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Cheaters Sometimes Prosper
The Red Herring has a story discussing the cheating epidemic in online gaming. Discusses the problem from the point of view of the game companies, especially the ones producing console games who have to get it right the first time or face reissuing a huge number of CDs.
So what? It's only a GAME.
Say that slowly. IT IS ONLY A GAME.
If you think someone you're playing with is cheating, go find another game. Do the equivalent of taking your ball and going home.
Oh, wait, that breaks the revenue model. Nevermind.
Instead, the real world operates on a punishment basis. If Alice injures Bob, there's lots of social and legal machinery which results in professionally violent people showing up to hurt Alice (put her in prison, confiscate her property, whatever it takes).
So, how about this: require a deposit of $100 in addition to $10/month. If the server administrator catches the player cheating, they eject the player and keep the deposit. Want to come back with a new pseudonymous identity? No problem, that will be another $100, thank you.
For a CD-ROM based game, simply include one (1) identity with the boxed set, and people who screw up can just buy another boxed set.
It also requires that every client's version of PunkBuster be up to date to detect the latest cheats, and it requires that PunkBuster actually have their program updated for the latest cheats. On top of this, PunkBuster kicks cheaters client side and not server side, so it is trusting the cheater's copy of PB to kick them. And someone I know wrote a program to disable the client side kick in PunkBuster, so...
The real problem with cheats in counter-strike such as the speed cheat, wall hack and skin hack is that the people who maintain the game don't care much. These cheats sometimes take forever to get patched.
Get a grip, people.
Remember Rene Magritte's famous painting. It's a picture of a pipe, with the caption "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." - "This is not a pipe." If you think about it, the caption is correct. There is no pipe. There is only a picture of a pipe. However, most people looking at the picture would say "Oh, that's a pipe." They wouldn't think to step outside the context, and properly reference the object as a picture of a pipe. This is simple mental laziness. We have come to associate representations very closely with the objects they are supposed to represent.
It's the same thing with how regular players and cheaters view games. When a regular player think of CS, or UT, or Quake, or whatever, they think of a game whereby one has to run around and shoot and hide and whatever else to win. They associate representations very closely with the objects or actions they are supposed to represent. However, cheaters think differently. They do not show the same kind of mental laziness. They see games for what they are: A client-server application with certain checks and balances in place which, if manipulated or hacked correctly, will yield some reward. This reward (represnted as kills, frags, bonus points, items, or whatever else in the game) also represents the cheater's resourcefulness in being able to manipulate the metagame, rather than the game. As such, it serves as a point of pride.
Regular gamers are playing a game which they perceive as real. Cheaters are playing a metagame whereby they manipulate the rules of the game to their advantage. Their measures of success are represented similarly, but this success is due to different sets of skills in the two cases. There is no comparison.
Case in point: Microsoft.
-- Guges --
As reported in The Onion, DEA Chief: Winners Occasionally Use Drugs.
Alex Bischoff
Alex Bischoff
HTML/CSS coder for hire
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
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$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
For the same reasons internet filter software can't tell when someone is being obscene. They're dumb and don't understand context.
If you implement a cheat-detector that occasionally detects a false posative, the people who got screwed by it will scream foul, and rightly so. (Assuming they even know what happened to them.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
In order for your reply to be convincing to me, I'd have to agree with the unstated premise that divorce is relevant in discussions of morality.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Putting the smarts in the server probably isn't feasable given how complex these games are. (No way are you going to be able to dedicate 32 meg of ram and the equivilent of 500 Mhz of clock cycles per simultaneous user on your server, for example.)
With non-action games (for example, online chess), having smart clients doesn't lead to cheating because all that matters to the game is the moves and the board. If one player is seeing a bland 2-d board and the other is seeing a fancy 3-d board, with full animation, it doesn't really matter. The rules are so simple that they *can* be enforced, because it is trivial to write code that can detect if a client is trying to do something that should be "impossible".
This is part of what I dislike about the current run of online games. There's no way I'm ever going to bother working hard at getting good at a game when all that work will pale in comparasin to some jerk who's willing to cheat. (And the same principle applies to both action games and RPGs.)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
What about divorces where the couple doesn't have children?
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.
What effective ways do you propose to "out the cheaters"? See your basketball scenario doesn't quite apply to online games because cheaters can come back as quickly as you kick them out. If Kobe Briant gets ejected from a basketball game, he's out for that game. But if (CZ)Mulan gets ejected from a Tribes 2 server for using an aimbot, how do you know that he won't just log back in as (GD)ChouYoun and pick right back up where he left off?
What you're talking about happens now. If someone is firing rockets out of the back, they get swamped from all sides. If someone is camping next to a spawn point in a game of Last Man Standing, they get ratted out by those who've been eliminated already. If someone is saving backup copies of their characters, then selling all their stuff to someone else then restoring their backup and getting their stuff back, other players are likely to bitch to the admin. Doesn't stop it from happening. They still cheat. How would you recommend that be prevented without destroying gameplay or requiring that all servers CPU power be doubled to handle all the new "Big Brother" code?
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
computers do not have intellegence
No, but human programmers that tell computers how to work do (well, some of them anyway). Generally, when a game player yells out, "XYZ is a cheater!" he's made a conclusion based on certain logic (moves too fast, shoots too accurately, has a nick like "cheatBot", climbs walls backwards, etc.). You can certainly program the same logic into a game server.
Anything that has rules someone will try to cheat at. Everyone dies, right? Well, that doesn't stop people from trying to cheat death. Why? Rules inherently suck. They were made to be broken. A Christian man and woman get in a relationship. God says don't cheat. What do they do? You guessed it. They cheat.
So how do real-life games take care of this scenario? Well, let's take basketball as an example. You have two basic ways of handling cheating in basketball. At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul. In an online game, this would be akin to a server admin maintaining the rules. It would be even better if it was automated (ie. the game could identify cheaters). Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers? At the unorganized level (ie. street ball), you have mob rule. Jim travels, so Bob calls a foul. Jim says, "No way, dood." Bob's buddies nod their heads. What happens if Jim refuses to agree? He's either out of the game or beat up (or both). What happens if Bob keeps calling wussy fouls? Bob's either out of the game or beat up. In an online server, this would be akin to sort of moderation system. Players could identify another player as a cheater. If this person gets identified enough, he's kicked off. If some jackass starts going around fingering everyone as a cheater (or the cheater himself starts fingering everyone), he gets knocked off. Mob rule is very effective.
The thing is that game developers are never going to be able to stop people from creating cheats. The effective way to handle cheating is the same way any other real-life game handles cheating. You out the cheater. Unfortunately, game developers haven't developed effective ways to out cheaters, and so, you have a Wild West scenario in online gaming communities. If developers would stop fighting the phenomenon and start understanding it, they might be able to work in more effective coutermeasures.
Coherent, Simple, Swift Justice - an on-line game should have a obviously-posted cheating policy, defining what is considered cheating (which should change over time as required), and a clearly-spelled out punishment system. There should be a easy way for players to report a cheater, and a defined methodology for "trial" (which could be as ruthless as "We (the company) have the sole discretion to determine your guilt/innocense"). Thus, everyone knows the law, it's easy to report violators, and justice is swift.
Won't work. You can't scale the system fast enough. With the possibility of hundreds of thousands of gamers playing, there's no way a company of 30 employees could deal with the flood of complaints. EQ is a great example of why this doesn't work. It's full of cheaters and there's simply to way to track them all.
The real answer is in allowing the community to deal out "justice" with it's own policing. Tribes does an excellant job of thing. You can vote to remove players. Put the power in the hands of the gamers to control their own communities.
This is absolutely idiotic. Cheaters are antisocial opportunists who feel such a sense of inferiority and a failure to ever compete that they "overcompensate" by using tools that allow them to supercede rules of the game: Tools which in >99.9999% of they just downloaded (they're not "subverting the architecture" : They're just losers using someone else's program).
Just because your idea of fun is more childish than others', doesn't make other people's idea of fun any less legitimate than yours.
I hope you're a troll and you're not really this stupid. A cheater intentional has "fun" at the expense of everyone else.
"Whether it's aimbots for Unreal Tournament or techniques for improving response times over the Internet, the potpourri of cheats shows how pervasive online cheating has become."
I'm sorry, but having a faster connection or tweaking your stack isn't cheating.
