Game Developers Cracking Down on Cheating

Hector73 writes "ZDNet has an article discussing a growing concern for the makers of on-line video games. Cheaters and trolls are making it harder for casual users and newbies to get hooked on the on-line versions of games. Considering that on-line gaming may become the major revenue source for game makers over the few years, maybe they will actually do something about it."

Comments

The author needs to check their facts

[Corby911]

In multi-player action games such as "Quake III" and "Half-Life," hackers will try to tap into the servers running online games to execute cheats that let them see through walls or automatically aim weapons.

Most, if not all of the cheats for Half-life and Quake III are client-side or proxy cheats.

Proxy cheats require 2 computers: the one you game on and a proxy that you connect to the server through. The proxy keeps track of what's going on in the game by analyzing the packets that get sent through it. It then makes adjustments (ie aiming corrections) to the packets as they are sent out to the server. This in no way involves breaking into the server.

The common transparency cheats are to a) replace the textures used on the walls with translucent/transparent ones or b) hack your video card's drivers. Neither of those affects the server in any way.

There's a multitude more of these types of cheats. I know because I used to run a decent Half-life and Counterstrike server. I got so depressed at the prevalence of cheating (and cheating accusations), I shut down the server and very rarely play any online games.

Supplemental reading

[defile]

The ZDNet article is missing the link to my original article which is what lead the news.com writer to interview me.

I can see why they left it out though, it calls a lot of the people they interviewed in addition to me names. ;)