheating? couldn't they put their own bot in to kill the winner thus winning themselves the money ?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
The question isn't *if* these guys are going to get rich (they might, they might not), but who is going to be the first to do it right.
Forget about "legality". There are ways around that, and to start off with, nobody will notice this shit building in the background. Not until there is a huge splash in the press about some mum who thinks her kid is becoming obsessed (...blah blah blah: you should all know the pattern by now). By the time that there is a move control it through special legislation, it will have become too popular to stop by fiat. Besides, with servers in Antigua, who gives a fsck what the Americans think?
So the issues to be addressed are: what business models to use, what kind of games are most "immersive"/addictive, and can you turn this kind of thing into (virtual) reality TV? I mean, once you have "star" players and teams, will people be interested enough to either lurk and watch the pros at work, or sit back and watch it on cable with some popcorn. The potential for drama and soap-opera appeal should NOT be underestimated here.
Personally, I want the Mechwarrior universe online, with battles on Solaris and House feuds, etc. Any genre is open for exploitation here, with its own audience. Gamblers and cheaters will just add spice. (besides, if you're a smart game service, you HIRE the cheaters to work FOR you).
Give it time. It'll happen. And don't worry about all the naysayers. They don't understand what's happening here.
I mean, people putting a couple bucks in a pot and one person gets it all happens all the time. In card games, office pools, charity runs, etc. I mean, yeah, its new to Gaming, but Gaming Is New. There was even a pot going on about guessing when the linux 2.4 kernel would come out...i forget the link off hand.
Now yeah ok some of the things i mentioned are people betting on other things, where as in gaming its people betting on themselves... But i'm not sure anyone can Really act suprised... Teens and geeks in my city used to Play Mortal Kombat in arcades at 5 dollars a win, 5 years ago? Were we pioneers? or really just fulfilling the human need to bet?
Not a good sign of their Linux compatibility.
Wow. This is a true moment of '80s nostalgia. I get to see a slashdot poster who actually WAS on Starcade. That show DID rule! WOw, this is like when I met Peter Davison at that Sci FI convention. (no, im not being sarcastic with this post)
I don't know if Magic might just be trend, but FPS gaming is definitely not "just a trend", so I doubt it will die completely, and I'm sure you will see people eventually making a living off of it. FPS is tending toward "sport" status, which means you'll be seeing more and more competitions etc, much like games like pool. You can play pool informally for smallish bets in bars etc - a bit like what this article is about. At the next level you can play in small local competitions as a hobby, aside from your real job. Finally, a tiny minority of really talented people will make a living off of doing only this - the FPS equivalent of people like Jimmy White and Steve Davis of pool/snooker. This is the direction FPS gaming is going. I doubt it will ever become one of the primary spectator sports though (e.g. like baseball in the states, rugby/football/cricket etc.)
Every game of Counterstrike I play has someone bitching about cheating. Imagine if money was thrown into the picture.
As any security expert has already explained -- not to mention Carmack the Magnificent on numerous occasions -- cheating can never be prevented in the "trusted client" model. There is no way you can reliably verify the integrity of the client on a machine not in your physical control. Period. Thus, all the work has to be performed on an electronically and physically secure server.
As for making textures transparent, that serves cheating purposes only because it's a side-effect of over-reliance on Z-buffers. Z-buffers are the most popular method of hidden surface elimination in CG rendering. However, Z-buffers don't eliminate hidden surfaces, they obscure them. Making polygons translucent helps un-obscure otherwise invisible geometry.
Back in the days of wireframe-only displays and pen plotters, a lot of research went into hidden line elimination, which is a variant of hidden surface elimination. Curiously, hidden line elimination is vastly harder to do, since you can't "erase" anything after you've drawn it. You must eliminate all unseen components from the object geometry before passing them on to the renderer. That's seriously icky math, since you have polygons slicing other polygons, thereby creating even more polygons. Add in the fact that you'd like to avoid drawing the same edge multiple times, or cutting a straight segment into a zillion tiny pieces, and the problem becomes even messier. Research into hidden line elimination was largely abandoned when raster displays became fast and cheap enough such that erasing/overdrawing previously-drawn imagery became viable.
So now it seems we come full circle: The only way you can thwart the translucent polygon hack is to perform the full geometric clipping (as hidden line elimination tried to do) such that invisible geometry is simply not passed to the renderer. Perhaps gaming sites such as this will stimulate renewed research into the area.
As for aim bots: Carmack the Magnificent has previously opined that a very talented player will be detected by advanced anti-cheating heuristics as a subtle aim bot. If you happen to be that talented player booted off the server, you will not be at all happy. (OTOH, Vegas casinos routinely eject card counters playing the Blackjack tables. So if you're hyper-good, they likely don't want you in their place, anyway.)
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
We used to do the same kind of thing for our Engineering week. Since I was heading up the ACM group, I had to come up with an idea for an event to take place during that week. We did a tournament, starting with Quake the first year, Quake 2 the next, and winners would get $100 in cash. It ALWAYS attracted a lot of people, and not all of them left the room talking as much trash when they entered. :) (That was one of the reasons why I liked it.)
We had a local LAN in a reserved lab with all identical computers, and no Bots. (they also used headphones)
If it was setup just like that, it would be fair.
Q: Why do you require my social security # or social insurance # when I withdraw money from my account?
A: If you live within Canada or the U.S. You are required to submit your winning as income.
Q: Should I be worried about hackers?
A: No, we have many many security features installed to make sure you are safe.
Arg! Since I can earn winnings (Taxable income) from these guys, they want my Name, Address, CCard Number, date of birth and Social Security Number. How do I know this information is safe?