They're referring to using aimbots to improve how fast your player acquires and shoots targets.
On modems that do compression-on-the-fly, it will render the compression useless (since good encryption has few patterns).
Solution? Compress the data in the game before you encrypt it.
First off, as others have stated before, the primary technical solution is to never trust the client. The following assumes that all appropriate technical measures have been taken to minimize the change of cheating.
That said, people will still find a way to cheat. The fundamental reason is that none of the "real-life" barriers to cheating currently exist in the on-line community. This is primarily due to these factors:
We can only defeat cheating through a change in the social system. The problem is primarily sociological, not technical. Here's how I'd go about it:
We can lick the problem, but it's not all in the game-designers' court. Some of the responsibility lies in the gaming community itself.
-Erik
There are always four sides to every story: your side, their side, the truth, and what really happened.
No, they are breaking the game's rules laid out by the implementors/designers, effectively adding their own. It's like an athlete who takes performance-enhancing drugs: They gains an advantage over other contestants who don't, but instead follow the rules.
War doesn't enter into it: This is interactive entertainment, and - from Red Herring's perspective - a revenue stream for the manufacturer/server provider, one which can dry up if non-cheaters stop playing that game especially or multiplayer games generally.
Netrek does not have a large cheating problem. The true state of the game is known only to the server. Clients are given only the information that they would know. Clients use RSA keys to authenticate to the server. If a client is cracked, the client key can be quickly revoked and new clients distributed. If the clients are kept simple, several clients and keys could be distributed on a CD. Most clients would be under 100k. The art and graphics could be shared by all clients and take up the bulk of the CD. If anyone cracks one of the clients, its key can be revoked and there is no need to re-release a new CD. More clients, all randomly linked and encrypted on the disk, can be right there. The main thing is that the server only allows blessed clients to play, and only shares with any connection what it could know.
That scheme works in netrek because it isn't as popular as quake. Cracking these schemes doesn't seem to difficult by the speed in which they are done in the PC world. Proxy programs are one technique. They aren't going to crack RSA they'll use some other technique or some flaw in the process used. Software companies can't spend time doing security audits, they have to release yesterday since the 'technology' in the game is dating fast...
Netrek also runs at about 5 frames per second which isn't really good enough for quake.
I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.
Having all the state in the server is ideal. Having the server do all the calculations is ideal. The clients can of course can try to run the simulation in lock-step with the server (which is hard without full knowledge) in order to provide a better player experience. Just like quake style game clients try and predict what will happen so that a delayed packet doesn't just cause them to freeze up. Making it run fast enough is the problem. Scaling to lots of players is an even bigger problem. Crossfire is doing things reasonably well though...
It still doesn't solve clients that help the player by auto-aiming and such. They don't need any extra information they just give the player better reaction times and mouse skills... These can be written as proxies which are hard to stop, though you can make life really hard for them... However, given enough late night hacking a few gurus could probably write a program that scans the video frame buffer (or just directly accesses the memory of the game process) and automatically shoots things it classifies as enemies. It can automatically shoot things by actually being the mouse driver and sending the correct mouse movements...
Of course programers should actually like the ability to write helper-bots - they turn the game into a pretty graphics version of corewars. That should give programmers the edge...
Believe it or not I haven't started RANTING yet... here we go...
<RANT>
Given time (and that game producers/authors wake up and see a possible revenue stream) you'll just choose a server that you know doesn't have cheats on it (or one that does, if that's the type of game you like).
Maybe the game defaults to use a public server, but you can send your credit card number to Blizzard/ID/whoever and be given access to the subscribers only server which is actively monitored for cheaters.
Or an seperate individual or company will see some money (or just not like cheating) and run their own server which costs money (or just requires some form of idenitification) and has very specific anti-cheating rules that result in cheaters getting banned.
The problem will be solved socially if it is solved at all. Technology isn't going to do it, and I don't think it's worth trying to solve it that way. Yes only give the clients the information they should have, it makes for better software design if nothing else. Yes use crypto to make cheating harder, it makes for cooler software if nothing else. Yes make it hard for cheats - but not if that means at the expense of programmer time that could have been spent fixing a damn bug, and not at the expense of windows software style piracy protection - must plug the fscking CD drive into the laptop in order to play the damn game (or download a small patch - gee which do I do?).
Solve social problems sociably. Cheating is classified as an anti-social activity by most (unless you're doing something where cheating is the point) so use social measures to reduce it or at least move it away from some places.
</RANT>
Cheaters sometimes win?
Yeah, right, next you'll tell me that winners sometimes use drugs.
Sorry, michael, but we had a lot of school assemblies about this and you're just wrong.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I'll just cat all those 1024 byte packets together and PGP the whole thing. The increase in size would be insignificant.
Of course, you probably think that one needs to PGP each packet individually, and stick the key name and PGP signature on each packet. Only a fucking idiot game developer would do that. The only reason not to encrypt game packets is processing time, not bandwidth.
The variant I've heard for that in basketball is: If you never commit a foul, you aren't playing tight enough defense.
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For single player, I don't call it cheating. You aren't 'cheating' anyone.. you purchased a game, you know how it works, and you found a way to do something else with it that pleases you. You aren't defrauding anyone.
Cheating on multiplayer... there are, and probably always will be, two equal and opposite viewpoints here. Those that say the game should be used as intended for multiplayer, and those who feel that client-server design is such that, if you can warp your client to display information your computer already knows about in a different way, then you should do so.
Examples: Mile high flags in Tribes, see-thru walls in Quake.... The now-defunct 'gambling' cheat in diablo 2..
And that'll never change.
It's up to developers, period.
Look at Nettrek.
For the unnitiated, a modified nettrek client is called a 'borg'. Main borg features are: automatic trajectory calculation&firing, automatic missile detonation if we can't escape it, etc. Due to the simple vector math in Nettrek, it's easy for a client to be modified to give you a huge advantage in lining up your shots/picking the absolute best time to do certain things.
How do the developers get around this? Simple. Signed code. Their software is set to return certain checksums to the server; the server can identify individual clients and allow/disallow them (so if someone writes a cool new client in Java, they can have it accepted at servers, it's up to the server operator)
SOme servers permit *any* client to connect, in which case the game changes to a contest of who has the best borg...
The point is, what about plain old code signing?
Now PGP 27 1MB files and tell us how much total added space there is?
Now PGP 2700 1kB files.
So here's how to deal with it...
Limit accounts to one per person (handled via credit card, etc.) and Rank players depending on their record. So Bob signs up for the latest game armed with aim-bots, automappers, transparent-wall hacks, etc. and starts at level one. He battles other L1s and wipes the floor with them (as should be expected). He gets bumped to L2 automatically by the system, this continues for awhile and he soon finds himself ranked at L15 and battling only other people using similar cheats and therefore battling on a level playing field.
If someone is consistently losing they would drop down a level. The system could even handle asking someone who is doing well but not dominating if they want to go up a level where they will face stronger challenges.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
I woudln't say human players can always detect cheaters. If some guy nails me in the head ten times in a row with a sniper rifle, he might be cheating - but he might also just be damn good with a sniper rifle!
I don't really mind things like Aimbots and such. I do hate some cheats like speed modfiers, but those kinds of things seem to get weeded out quickly - personally I'd rather face some danger from cheating than punish really skilled players.
Really there's almost no way to stop cheating until online games stream video directly to the monitor from a central server - and even then there will probably be some ways to bend the rules!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Remapping the wall-tiles in a DOOM-style shoot-em-up game to a transparent image is a local event that nevertheless can change the odds dramatically in a networked game.
It's true, text based MUD's don't have this problem. Are you suggesting we all forsake the 3D-OGL games we've become so used to?
mefus
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um, er... eh -- *click*
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
What about a game that incorperates this drive? Something that's playable as-is, but allows for this type of thing, that incorperates it into the game?
Is there something out there like this?
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
there are things that you prefer, and there are things that you have the right to. the former is ever growing and the latter is ever shrinking. these two things can sometimes overlap, but not as often as people would like.
