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Asus Request Feedback on "Cheat" Drivers
skunkeh writes "Asus have a poll up on their site asking the general public whether or not they would like to see "SeeThrough technology" available in drivers for Asus graphics cards. The technology in question is causing uproar in the online gaming community where the drivers can be used to cheat in games such as Quake III and Counter-Strike. Asus have posted some flimsy arguments in defence of the technology on their product page but they don't appear to be convincing the several thousand gamers who have already posted their comments." I still think this is cool stuff. People are just going to cheat online: drivers don't have all that much to do with it. And if they can't cheat, they'll DoS attack. Maybe I'm just disillusioned, but I have more fun playing with people I know and trust then strangers. Strangers cheat.
... without needing to cheat. It scares me how good that girl is with a railgun sometimes.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
I think you're misunderstanding the motives of people who would use these hacks in online games. It's not about gaining prestige with better players by playing like them. Your last line, 'Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers', is closer to the truth. They're after just annoying and pissing people off. Nothing tweaks a cheater's knob more than seeing some really good player go down, and then scream bloody murder that someone's cheating or someong's a bot. It's funny, because the cheater's really destroying their ego. When a cheater gets banned, he just moves to another server and starts over, laughing when he magically beats the best and makes them cry. Given all the gaming servers out there, it would take a while to run through them all, and by the time you do, at least three or four new games are out ready to be tackled.
Script kiddies and cheaters are both annoying plagues. The best way to deal with them is not to have reputable companies give out tools with which they can easily cause problems, but to actively work to prevent them from causing problems in the first place. Voting and admin bans are simply measures to stop problems after they've annoyed people (akin to locking down a box after you've let a script kiddie do some damage).
So you ask, why don't id software and Valve just add cheat protection to their games? Well, that's the funny part. Because the games use an open standard to render their scenes, they are also succeptible to all sorts of totally unpreventable "hacks." Just like id software loves to hack open protocols and add some error correction to UDP, Asus likes to hack the open protocols and modify the way some OpenGL instructions work. It helps their business, just like it helps id's business.
Is it A Bad Thing? No, I don't believe so. If someone will go to all the trouble to buy a $150+ video card just to see through walls, I believe that they would no less likely spend the five minutes searching to download the superwallhack cheat for Half-Life. Anyone who won't face up to this fact is simply naive.
Regardless, id software and Valve are both in the same boat: by using an open standard to render their games, they are relying on security through obscurity.
A better solution would be careful game design that thwarts cheaters. For details, please refer to the Slashdot posting titled "Combating Cheating In Online Games". It refers to an article on gamasutra.com titled "How to Hurt the Hackers: The Scoop on Internet Cheating and How You Can Combat It". Please disregard gamasutra's incorrect use of the word "hacker" here.
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The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
I would say that the players are ruining the spirit of fair play, not the drivers.
How we know is more important than what we know.
One day, you're actually going to have a girlfriend.
So now people want to get rid of "SeeThrough technology" in graphics cards because it might be used to cheat by some individuals?
What next? Getting rid of peer-to-peer file sharing because some people might trade copyrighted data?
Yes, let's deny something that could be useful to many because of the actions of a few.
</sarcasm>
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
> Strangers cheat.
Girlfriends cheat too!
Anyone who thinks these are good has obviously never played an online game against anyone. One person running these drivers can cheat and ruin the entire game for the 20+ other people on the server.
How would you feel if you were playing a game fairly, but were being killed 10 seconds after being respawned not because of skill, but because some cheating punk can see through walls.
To put it in language that linux people can understand, this is the equivilant of a person getting root access illegally and kicking off other people connected so that they can get a bigger share of CPU time. Sure, it's great for the person with illegal root, but annoying and painful for anyone else
First, let me say that I consider using a wireframe- or transparent-mode video driver in any sort of multi-player game is absolutely cheating, and should absolutely be prevented. That said, it's worth pointing out that, while Asus has been promoting these drivers from the cheating front, there are legitimate uses for this sort of thing, mainly for developers.
For a person writing a 3D app, not having a wireframe mode could make debugging and performance testing extremely difficult. Take, for example, the case of testing vistable algorithms (probably the case where this is most important), which are the systems used by games to selectively hide objects outside of vision and speed up rendering. Trying to debug and evaluate such an algorithm without being able to see exactly what is being rendered would be near impossible. Another case where this is important to have is when designing models or worlds through any sort of abstraction. A large percentage of the work in modelling is minimizing the number of polygons, which is difficult to say the least if you can't see them. This is exactly the reason Valve added a wireframe mode to Half-Life (which, I might point out, works only in single-player in software mode, making it effectively useless, so a driver like this could be extremely useful).
My point is, while Asus is definitely promoting this for illigitimate use, there is good reason to have these sorts of things.
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A picture is worth 500 DWORDS.
Metabyte tried this exact same thing back in the days of the Voodoo2. The community blew a collective nut, Metabyte pulled the drivers and they never left the underground. I imagine the same thing will happen again.
