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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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
I do not find it acceptable at all that others determine for me what I can an cannot do within the boundaries of my legally earned rights.
this is pretty funny. what country are you from. see, here in the us we have a constitution that contains a list of our rights. most of these rights were earned years ago and the people here today now think they have the "right" to everything. i know it sounds kinda silly...
we probably have people who can read "the right to play online games where noone cheats" into the constitution. sadly enough it doesnt mention such a thing. i'm glad to see the founding fathers incorporated online gaming into your legally earned rights. it probably also includes such important things as: watching jerry springer and mtv, shopping with convinence at wal-mart, cheap gass for huge tank-like cars, and lest we forget the right to high speed internet access for everyone. you must indeed live in a wonderful country.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
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
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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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
Sounds great. I'd love to pay $250 for every game I want to play to accomodate the encryption co-processor.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
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
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.
uhm...encryption -does- require more bandwidth in order to be effective.
Any decent encryption uses checksums, repeated bits, and a ton of other info in order to make sure the info being sent is valid, and hence requires more bandwidth. Sometimes, they can use compression to make it smaller, but not by much.
If you don't believe me, take any file, and run a decent encryption algorithm on it, and watch the file size change. It also slows the game down due to additional clock cycles being spent on encrypting the data...
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....
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.
There is a damn spoon. And no freakin macaroon is gonna change that.
--Jimmy has fancy plans; and pants to match.
punkbuster does not work
reasons:
1. not intended to yet
the current focus is getting it stable, not yet stopping all cheats
2. not wide use
almost 0 servers run this in required mode
3. lack of updates
recently(read about it at crossfire.counter-strike.net) a anti-cheats CS page posted cheats after waiting I believe 3 weeks for valve and punkbusters response(he emailed them first) and getting none.
its a good system, but would be much better if valve implemented something similar themselves built in and gave a shit about their customers past getting paid
Blocking ips doesn't work. Cheaters can often easily find new ips to login from. Also blocking ips of cheaters means you will be blocking ips of non-cheaters too.
see a Text Widget
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 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.
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.
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.
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.