:) i think the game issue comes down to responsability on the part of the gaming company. they need to be willing to put their foot down when necessary and move swiftly to correct problems when they are found. you are a consumer and can speak with your money. when you are dissatisfied with a product speak out, mail the company, make a thisonlinegamesucks.com website, organize a protest, march on silicon valley, etc. use the rights you do have to achieve what you desire.
it is true that i enjoy posting on slashdot, but i dont confuse that with a right. if malda decided today that i could no longer post, canceled my account, banned my ip and kept an eye out for me as i tried to create new accounts via a proxy server this action would be fine. it is taco's perogative to ban me from slashdot.
at this point i would have to find another outlet where i discuss stuff. i dont think i was really missing the point. people all over slashdot and across the united states think they have these "rights" and it's really annoying. they do however have the right to say they have the aforementioned "rights" and i suppose i'll support their right to say that. i will also refute what they say when i think they are incorrect.
it's strange how people get used to something and then one day it's gone. but hey it was my right; you cannot take that away from me. i personally look forward to the day all cell phones stop working. hell we are so dependent on land lines that to loose those would be an impressive sight to see.
back on topic
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Maybe the next generation games have trusted clients supplied with 'm (such as USB dongles w/ microcontrollers or so).
nosig today
You, my dear Sir, are clueless on the field of Information & cryptography. I won't even begin to start where you are wrong. Lets translate this in 'carlanguage':
:-)
"Not only do you have to have a spare tire for each seat & what-not, but closed cars are bigger, so that adds to traffic as well".
You see, that doesn't make sense
nosig today
Piffle. An efficient symmetric cipher does not require any additional information. Its a transformation, not an expansion. There is no need for checksums or repeated bits unless the underlying layer needs it anyway.
An asymmetric cipher is a different beast althogther and may explain why you made the comment, however asymmetric ciphers should only be used in the initial (general non-performance related) exchange in order to set up a symmetric key.
The CPU cost for decent encryption at ADSL and modem speeds, even at maximum link rate, is not particularly large, and the latency introduced is almost non-existant (we are, of course, assuming a good implementation of a good algorithm here, VOIP stream ciphers and block ciphers such as Blowfish are particularly effective).
Unfortunately, the most important point here is missed. No matter how well secured the link is, the gamer has complete control over one end of it. Therefore, with a bit of hunting around in memory, they have the encryption key, and, in fact, access to all the buffers the information is being decrypted into, and all the internal game structures.
You just can't trust the client.
You can't win a fight.
Piffle. An efficient symmetric cipher does not require any additional information. Its a transformation, not an expansion. There is no need for checksums or repeated bits unless the underlying layer needs it anyway.
An asymmetric cipher is a different beast althogther and may explain why you made the comment, however asymmetric ciphers should only be used in the initial (general non-performance related) exchange in order to set up a symmetric key.
The CPU cost for decent encryption at ADSL and modem speeds, even at maximum link rate, is not particularly large, and the latency introduced is almost non-existant (we are, of course, assuming a good implementation of a good algorithm here, VOIP stream ciphers and block ciphers such as Blowfish are particularly effective).
Unfortunately, the most important point here is missed. No matter how well secured the link is, the gamer has complete control over one end of it. Therefore, with a bit of hunting around in memory, they have the encryption key, and, in fact, access to all the buffers the information is being decrypted into, and all the internal game structures.
You just can't trust the client.
You can't win a fight.
One problem with that line of logic. This is not war, this is competition. And competitions have rules. The rules are defined by two entities 1) the creators of the game, and 2) the server admins running the game servers. If an admin out there wants people to use cheats on their server, by all means, go ahead. But I'm betting the vast majority don't.
A game where you have to write scripts to have a chance?
No, you do not need to write scripts, but you do need to adapt to them and you should not really expect to be able to beat the few people wh are better at scripts then you. You need to write scripts to beat the sript writers; You need to understand scripts to beat the people who can read new scripts and understand them; but you only need to be able to pick up some wierd new user inderface feature and start using it to be able to beat your average player (if a script is really good then it will eventually be documented so that you don't even need to know how to read the coade to control it).
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
You may have been joking but your partially correct. You can control cheating by allowing specific cheats. RTS games make a good example:
People want to write scripts to help them micromanage their units and they want to write cheats to allow them to see the whole board. Ok, fine. This means we should make it very difficult to write cheats to see the whole board and we should build a scripting langague into the game. Clearly, the guy with the better scripts will kick the shit out of the guy with crappy scripts, so we set up the game to share the scripts. Now, we have eliminated one form of cheating (scripts) by making them legal and fair, but we still have two types of cheating: map cheats and tricks to prevent your scripts from being shared. The solution to these two cheats is to make them unprofitable (Remember: these cheats require hacking assembler while scripts are user friendly). Specifically, we will make battle.net delay the distribution of the scripts for a week or month. Now, it will always be more profitable to develope a better bot and train with the good bots you have as opposed to hacking the assembler to cheat.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that if someone wants to spend the time programming to give themselves an advantage GOOD, but we should force them to eventually share their efforts with the rest of the world.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Ok, lets's try your 'Evolution in Action' on another type of game.
"Dude, pawns can only move foward one space."
'No way! I'm cheating! Evolution in action! Check out this new move I made up.'
"You can't bring your pieces back onto the board!"
'I've given my bishop the "Raise the dead skill."
"What was THAT move?"
'Oh, I gave my King and Uzi so he can kill your pieces without moving. Since I haven't moved, he has now killed off all your pieces. Checkmate! I am the chess master! None can beat me and my new modified rules!'
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
You've just proven the other guy's point. Statistics ARE meaningful, you just have to be careful about the meaning that you draw from them. In Science nothing is "absolute" a scientist cannot really be 100% sure that gravity will work the next time you drop a pencil, but it's never gone wrong before, and so they can say with ALMOST total certainty.
Now on race and crime or race and intelligence. Those are meaningful statistics, but to really get at what they mean, they have to be compared to other meaningful statistics: such as race and economics, race and education, and those factors again on crime and intelligence. Heres another meaningful statistic: first generation African immigrants in america have a lower crime rate and greater level of income than whites on average. Yes there is a correlation between race and position in society, but the suggestion that the blame lies in a problem with the race rather than a problem with the society has little backing in fact.
So yes, if you excercise it will reduce the PROBABILITY that you will have heart trouble. They can't say "Eat right and excercise and you'll never have a heart attack" because that would be blatantly untrue, but saying that it "may" prevent heart disease covers the fact that yes, on average, healthy people have a much lower rate of heart disease, but some people are still just unlucky and we can't assure you of anything 100%
Sorry to be so offtopic, but I had time to kill and this guy was letting his mouth run where he shouldn't have.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
This is a good idea, but it doesn't always work. Sometimes modifying the "shared" art can be cheating. Case in point. In the online game Tribes (the first one, not the second), a cheat appeared that let you know where the flag carrier was anywhere on the map. What'd they do? They changed the flag artwork to make the flag 6 stories tall...
"We guarantee that this product will reduce your risk of heart disease" is basically their alternative. No, they don't know very much for certain. All they know is that there are statistical correlations and that it's however likely that they're not just a fluke in the data. They also don't know for certain that their experiement wasn't flawed or skewed in some way.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
> Provide the players with *clients* that only display the game and send player movement/control data.
The problem is latency. In an ideal world the server would tell the client "exactly" what it can or can't see.
However, today's network just don't have a low enough ping to do this. Quake used client-side prediction for movement as ANY form of lag provides a discontinious play experience.
Actually Ultima Online does do the above. You can't "use" the next item, until the server acknowledges the first item is valid.
i.e. open container, drink potion
You're also forgotting, that ALL program's have bugs. You can have the best hack-proof client, but if the server logic (bug) is incorrect people can still cheat.
The fascinating thing is that everything you've said also applies to /. and its comments.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The way I figure it, your average cheater is going to get bored pretty fast. Running around with wallhack or an aimbot can't be much fun after a while.
What gets me is bitching about cheating. I was playing Counterstrike a couple days ago and this one guy, who I'm pretty sure wasn't cheating but was doing very well, was getting constantly abused for being a cheater. It went on and on whine, bitch, complain, vote, fail. It really takes away from my enjoyment of them game.
I'd like to see a game company come up with a way to stop cheating in online games, I'm just sick of hearing about it.
One person may be good with the rocket launcher, the next may be good with the BFG -- or the debugger. Problems have solutions. Transcending the presented solution-space to find meta-solutions, preferably including some nifty code, seems more like something we should welcome to me: the victory of geeky engineering over gruntly brute-force. All hail the "cheater": All hail the engineer.
Is remaining inside the proposed rules instead of finding creative solutions to the problem at hand really something we want to encourage on /.?
