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Asus Dropping See Through Drivers
Stijn Wuyts writes "Asus Taiwan marketing manager Kent Chien e-mailed today the company will delete the See-Through cheating code in their future drivers, as a result of the protests from the gaming community. But maybe this move comes too late, because the company already released the drivers for their GeForce 3 video card. As long as this driver works with current DirectX versions, it can be used to cheat. Removing the code in future versions will not stop current Asus buyers from cheating. Even the cheating detection by checking the Windows registry (as Asus proposes) can be disabled by a skilled programmer. I think Asus realised too late what were the consequences of their newest driver "features"..." Personally I think this is lame. If you want to see through walls, fine: It makes playing games lame, but thats your choice. But wow have a lot of people cried over this. As if crying is going to make any of this stop. Oh well, Asus will remove the driver, and anyone who wants it will just keep using it.
Sure, a skilled programmer could cheat. It's been possible to look through walls in games since there was access to hack up openGL drivers to add 50% opacity to all surfaces.
This is about cheating for the masses. When users have to click a checkbox to enable a cheat, there is bound to be more cheaters because it is more accessible. In that respect, Asus opened the door to something new and bad.
How many sites urged people to Vote yes?
Bunch of freaking lemmings!
I suppose it matters how whiney the tone is, but I think everyone who *likes* playing games for *fun* can agree that the munchkins who have to have the best score no matter what (typically exploiting every possible loophole in the rules) ruin any game they have anything to do with. This goes for "real life" games as well as those affected by "see through" drivers.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
What if the drivers could allow you to see through Laura Craft's clothes in Tomb Rader?? Man I bet thaey could sell those drivers.
"If ignorance is bliss, why aren't there more happy people in the world?"
I think that having it exist in a form where it takes a bit of skill to enable it is fine. It takes just as much skill to download a cheat program, assuming the person already wants to cheat. And there will always be people who want to cheat.
This driver could have had some cool uses besides cheating, though.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
This my be true for single-player games, but for networked, multi-player it makes the game "lame" for everyone. That doesn't provide a great incentive for people to spend $45 on the next version of Quake or Unreal....
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Games should be for fun and excitement and it seems too many gamers take them FAR to seriously. I think its abominable for the community to make a company restrict drivers for this reason. Blah.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Code Master of the Gameshark Code Creators' Club used that exact same arguement when he posted cheat codes for Phantasy Star Online, and those codes ultimately wrecked the distribution of special weapons and allowed script kiddies to kill their own teammates. People stopped playing the game over this and it thrashed the servers that Sega had so thoughfully provided the players of the game free of charge.
Thankfully, the cheats have gone on to other things since the fun has gone out of the game for them. Alas, we lost a lot of good players in the PSO community thanks to those codes corrupting 100s of hours worth of save data per character among other problems.
Online gaming can be construed as a community, and when the understood rules of that community are violated it isn't just the cheater who is deprived of a good gaming expereince, but the entire community as well. These drivers are not an isolated incident, not just one person has them.
Berk Watkins