In a game like Quake II, the ability to see through walls would hardly give you any advantage, because it comes down to your ability to move fast and aim accurately. However, in a game like Counter-Strike, a patch such as the one mentioned above could win you the game.
Anyone who's ever played CS knows the intensity of crouching behind a box, hiding behind a corner or ducking in a vent, waiting to make your move. If your enemy could just look up and see someone waiting in the vents, why not jump in behind the enemy and blow his head off?
Never the less, cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out, and when that happens, you are immediatly discredited. Just try to use a cheat patch or auto-aiming script for more than one round before someone yells "[your name here] is a BOT!!!". Then, hopefully someone in the room has administrative privlidges, and can ban the cheater. Or there could be a voting system in place to kick the cheater (like there is in CS). This is really the only way to stop cheating. It is impossible to prevent, but easy to stop with the right methods.
Cheaters:Online Games::Script Kiddies:Hackers
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#nohup cat
Actually, that's an incorrect analogy. He's not advocating that game developers purposely make it possible to cheat. He's saying that cheaters should be given the tools to abuse the game and make it miserable for everyone else, much like BUGTRAQ's philosophy that script kiddies should be given tools of destruction to embarass companies into fixing security holes.
Perhaps what you were trying to say was that since people are going to steal things as well, we should sell them C4 and Thermite at the highest prices that they are willing to pay. Which I wholeheartedly support, as long I'm the only one doing the selling and they don't go out to rob my bank.
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Friends don't let friends use multiple inheritance.
I would not agree though that the result of a cheat being easily publicly available will reduce the amount of cheaters. I'd say the opposite.
Assume some people really want to cheat. They will find some way (wallhack, aimbots etc) and have their fun. Then there are other people who feel "that could be cool to test", and tries it. Not for the purpose of winning the game, just for the fun of testing it out. Those people whould most likely not cheat if it was not easy to access those files.
Then there are those who realize that gaming is more fun when played fair. Those people will not cheat anyhow..
Making it easy to cheat wont reduce cheating frequency, in the same way as making it easy to steal copywrighted material wont reduce piracy.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
I agree, but listen to this. At one time, everyone was a stranger. Give some people a chance, they might surprise you. And if they don't, then don't play with them again. You were a stranger once. Remember how much it sucked when people wouldn't play with you?
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The only defence of these drivers is that they allow me to delete the nude Tomb Raider patch.
Arthropoid, the Right Clam for the Job
Ok, let me see if I get CmdrTaco's logic. People are going to cheat, so we should give them the tools to do so.
People are going to steal things as well. Does that mean we should leave bank vaults open?
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I can't very well admit that the reason why they keep getting headshots on me has anything to do with SKILL, can I?
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
I've played against aimbots, and they're infuriating. But thanks to them, experienced snipers are discredited. I spent days perfecting the art of the headshot playing against god bots in sniper areas, but now, when I make a less-than-newbie-probable shot, I'm accused of cheating.
I don't cheat in online gaming. Never have, never will. Sure, you can raise your FPH with it, but it's not going to make you a better player. What satisfaction you can get out of being highly ranked just isn't there when you cheat your way to the top. But it's incredibly irritating for those of us who do play legitimately, and want a fair match.
-- Chris
-- Chris
$email=~s/[^a-zA-Z0-9@.]//g;
"To help novice players to have a faster learning curve in playing 3D games"
Thats a stupid argument. It should be the game developer who decides how difficult a certain game is, and certainly not the driver manufacturer. There's an "easy" setting with most games which is adequate even for absolute newbies. Also, by using see-through newbies won't learn the game faster. They'll learn to play a whole different game. They won't train their quick reflexes needed to fight someone who has surprisingly turned around a corner. They won't train their "feeling" for secret areas, because they can see hidden items from far away. In the long run, it will not help their gaming experience or skill, the opposite actually.
"To let skilled players to have a chance to test their skills with a new challenge"
If a player is skilled and wants a challenge, he most certainly won't turn to see-through, which effectively prohibits any challenge. Challenge comes from the situation in the game which need skills to overcome - If you can hit an enemy dead-on the moment he turns around the corner, you no longer playthe game the way the game designers intended; and therefore miss the challenges they set up.
"To help users become familiar with 3D graphics rendering"
"To save the time of developers for developing and fixing 3D graphics"
While those point may be valid, they're negligable; Game designers who code 3D stuff surely also have the ability to also code in a wireframe or transparency mode for developement, which can be excluded from the final release or blocked for multiplaying. There are games that still have these devel modes in single player mode, and the "users" who want to "become familiar with 3D graphics rendering" can use those.
The difference between the two ways of implementing is that if you implement it at game level, you can make it so its not allowed in online playing, therefore not altering the game for other players. If you however implement this at driver level, you give all other players an unfair disadvantage and destroy the game.
All games will need to come with built-in aimbots, etc. as well...
Man, I tried the ASUS see-through drivers on NPRQuake, and it didn't help my deathmatch skills at all! I tried the "wireframe" mode in the sketch rendering mode, and it didn't help me 0wnz anybody! What a scam.
using the see-through to cheat at minesweeper! I played so long to get those high scores and those bastards can see the mines right off!