Problems have solutions.
--Azundris
When had to use dongles to run programs? Why couldn't the game developers use the same technology to provide an encryption "processor"? Yeah, you might have to switch it out to play one game or another, and a crack would eventually come out. But if it was an EEPROM that could be programmed via a download/atch that was verified from a PGP/Gpg key.... I personally don't know the feasibility, but it sounds good.
There is no way to stop cheating, look at the casinos that have been trying for ever, but there is a way to make it unenjoyable.
Phear The Phat Penguin
Eh, wrong, at least when it comes to compressed communications protocols. If you know anything about information theory, encryption increases the entropy of the information, while compression increases the rate. Compression in the communication phase relies on the ability to find repeated data or some pattern in the data(as all compression schemes do). Encryption before transmission (as in over a modem) significantly reduces the possibility for compressing the data by hiding the repeated data and the patterns.
Not convinced? gzip a text file. Then gzip a DES-ed copy of the same original text file. Compare sizes.
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Just because the original poster didn't mention compression doesn't mean it's not a factor or not worth considering. In fact, is the factor that I pointed out which made his claims (or reckonings) inaccurate.
...and recognises that there is a non-zero increase in the amount of data being transmitted because of encryption.
And I pointed out the indeed, the total data transmitted (think bits) does increase because of encryption (beyond transmission of keys/etc) in a situation with compression, such as a modem, which is a very important consideration.
Perhaps we should take a breather before jumping on things so quickly?
Oh, for pointing out something the poster missed, and something that turns out to be very important and is counter to the poster's claims?
120 characters isn't enough to explain it.
Anything that has rules someone will try to cheat at. Everyone dies, right? Well, that doesn't stop people from trying to cheat death. Why? Rules inherently suck.
The lesson that rules teach us is that we (that means me, Kimihia, and you, Hrunting, and you, the reader) cannot keep them. Not that they are made to be broken.
Rules are strict. Rules are hard. Rules set standards that we are expected to keep.
But frankly, we are lousy. We *can't* live up to them. Just a few days ago I drove 1 km/hr over the speed limit. I broke the law! I'm done for now!
That's what rules are about. They show that we can't live up to them and we need a saviour to pull us out and save us (because saviours save, that's their job).
Hell, human players can detect cheaters, so why not computers?
Because the difference between a good player and a stupid cheater is small. There are also whiners and l0sers.
An example. I'm fairly accurate with my aiming. Unless something takes me by surprise and gives me a heart attack and knocks me out of my seat, I can usually land a torso shot with the sniper rifle on someone right across the map.
That's me, an organic entity landing the shot.
Now, on the other hand an aimbot could do the same thing. Same end result. They land a torso shot with the sniper rifle on someone right across the map.
Being able to spot the cheating is pretty tuff. My biggest indicator is: erratic behaviour. eg, a huge jerk in orientation prior to shooting. If someones mousing is usually smooth, then the instant before they shoot they yank it around and headshot someone, that is a good sign they are cheating.
And yes, that would be best done server-side by a software agent.
What if two smart cheaters meet in the same match?
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
"We will try to stop cheating(hacking/priacy/whatever), but we know we can't," says Mark Jacobs, CEO of game developer Mythic Entertainment in Fairfax, Virginia. "Anyone in this industry who tells you they can deal with hacking is a liar."
Does this qualify as doublespeak?
One solution I see is to make a game where "cheating" is allowed, or even encouraged. IMO, an OSS/GPL-ed game would be able to keep up w/ the cheaters.
This totally ignores a large part of cheating, which is that software on the client can control the play even if the gameplay is handled on the server. Clients can still run automappers, autoaimers, and so on.
I used to play MUDs, and used a Procomm's key recorder to record movement keystrokes to go from the pub to the orc's den or whatever. It saved monotonous typing. But it also gave me a minor advantage: on my blazing 9600 bps connection, I'd zip past other players on my way there. It's a slippery slope between that and writing software to play the monotonous aspects of the game for you, attacking monsters, monitoring health, selling loot, and so on. MUDs did nothing to prevent this sort of client-side automation.
Those sorts of problems extend to a wide range of games, from MUDs to 3D shooters to word games, board games, card games, and so on.
On the console thread still, contrary to alot of messages I've seen here. I don't think cheating will be so easy. Then again I've only played Quake 1 on a 13 year old machine, so I'm not much of an authority here.
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
What? Ever hear of CD-RW? ;)
If they're clever, it would be possible to patch CDs. Though you probably can't update the physical media, downloading a few kilobytes of update each time you sign on wouldn't be too unreasonable. This could be cached on memory cards, maybe, and loaded on boot (similar to Intel's microcode updates).
Of course, making the system easily modifyable like this might make cheating that much easier.
Some people just delight in screwing things up for everyone else. Maybe they feel vengeful against all the total strangers to them; maybe it gives them some stupid sense of power, to annoy so many at once; maybe they just want some attention. But they are out there and they will do it.
I played Unreal Tournament one night, and some of the players on the other team took our flag. But instead of taking it to their home base, they hid it somewhere, and sat around text-chatting to each other. When players on my team asked them to just take the #%!$ flag and have done with it, they denied having the flag, but eventually said "Oh, THIS flag?" Very funny... not. All I could do was find another server. I don't even think they were actually cheating, but they were definitely screwing around with us rather than playing the game.
I played CounterStrike one night, and some guy had an invisibility hack. It was a bomb-planting level and he was a Terrorist. What happened was that the CTs would kill all the Ts but the invisible one, and then the level would just drag on and on until time ran out. This guy would run right next to me, making a clicking sound (I'm pretty sure he was toggling his flashlight off and on; it sounded like the flashlight click). I tried spraying bullets around, but I don't think he was "there" to hit. Everyone, including all the other Ts, wanted to vote him off but we couldn't make it work.
I've played CS on servers where Friendly Fire was enabled, and guys would run around killing their teammates. But that's not the worst. Some guys would shoot you just enough times to really hurt you, but not kill you, so the server would never kick them off. If you killed them, the server would kick you off. You couldn't win, and we couldn't get voting off to work.
I have other examples, but in all cases just being able to vote the moron off the server would keep the cheater from ruining the game for everyone else.
More subtle cheats, like ones to see through walls, are impossible to prove; but the truly obnoxious and outrageous stuff would be shut down cold. And that's a good thing.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Aimbots are similiar. They're fun for several rounds but once the newness wears off then its not as fun. Of course, half the fun is the reaction of people when the realize someone is cheating. I've never been called a fag so many times in my life! :)
So how do you get rid of a cheater? Simple: ignore him. I think most people who cheat do it for attention, either positive ("Wow you're great!") or negative ("Get off this server, homo!"). If no one pays him any attention he'll leave and go somewhere else. Of course, if you can get an entire server to act like no one is cheating, you can color me *very* impressed.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
That works because I find friends first, then we game together. Doing it the other way is like walking into a casino and sitting down to play poker. I love to play poker, but won't do it in a casino.
When we do spring cheats on each other, the game is to win quickly, then teach how we did it (e.g., if I find the BFG that is hidden under the floor). People who are building these more sophisticated cheats (e.g., the autoaim etc.) are really playing a different game titled "who's the best cheater", which is fine as long as they know it, their opponents know it, and we all go in with that knowledge. In a room full of strangers, I would always assume I was playing that meta-game, not the baseline game.
An old poker adage covers this very well,
Cheating isn't new its in Casino's and everyday run of the mill poker games. I don't like cheating but i mean shit, has there ever been a time when someone didn't cheat?
last time we tried to implement it on a lan cs server even if the person installed it the server thought they didn't have it installed, so we scratched it for a more direct approach, logged ips, you cheat your banned.
it will increase pings mainly, it would take a few milli seconds todo any kind of worthwhile encryption
Not only do you have checksums & what-not, but most encrypted data has lower compression ratios, so that adds to the bandwidth as well.
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
xqz2 aimhack
This cheat has worked in counterstrike for god knows how long. The latest versions are also immune to punkbuster. I don't use it, but I like to know what's available to my enemy. Even if only to help spot the cheaters.
I tired quickly of the online cheating that ruined the fun for the other players, both on my team and on the cheater's team. Finally, one of the CS servers that I liked to play on installed PunkBuster for a while. PunkBuster doesn't necessarily prevent cheaters, but it announces to everyone in the server that "Player X is using the Wall Hack", etc. Suddenly, fewer players were using the server, and the games seemed more balanced.