According to the video, everything is secured with a "proprietary security system". What the heck does that mean?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
219 freaking Megabytes for a demo movie? Shouldn't it be a rule that the preview movie should be smaller than the actual game? Ever hear of compression?
Never trust a guy who has his IP address tattoed to his arm, especially if DHCP.
Now I can actually gamble at the same time, combining 2 dangerous habits.
Hey, now you're on to something! If they'd pay my earnings out in heroin, I could combine all 3 of my dangerous habits into one. Man, what a time-saver this will be!
Sign me up!
They also provide services like Domain Registration ($15-25), Web Hosting ($2.50 - 10/month), secure servers ($50-100), etc. Basically, the higher your monthly membership fee, the lower your OTHER fees.
I notice that alot of gaming & clan websitessites have trouble staying with one provider, so perhaps Bloodmoney is trying to bank off of that opportunity.
Other then the gaming membership, I don't really see anything unique about their web services. I notice that they do NOT provide any dialup or DSL/cable access, which is pretty smart. The Access business is pretty darn volitile.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
Check out this following illegal link to ebay, for example.
$1500 for a game character?!! Holy shit, my roommate should just quit his job and start developing these characters. Question is, how long does it take to create something that someone will shell out this kind of money for?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
I know thresh, ask him about the fragfests put on by racine and dave allison, anyways..
I doubt many hi-end fps champs are really gonna go on this thing, heck they all make tons of money doing product endorsements and such. I've also heard stuff like the hi-enders don't go online as themselves anymore because of too many people playing "smear the queer" Where as soon as they enter a server, everyone and his brother wants to say "I killed thresh!!"
As much as I would like to see this game have success I have to give it the kiss of death allready for several reasons.
1. Most FPS gamers do not believe in the pay for play system.
2. What is the liability for cheating?
3. Its sports gambling, all sorts of stuff can and will be rigged.
I'll give it $20 bucks before I say, "ok this sucks"
--toq
This just reminded me of an old gameshow from the 80s called Starcade (IIRC). My memory of it is fuzzy now, but I believe the contestants would have to answer game-related questions and play arcade games for points. Was interesting at the time, but I've never seen anything like it since.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
As if I already didn't have a bad enough social life between Counterstrike and Diablo sessions. Now I can actually gamble at the same time, combining 2 dangerous habits.
This sounds like fun actually, using micropayments or something to have a little more stake in the game. But yes I can see the emotions/reactions getting stronger during playing if there's real money involved. The incentive to cheat using scripts or other hacks would be much greater..
Brett
__ No registration required to read this message. They did it in the Matrix.
How does this tie with gambling laws, any /.-lawyers know?
Also, this concept of gaming-for-something is similar to what is generally perceived as "The Next Big Thing" in the gaming industry - free forms of economic reward/punishment among multiplayer gamers. A lot of online RPG's followed this formula - it makes sense that FPS's are following suit (FPS's generally take RPG concepts, and 3d-ize them... the former follows the latter)
Trade, if you will, for a newly formed society. The "Everquest" effect...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Okay, they give your 10$ worth of 'credits' to start playing. One would assume that you actually have to wager this to start getting money. Where do the prizes come from? Who funds this? Ads? Gamblers?
Jezus, this is a bankruptcy waiting to happen.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
That would be sweet,
I'd actually able to make some money from my Quake3 addiction.
I wonder if they will put out games which you can only play on their network,
or regular games cheaper that you can only play on their.
What's to prevent me and three friends from creating 6 player games all the time and coordinate ourselves over a party line (or on a LAN in the same room) to gang up on two players and rape them of their money, and let the next two victims come in.
If a ganger runs low on cash, he kills his teamie for money, so the team is always with a few bucks, and can continue to take everyone else for granted.
I've used these tactics with TFC, Infiltration, etc before... nothing to prevent me to apply it this way and make a few bucks every night. Curious as to what measures are in place to prevent this kind of abuse.
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Just deal with cheaters like they did in the old West, shoot them under the table.
Oh wait, that won't work...
...that it isn't secure. This is a running theme on comp.risks
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
This gaming model is beautiful, but it's also the optimal model to encourage cheating; small enough for cheaters to be relatively anonymous, but still a real incentive for unscrupulous cheating -- and many players won't even know they were robbed. So, I wonder what safegaurds they'll put in place? Nothing is provably perfect, of course, but if they're careful, smart, and very diligent, it's possible to make it arbitrarily difficult for cheaters (e.g., requiring positive identification at registration, an auto-updating client that incorporates a challenge/response system that changes daily, etc)... I wonder if they'll expend the effort neccessary to do this right?
-spcI can see this starting a new group of people, who think they're good enough to make a living off of this. It wouldn't be a big surprise, seeing the way that people did the same with Magic cards when they were really hot, and try to do the same with other hobbies. However, I think after the initial few months of excitement, we'll end up with the same sort of group... Unemployed folks, who didn't see a trend dying before it was too late...
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
Great idea! Now when we get a bad ping or lost frames and we die, we can lose money, too! What a brilliant idea...
Diesel has been doing this for some time, as has Tommy Hilfiger, and numerous other companies. Maybe when you saw those 'Diesel' signs lying around you thought it was related to the fuel? No, it's related to the clothes. I think I first noticed it in about 96 or 97. Not sure how much it was done before then, but it's been done to death since then.
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
playing for money sounds like it could bring the bots out of the wood work.
:)
Although it could be interesting to see a bot war in a FPS
A couple of problems I see:
They're really going to need a good skill-matching service. I mean, if I played UT on some of the highly-trafficed US servers when I was learning, and it was costing me $1.00 per time, I'd be massively in debt now.
What about cheaters? Someone tell me how you can detect or foil an aim-bot? It's bad enough now. When there's monetary incentive for the cheaters, this is going to be a HUGE problem.