Each user has to run the client version of PunkBuster on their machines before connecting to the server, but to me, it's worth the extra few clicks. I'd rather play on a server that helps keep thing fair than get stomped by some jagoff with the latest hack.
--SC
You read fiction? I write it! Lemme know what you th
erm....this wouldn't work...in a gamw
:)
especially as these packets are being sent in real time...so it would be impossible to have the 27000packets, encrypt them and then transmit them, without having regular pauses in the game. which would be *very* annoying
try to think through your idea, before resorting to calling ppl idiots, or suggesting unproperly thought through ideas.
personally, I run punkbuster on my CS server, and force all users to run the pb client..this way, I'm fairly confident that no one is cheating
cpu
moo
/isn't cheating... and ppl wont trust you if you get caught once.
:P
I think ASUS should be publically condemmed, and shamed and killed and have nasty things done to them for writing those STUPID drivers.
if anyone thinks they are a good idea...go jump off a bridge...
come on, CS/Quake3 etc are *only* games... cheating is lame...its stupid, its pointless... it doesn't make you a better player... its nearly always possible to identify who is
those who think they must cheat, so ppl think they are a good player should spend more time worrying about more important things - like the microscopic size of their penis perhaps?
cpu
The only significant thing about this article is that it's in the Red Herring, the investment magazine. Slashdot has covered this before, and the previous coverage was better. Go there. Also see this list.
That's a very interesting idea. I would say that one client per person would be better and to have a trial system for people's keys to be revoked. People file complaints to a central server which keeps tracks of actual game servers, and a shit list. Complaints contain information such as time of cheating, what happened, and maybe even a server log. If 3 or so people file a complaint against one key, then they go 'on trial' make their case by filling out a form, and the people hired to stop cheating evaluate the forms after being properly educated about that game itself, and the possible causes for false alarms etc. When someone starts a server, they can choose not to allow shit listed people, and authenticate every person through the use of their keys and a central server. I think it just might work, although I just thought of it, so I am sure their are some kinks.
This Wiki Feeds You TV and Anime - vidwiki.org
in war, improvements are often made to weapons, on the fly, to increase their lethality.
ditto for armour and maneuverability.
who is to say that the hackers aren't doing the "right thing"? they are using their skills to win a battle...sounds human enough to me.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
As long as there's a client that sends input to the server, you're going to have aimbots. Due to how 3D FPS games are designed and that most people use the keyboard+mouse setup, you're going to have different sensitivity settings for turning rates, depending on everyone's playing style. Which means if the server gets some packets from the client that he was pointing at 0 degrees, then 180, fires a shot, then back to 0, there's no way the server can tell if it's an aimbot or just a player with a high sensitivity setting. And it would be bad to limit the turning rate, because everyone plays differently. Hell, my HalfLife config has a button that toggles between a low and high setting depending on the situation needed (i.e. low for sniping).
Well, actually if the server receives a packet of 0, 180, 0, it probably IS an aimbot since most of the time you'd have some packets between the two directions. But aimbots nowadays restrict their cone of fire to like a 30 degree cone in front, or vary the angle so it's never exactly on the other player, or can insert a couple "tweened" packets so there's no instant lock-on. Or act like an autoshooter (0 degree cone) so all you have to do is pass your crosshair over the other player and it'll fire for you.
There's not much you can do against aimbots, other than introduce an element of randomness in the weapon path so the aimbot can't compensate for that (like Counterstrike, the more you move or fire, the more inaccurate the weapon becomes from recoil and all that). Encrypting the data will only work til the encryption scheme is broken.
It's a bit easier for wallhacking, in that with the current setup, you send other player locations before the player sees them, to let the prediction can handle it (i.e. if player A continues to move on this vector, then he'll show up on the player's screen in X seconds). Just have better server code to handle where the players are and what they can and cannot see (so even wallhacking, you might get advanced notice of the other guy 1 second ahead, but not 5). Or hell, just go back to software rendering! =)
Hacked models and skins, modifying them so they're easier to spot (i.e. skins where the head is white for seeing in shadows, or spikes sticking out) is somewhat easy, just lock the models so they can't be modified.
Systems like Punkbuster are good in that it'll get rid of at least the majority of players who simply download the cheat from some website, but to a determined cheater, he's going to use something which PB does not check for, and continue to cheat. Having a pay for an account system could work, unlike, say, HalfLife's WONid system, until you pay, the account and ID does not exist, which limits the cheaters who rely on anonymity or cdkey generators. But that also filters out the legit people who can't afford $ for the ID. But passwords can be hacked, unless you also have an option for those with static IPs (or known IP ranges) for some extra security. And of course, if caught cheating, id is banned, and you'll have to pay for a new one.
sigh... if only we can get rid of all the lamers who have to resort to cheating or ruining other players' fun to get their entertainment. I think the PB people have the right idea in that, cheaters have to be held accountable for their actions.
Exactly, the same thing I was thinking when I was on several UK2 CS servers this week: all free map servers contained at least 1 wallhack luser. And what happened? a complete outburst of flames towards the guy. If you think of it: that must be the reason why he cheats. I mean: what kind of value does a 44-5 score have on a CS map when you just pick up your m60 and shoot everyone through the walls? none. So ignoring the loosers is the best way to let them stop: no attention, no fun for them.
--
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
In almost all sports, a certain amount of cheating is part of a winning strategy.
At the organized level (ie. NBA), you have referees. They have the rulebook, and when someone cheats, they call a foul.
Not exactly when, but maybe about half of when. If the average penalty for cheating doesn't wipe out the advantage gained from it, then you do it. After all, your first loyalty must be to your team.
In specific cases, this can be a no-brainer. If you're covering a receiver downfield and he's about to catch a pass for a touchdown, you tackle him. The penalty for pass interference sure beats giving up six points.
So, is that cheating? If you disguise it so the ref might not call it and you get away without a penalty, is that cheating? Or is that just a lucky break?
In ice hockey, this is most evident. Penalties are called only if the infraction exceeds a certain severity. Well, certain is perhaps a poorly chosen word, 'cuz it varies wildly from game to game, ref to ref, and even minute to minute. As a player, you test this threshold until you see how bad you have to be before you get called. Hence the adage: If you ain't cheatin' you ain't tryin'
My solution to on-line game cheating? Simple -- if you get caught, you have to give back all your prize money.
--jzap
Probably : http://www.ozforces.com/showthread.php?s=b50e0ee85 7c1967c4232f31f03f60b4a&threadid=11766&highlight=m aniac+and+demo+and+cheat
Okay... I PGP'd a 27mb zip file full of jpegs, and it came out only 15k larger.
You're a fucking idiot.
Game programmers should aknowledge the fact that there are cheaters and implement an easier way for other players to vote him off the server.
Tribes 2 already has this function.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
More recent MUDs (e.g. the stuff by simu) have a server enforced time that each action will take, as well as maximum buffered inputs for zero time commands. They still have problems with scripters of course, the battle continues...
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
So, instead of doing this: prepare data -> encrypt -> compress, do this instead: prepare data -> compress -> encrypt.
Any reason why that wouldn't work?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
Tribes 1 is easy. Start a vote (when the feature is enabled on the server) by bringing up the menu (tab) and going through 2 levels or so of numbers (something like 2, then player num (the player list is right there). Everybody else just has to bring up the menu (small, transparent and used for checking kills as well as voting) and typing one number to vote yes and another number to vote no. The same voting process is used to give admin status, change maps, etc. Voting occurs constantly.
Since I've played Counter-Strike, I know that voting in that game is simply poorly designed. However, other games have it right.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Well you can't prove morality by logic alone, but you can prove that divorce is bad if by bad you mean harmful to children.
Check out the 1993 article on the subject in Atlantic Monthly. Always a good source...
. --- If you're looking for free e-mail you won't find it here! http://www.noemailhere.com
One advantage you have against these losers is their equally pathetic knowledge of computer security. I love windows security, these lamers don't even know that they need a firewall. It's kind of cute, can also be amusing.
I don't know what to say, check this link out.
It's an ebay auction for an aimbot, look at final price and the COUNTER!!! It show how pathetic these people are.
http://cgi.ebay.com/aw-cgi/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewIt
Though I still hate you fuckers with T3's and 30ish ping - thats almost as bad as cheating
The slashdot 2 minute between postings limit: /.'ers since Spring 2001.
Pissing off coffee drinking
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
I'm afraid I've got a newsflash for everyone: Life isn't fair.
As an avid online game player I understand the frustration that can be caused by a cheater. After a humiliating defeat there are the lingering doubts, was your opponent was simply more skillful than you or cheating their asses off.
However, this article almost seems as if they think a solution to cheating must be found or online gaming will suffer drastically. Since online gaming has done nothing but grow and grow I seriously doubt it.
While cheating is an annoying side affect of online gaming, it's part of life in general. People have a natural tendency to not want to work hard to achieve top results. (Look at Microsoft, why build a better product when FUD is so much cheaper?)
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Two basic rules to the security model when building an online game:
1) A clever, capable player will know everything his computer knows about the state of the game.
Corollary: Expect secrets told to the player's computer to be overheard by the player. Especially secrets like the position of objects not in the player's line of sight.
2) A clever, capable player will control everything about the state of the game that his computer controls about the state of the game.
Corollary: Borg assists have been around since nettrek in the early '90s and will surely be around 10 years from now. Design a game that works as well with as without them, and you won't have a cheating problem.
Game companies who "cheated" on these two rules in their development phase now have a cheating problem. Isn't that circular?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
try PGP'ing 27,000,000 1024 byte packets and see how big that grows. Then figure out how much CPU time is required to decrpyt all of those packets in real time.
You'll figure out who really is the fucking idiot.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Yeah, they improve lots of programming related skills like reverse enginering and things like that, when the cracker becomes coder, this skills helps to improve their code by using anti-cheat techniques and making a better code, wich make better crackers, and then it helps on evolution...
DON'T PANIC.
This is exactly what happened to the Quake 1 Mega Team Fortress crowd. Believe it or not, but the gameplay was SO solid and addictive that thousands of people still play a game based on the Quake 1 engine. Except that number shrunk drastically about a year ago when everyone discovered bunny-hopping. Now even the slowest class moves faster than a scout. Everyone "can" do it, but it utterly ruined fair play.
------
Let me give you the lowdown
Can you say "Denial of Service"?
"Whether it's aimbots for Unreal Tournament or techniques for improving response times over the Internet, the potpourri of cheats shows how pervasive online cheating has become."
I'm sorry, but having a faster connection or tweaking your stack isn't cheating.
"A drawback of encryption is that it can slow down the game by stuffing the communications pipe with more data." Uhm... Encryption doesn't require more bandwidth except when sending keys/pads back and forth (which is a marginal amount of the total game bandwidth anyway).
"But game developers also have themselves to blame. For years, programmers put hidden codes into their single-player games so that they could take shortcuts as they tested them. Game magazines and Web sites began a lucrative side business telling players how to use these codes to cheat. InterAct Accessories, for instance, sells GameShark, a "video game enhancer" that has thousands of cheat codes for beating PlayStation video games."
GameShark: Off-line. Unsanctioned.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
or at least the software that runs the hardware. Yes I am talking about those see through drivers that ASUS had released. See this article to refresh your memory. Yes, these drivers have been revoked, but what I am ranting about is the ability for someone to forge the drivers so that servers who check for them are fooled, or else for some insane person to actually code them from the ground up. Well, he really should be insane!!
Dodge this !! --Trinity, The Matrix
You vastly overestimate the creativity of those "engineers". If their efforts are supposed to be creative, why is it that their hacks invariably use "gruntly brute force" - naïve ballistic calculations and simple health fudges?
Apart from that, most cheaters do not even write these simple minded hacks but download and apply them, pretending to be 1337 to their online opponents.
The need of cheaters to be seen as 1337 to such an extent that they need to lie and have their computer win their games for them is a sure sign of some sort of geekish mental incapacity.
Seriously, when someone womps you in a game of NetStorm in a minute with the help of infinite money and instant build times then describes the cheating as "fun" in a following chat session, what other conclusion can you make?
Cheaters, like script kiddies, are a wee bit retarded, and somewhat creepy. Finding one in an online game feels a bit like discovering that a person you've been talking to on IRC is a child molester, or an amway sales 'bot.
Blancmange
Then I can assume your little screwup was intentional, or is this an example of Guadere's Law? (Guadere's Law: A shameless in-joke only the users of the Straight Dope Message Bord would understand. Succinctly, anyone correcting a spelling or grammar mistake of another poster is bound to make his/her own spelling or grammar mistake in the post correcting the mistake.) Yes, this is my first post. Thanks for asking "Who the hell is that?"
How can you use my intestines as a gift? -Actual Hong Kong subtitle.
um, it is a huge site can you post the url to the thread please ?
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
should be drawn at multiplayer games. I personally could care less if you want to cheat on your own computer in your own time. In fact, if you wish to cheat with other cheaters that is your choice too. But once your cheats start screwing with me, then I get pissed off. The only true way to make a game 'un-hackable' is to make the client untrusted, as Diablo II does. Even D2 has been hacked, but it has by far had the fewest online cheats. Blizzard went ahead and left an open battle.net where the client would be trusted (and therefor are cheats), and there is also realms where EVERYthing is stored on the servers, and every time you click a button that click is sent to the servers and the servers tell you "ok, you swang". This puts a tremendous load on the servers (anybody who has seen Diablo II when it first came out saw the problems they had), and im sure it costs a tremendous amount of money. The only other approach to cheating that sort-of works is releasing new patches every couple months that re-work the protocol so cheats have to be re-writen, and hardly solves the problem.
Programs like PunkBuster are just as stupid (In case you dont know, that is a program to detect cheats for games). People will just hack that too to disable it. No matter what you try the cheaters will always find a way.
Consoles happen to be lucky, they will have the fewest number of cheaters because its simpley harder to cheat on. But once you start throwing consoles in the same arena as computers (xbox PC hardware) you are asking to get screwed over. The line between consoles and PC hardware seems to be getting finer and finer.
Anyway, just my lame 2 cents.
see, the thing to do is enable cheats for everyone, and see who's the best cheater.
... i give it 5 minutes.
i wonder how long they will get sick of having god mode on for everyone...
i can see it now... 'look, i can make you jump with my rocket launcher, hahahahaah'
Runnin' On Empty
No sir! It's gamers, demanding you publish your biometric signature on a .NET powered authentication server!
This is why games like EverQuest which require every user to give a wealth of info (credit card numbers for billing, etc.) are able to effectively deal with people who break the rules, unlike rather anonymous games like Quake 3.
So I think it is not fair to go whining about Valve.
More players stats, and an easier "vote against player" would be cool.
Technically, some cheats would really need a modification to the operating system to work around.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
I'm in a fairly serious Counter-Strike Clan (www.tarclan.com) and I can tell you that the cheating problem has been a continual plague on the concept of league play in CS. For a little while recently, Punkbuster seemed to be working for at least keeping down the numbers of cheaters in league matches, but recently it has become obvious that a great number of cheats were not being detected by PB. Whether this is being done through hacks of PB, or simply because new cheat programs have become available that PB does not yet recogize is unclear, but certain leagues have become virtually unplayable as a result. In my clan we know and can accept that there is really no way for us to catch all the cheaters...so basically we now just scrim and match clans that we know and trust as noncheaters and don't let the children on the publics bother us. It's a lot more fun for everybody if you can trust the opposing team enough that you can just play the game and have fun without worrying about who is cheating blah blah blah. The clans we play have built reputations as being good as well as trustworthy, and aren't willing to risk that over a match. So, although the public server game for CS may be pretty dead for the moment, there is still good fair play to be had if you dig deeper into the CS community.
As several others pointed out, there are many games that already have better voting methods; usually one player calls a vote and everyone gets a little message at the top of the screen telling them what the vote is, and to press one button for "yes" and the other for "no". Unfortunately, it's my experience that these votes hardly ever pass. I'm not sure if this is because of bad vote-counting algorithms (it seems that some systems count abstention the same as voting no, rather than disregarding it entirely) or what, but clearly something isn't right. Even when someone is blatantly and obviously cheating, it's almost impossible to get them kicked off.
[the absolute destiny: apocalypse]
Game manufacturers could implement a way so you can point at people in the game or freelook and you could press a key to vote against that person. I know counter-strike has the scripting ability to build one of those. You could just bind a key to an alias that votes against ppl you're pointed at.
I've always wondered why it is so difficult to vote against a player in Counter-Strike. You have to open the console and type listplayers to find the cheater's number, then type vote #### whatever number he is. A lot of people are too lazy to do this or don't know how. Some don't even know how to get to the console.
Game programmers should aknowledge the fact that there are cheaters and implement an easier way for other players to vote him off the server.
My best friends always does this to himself. He starts a one player game, usually a role playing game. Then he either gets the hint book, or finds a crack or cheat, and then makes the game no fun for himself and doesn't finish the game. I always yell at him for it to. One time he wanted to see how many dragons in a row he could take in BG II... oh well his loss....
The problem is with cheating, as a Blizzard employee who worked on Diablo pointed out, that because of the Internet, once one person create a hack, every Joe-Stupid can have the cheat.
So cheating in multiplayer computer games is the new Scourge of the Internet? Do you have any IDEA how pompous and stupid that is? The only people more ridiculous than people who need to cheat to "win" at a computer game, which is nothing more than manipulating bits on a computer in a predictable way, are the people who think those clowns are anything other than amusing.
I know what I speak of. For years, Diablo on Battle.net has been rife with cheaters. In fact, approximately 95% of people in public games of Diablo are cheating (I shit you not, and that's a kind estimate; it's more like 99%!). What sort of people are these? These aren't "dangerous hackers". They're stupid 13 year old punks who think that turning on godmode in a trainer someone else wrote means that they're "better" than other players. All it is, is adolescents showing their immaturity. To say cheating at computer games is a terrible problem is massively overrating the importance of it.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
This is the solution. And it isn't as hard as you think at least it isn't in Unreal Tournament. If you create a demo of yourself playing using a cheat, only people who also have that cheat installed are able to run it.
I help run a forum for gamers at www.ozforces.com and we recently did a test. We created a demo using a game that had a cheat installed. We then posted the demo on the forum and asked people to comment on the demo. Most people came back and said they couldn't run it, but there were a few people who could. When we informed people that you would only be able to run it if you had the cheat installed we got flamed badly, but it was an interesting experiment.
This experiment didn't actually prove that they were cheaters. It only proved that they had the cheat installed. Unfortunatly it is starting to get to the point where if you find people who have it installed you have to assume they are cheats and disallow them from the server.
Anonymity increases the probability of people cheating. Even if they get caught there are essentially no consequences, just pick another server or nickname reconnect and carry on cheating. I also think the complexity of a game contributes to its signal to noise ratio in the sense that an rpg may be less likely to have the ratio of cheaters than an fps like half life. This may be due to simply having more players or the dynamic of the game is one that doesn't necessitate a whole lot of thinking compared to say an rpg. I think what I'm getting to is that reflex based games might be more prone to having people develop cheats for.
sometimes win. Smart cheaters always win.
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No sig for you.
Available at http://www.PunkBuster.com (to lazy for html) stops many cheats for FPS games. I don't have the full list, but I use it for Counter-Strike. It's free, downloads quickly, and is very effective. (ie: any cheat that's in the program is totally blocked). It does require both the server and client to be running it for it to work :( If it ain't on the server if I have it running it doesn't matter at all.
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No sig for you.
A solution: All power must lie in the server; none with the client.
Ideally, the client must be nothing more than an I/O device for the player to interface with (and send payments to) a server that would store and process 100% of the game. The server would have the CPU, the GPU, and the whole game in RAM. The player would send his inputs over the broadband, the server would process them, and send the outputs back over the broadband, compressed in whatever format is convient, for the client to decode and display. The player would be under the impression that he is running the game locally on a top-of-the-line PC with zero load times. Also, he would be perfectly synchronized with all other players (who would connect and relate to the server in the same way). What other benefits would he have?
There would be cap for needed bandwidth. If the server sent the actual game code over the internet, the consumer would need as much bandwidth over the net as his local HD, which is several MBps. Under this system, he would need only enough for decent looking streaming video, 0.5 to 1.0 MBps.
The game code would only exist on the server(s), so it would be very hard to hack or pirate. If someone did manage to steal the code, it might be unusable (needing proprietary hardware) or undesirable (he could only host games isolated from the rest of the servers). Also, the developer could change and update parts of the game daily, making players want the genuine service to get live updates and stay current with other players.
The client hardware could be quite cheap.
All the world's content would be at the consumers' fingertips (gee, it sounds just like the internet, or Napster even).
In the case of Quake, cheating can be high praise. I got kicked of a server for being an old skool reaper-bot. High praise indeed.
And lately PSO is been a bit of a bitch. Can I blame the pkillers, sure, a little. But they couldn't be pkillers if the programmers for PSO weren't so shockingly lazy. I'll never know why they use signed integers for values that shouldn't ever be negative. Screw Sega. It's just that kind of commitment to quality that insures I, and a great many others, won't be bothering with PSOv2, and other Sega crap. $50 bucks isn't a lot of money, but when a game isn't even worth the gas to fetch it...it sure seems like a lot.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
But now my rant....
afx_msg void OnRantInit();
The problem here aren't two seperate problems. Ie. it's not really about the programers being lazy, the companies being cheap, and consumers unwilling to pay for better service, or unwilling to seek better service out. It's about people, over all, being lazy and cheap. Almost irrespective of the undertaking. (In this case stoping cheating.) I'm lazy, and cheap. I'm not particularly proud of this, but I've...made my peace with it. I might try another server or two. But really...there are too many forms of entertainment willing to satisfy my appitite, and most don't ask me to put forth any effort. If I shell out $50 bucks for a game, I sure as hell won't pay $10 bucks a month to play it. That $10 bucks would be better spent on a netflicks account. Or that greatest Van Damm movies DVD boxset (the one he personally brings over to your house, for an extra $5 he'll mow your lawn too). Like wise when someone cheats in an online game, why not just remember to not buy games made by those shiftless loosers? Why that's very easy, and costs almost nothing. After all, it'll free up some time to pursue other modes of fun.
With respect to it being a social problem, I happen to agree whole heartedly. Why who wouldn't? But to say there is no room for technology? Why, I'm tempted to call you a Luddite and kick over your barn. Technology solves all manner of social problems. Why TV helped inform people about their world as was never before possible. There was a time when people didn't really know what lay beyond the horizon. And thanks to technology, children today have the history of, not just the world, the universe delivered to their home, the best of it for free. As for technology's place in games. Well I imagine crossing someone who's other hobbies include writing worms and viruses might provide a particular direction for another decidedly technological approach. But even with the faults I, if not others, find in your rant, I can't disagree with the truth, that some people are assholes, and we need to live with. To that end, I'm with the NRA, we need more guns in schools (teachers, kids, as many as possible). Then we give it a few years, things will work themselves out.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
There is a damn spoon. And no freakin macaroon is gonna change that.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
is the people who say 'oh well, you can't stop it, so lets not do anything about it'.
Gooseman of CS has said himself that stopping cheating on the windows platform is nearly impossible.
It IS possible. The manufacturers simply do not put enough well-thought out effort into it, allowing cheating to take place.
Why not build a punkbuster like program into the game that will check for updates and patch itself, that way cheats are always automatically stopped? Sure there would be problems, but a model like that with the right design could work.
Cheating can be stopped.
It's just a game right? -- It's just a joke before you get mad. -- No really! It's just a game!
Get your Unix fortune now!
But that's just my point. If the SERVER KNOWS that you can't see an enemy because it's hidden by a wall, then at that time, the server should not transmit any positional information to you about that enemy. Make the walls clear all you want, you will see nothing.
OK, now ask yourself this: "How does the server know whether or not you can see an object?" It doesn't. In order to find out, it would have to all but render your screen for you. You can't just assume that because he's behind a wall, you can't see him. What about holes in the wall? What about cases where the "wall" is really fog (or any other form of reduced visibility)... you want the server to do your anisotropic fog calculations for you and all twelve other people in the level?
If servers started doing that, it *could* effectively eliminate some forms of cheating. But it would mean a *huge* drain on the server. People spend up to $400 on 3D graphics cards these days (GeForce3, anyone?)... and it does the calculations for one client. You want the server to start doing the calculations for every single client on the server? Geez, man, what kind of equipment do you think these servers have?
__________________
It's always a long day... 86400 doesn't fit into a short.
First up I enjoy a good game thats challenging and seems fair as much as anyone else. Mainly becuse I have some skill. But when it gets unrealistic to win.. why would I play?
I agree with the sentiment that creating cheats and hacking/patching games or whatever develops valuable skills.
Using them to beat others in the game starts to get questionable. Distributing them to idiots is totaly pointless.
If you create a secret wepon(cheat..whatever) then why would you distribute it?
Well apart from the open source/bragging rights issues...
My main point though is about genetic selection. Without some contention to weed out the weak and lazy there is no way that a population can improve.
The population that I am refering too in this case is the games industy. While I am sad to see a game that is popular and fun die becuse of weak security code and bad architecture. This does make for a stronger industry over all.
The game companies that are whinging that they dont have enough coders to regulate cheating and can't admin the servers are.. to put it bluntly.. obviously not doing whats needed to survive in the industry as it stands.
Making things easier by making a few rules to stop cheating is not going to force them to improve their situation.
Employ some more coders. Employ some of the lost dot commers. Admin your servers. Stop being cheapskates and then whinging when it bites you in the ass.
Or get the fuck out of the business!
On the other hand cheating is only so in the eyes of the defeated. Unless it makes it less fun.. then you are cheating yourself.
But seriously, you are playing a war based game and someone has developed a better wepon than you have. Hello? I know this is getting a little unreal and people dont play these games for that sort of reason.. still.. with a little restructuring cheating can become a valuable part of the whole game experience for everyone.
There have been some excelent ideas posted here to allow cheating to continue for those who want to use it. And to remove it for those who dont.
Now its up to the game companies to actualy pay attention, stop whining and build some better business models that actualy take reality into account.
I think the subject of this thread is just a few whiners trying to live in a perfect world and then complaining when it doesn't work.
"... every time I open my mouth some of my stupid escapes!"
I play counter-strike a lot, and the better servers have dedicated admins coupled with modifications that make voting easier. I only play on two servers, and there is always an admin on at all reasonable times if day. Volunteer admins and vote-kicking will save us all from the horror of cheating.
Just look at Slashdot. Volunteer admins, moderators, keep discussions clean, and on-topic.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to put a karma system into counter-strike. Players could get points for good play, and it would provide bragging rights for good players.
Thanks for your time Admins!
Too busy staying alive... ~ R.A.
I saw a sort of flame in the forum section of an italian on-line gaming site ( http://www.gamelandia.it/ ). It seems they are facing users who change the score in the java applet they are playing with, with a simple memory debugger, and get those cheated scores posted and saved on the server. Since the site is giving valuable prizes (cdplayers, home mini hi-fi, car stereo etc.) they are having many troubles, and maybe are deciding to stop the game. Thi s is more than cheating, and the developer didn't provide any way to enable (and disable) this.
Apple iProduct. Non importa cosa sia, lo comprerete!
Bored with your projects?
Try Einsteinium
I mean, how much do you think you'd get for a fenced BFG 10K?
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
the liberator who destroyed my property has realigned my perception
www.quantumheresy.com
I wouldn't call it an epidemic. I play a lot of halflife based games/mods and very rarely see someone who I believe is cheating. I think this problem may be amplified some when ppl read articles like this and then run around like idiots screaming "cheater, cheater!!!" every time they get killed by someone with skill. I've seen it happen a lot.
I stopped playing games (fps, rts) altogether because of cheaters... I have a maphack for SCv1.08 already. It's been out for like 3 weeks... I can't stand to play and lose because I haven't been using the right cheats, and I'd rather know it was skill... I know others, who have genuine (and amazing) skill, but gave up because of lousy cheaters. I wish there was some way we could regulate it... I like in TFC and CS, how if you have your own server, you don't have to worry about cheaters. But I digress. Wait, no, I had no point from which to digress.
If that was true, then they wouldn't use those hacks to play and win at those games. If the game's below you, and you've already done what's important to you -- hacking it so that you can win -- why run around among regular players of the game and ruin it for them?
That's right.. because you're a troll. A snert. feral. whatever you happen to call the idiots that are just there to get their enjoyment out of ruining others' enjoyment.
Bob
As was mentioned earlier, cheating is a part of life, games reflect life, therefore, cheating is part of gaming. If you wish it to be different, then educate your kids that cheating is wrong! :)
the referee system introduced in the Q3 mod Urban Terror. The server admins usually don't give a shit about the game, but they can give referee rights to anyone, who have only access to limited number of commands like voting, kicking, etc.
May reduce? Don't they know?
Suppose studies had shown that among test subjects who exercized half of them showed a clear reduction in heart disease, while the other half maintained a normal rate of it. Also suppose that they could not determine ahead of time into which half a person would fall. They have clear evidence that it works for some people, but they don't know for anyone in particular. Therefore, excersize may reduce your risk of heart disease.
What about other problems in the game, such as small bugs that can give an edge to the player who knows them.
One such example is the murderball TFC map, where due to some map error (easter egg????) if the grenade is thrown under battlements, the whole front of the base gets the blast.
The problem here is that the client is original and correct. No scripts, etc. have been used, but still its a cheat.
Same thing about respawn spamming, although this one being a cheat is the question of morality.
But anyway. The only way to fix this is to release patches, as mob rule takes time and actual ivolvement of players to work. Patching has always been a solution for PC's, and might as well become one for the gamestations.
Remember, when you are downloading MP3's, you are downloading communism!!!
badness 10000
I guess you're one of the 14yr old ppl that use those moronic cheats
*play online and find out !*
LAMMER
I work over on counter-strike (www.counter-strike.net), and i must say that there is an entire cheating industry there. I usually do work with the level designers to help them get their maps as bug free as possible, because people exploit the levels the most.
you can try and regulate cheating, but someone will figure a way around it. just the nature of things, while i am annoyed by people who cheat. without script kiddies on half life, it would get a little too easy to get insane frag ratios and honestly if someone needs that much help to do good in a game, then its jus an ego boost to people like me who play straight
part time dreamer, full time slacker
This is an excellent approach if the game company is going to maintain its own servers, but if the player have control of the servers many if not most of them will get hacked eventually. A lot of game companies I've talked to don't want to do thing this way because of the expense of running their own servers. They would rather do peer-to-peer games so they don't have to.
TFC and CS may be a free download but you have to buy Half-Life (a lot of vulnerabilities are because of the engine, not the MODs).
I'm not sure if the server could handle doing line-of-sight calculations for all 20 clients. There is also the added complication of semi-transparent surfaces. As said previously, unless the server renders everything and sends only streamed video to the client, a game is vulnerable (though even with video, a client with enough horsepower could analyze the video and act like an aimbot).
Cheating in single player games isn't the threat here. With the possible exception of developing an addiction to workarounds and codes that could carry into online play, cheating by yourself is no threat to anyone but yourself.
I've heard a number of game designers whine about people using codes to diminish the challenge and subsequently the reward of games they put together. It seems silly. Take Time Splitters for the PS2. Free Radical didn't see fit to put any codes into the game in order to skip through the built in reward system. Players must beat sections of the game to reveal hidden characters, levels, and play modes. While I don't mind playing through the game for these extras, I've had a number of friends grow tired of the game--mostly thanks to the limited number of playable multiplayer maps at the outset--because they didn't have the patience. Free Radical shot themselves in the foot in my eyes because the lazy people in the market passed on the game after renting it or playing it at a friend's house and seeing how much work they would have to do to get anything cool.
What game designers have to realize is that there exist two crowds: those who are happy to have a reward for all their hard work and those who want all the fun stuff now. Both of them spend money on games and both crowds must be appeased. And please spare me the argument that the presence of codes encourages everyone to cheat and cheapens the morals of good players. My friend Eric and I are both from the former crowd of gameplayers and we often have two saved games on our memory cards: one with our hard-won games and one with all the cheats enabled that we whip out for the party.
Yeah I wish that you could get one key per person/IP or person/mac address (not sure if that could be done). Then you have a revocation list problem for the keys of cheaters that need to be revoked.
I think you're right about the cheating problem, and that I'd underestimated the needs of the game programming houses that do not want to run servers. Still, they need to solve the cheating problem. Maybe Slashdotters can design an architecture they can plug into and guarantee no cheats. Is this technologically possible? Also, a given game probably only needs to stay secure for a decade.
I have a separate rant about letting clients know information that they shouldn't, and about letting clients decide what the state of the game is; I will spare you.
is as old as monogamy...
DESTRUCT!